Albert Einstein is widely considered to be the most famous and accomplished scientist of the 20th century. He was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work on the photoelectric effect, and achieved world fame for his general theory of relativity, which he released in 1915. In 1999, he was named Person of the Century by TIME magazine.
Albert
Einstein is known best for his general theory of relativity, an
improved model of reality which succeeded the less-precise Newtonian
model. He described fundamental connections between space and time,
matter and energy. He considered space and time to be manifestations of
the same underlying thing, as well as matter and energy. Because his
theories were so complicated and controversial, it sometimes took a
decade or more until they were accepted by the scientific community. In
addition, due to his Jewish descent, Einstein's time spent in Germany
during the rise of German nationalism made him the target of campaigns
to discredit his theories.
Albert Einstein was born in 1879 in Ulm, now a part of Germany. He
attended school in Munich until 1895, when, at the age of 16, he dropped
out of secondary school a year early. He applied to the Swiss Federal
Institute of Technology in Zurich, but failed the liberal arts portion
of the entrance exam. This led to him going back to secondary school in
Aarau, Switzerland, which he graduated in 1896. After his completion
of secondary school, Albert Einstein applied again to the Swiss Federal
Institute of Technology, being accepted. He received his diploma in 1900, and went to work for a Swiss patent office in 1902.
Albert Einstein continued to pursue physics on the side throughout
his work at the patent office, receiving his doctorate in 1905. That
same year, he published 4 papers that later served as the foundation for
much of modern physics. The topics he addressed were Brownian motion,
the photoelectric effect, and special relativity. The theory which
prompted the most discussion throughout coming decades was his theory of
special relativity, which explained why the speed of light appears
constant to any observer, despite their velocity.
From 1906 onward, Albert Einstein became increasingly involved in
academia, working at universities in Zurich and Berlin, where in 1914 he
became director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics. In 1915
he described his famous general theory of relativity, which was viewed
with skepticism until it was confirmed experimentally in 1919.
In 1933, Adolf Hitler came to power, and Albert Einstein was forced
to leave Germany for the United States, where he went to work at the
Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton; and in 1940, became a U.S.
citizen. Albert Einstein stayed at Princeton until his death in 1955,
working on a theory of physics which unified gravity with the other forces of nature. He never succeeded. Today, physicists' best bet for realizing Einstein's dream, according to many scientists, lies with the theory of superstrings, still largely hypothetical.
Below is a quote he left for us.
"A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
