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Albert Einstein: His Biography in a Nutshell. Michel Janssen
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Short Description: Albert Einstein: His Biography in a Nutshell. Michel Janssen. Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879, into a middle-class Jewish family in the Swabian ...
Content Inside: Hsci/Phys 1905 Spring 2003 Einstein for Everyone Albert Einstein: His Biography in a Nutshell. Michel Janssen Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879, into a middle-class Jewish family in the Swabian town of Ulm. He only started to talk when he was three years old, but it is a myth that he was a poor student. What did evidence itself from the start was the single-mindedness that became an important characteristic of his later scientific work. He only applied himself when the subject held a strong interest for him. Science was such a preoccupation from early on in his life. When he was only one year old, the Einstein family relocated to Munich, where his father and an uncle went into business together. In his father's factory, the young Einstein marveled at dynamos and other machinery. Two other events appear to have been crucial in awakening his interest in science. At the age of five, he was deeply impressed when his father showed him a compass. At the age of eleven, he discovered what he later called his "holy geometry book." Popular science books showed him that the Bible could not literally be true, and his early religious fervor--which he had developed in spite of his parents who were not practicing Jews--gave way to an enthusiasm for science. In high school, the Gymnasium, he did extremely well in physics and mathematics but was undistinguished in subjects that were of no interest to him. In 1894 his father's business in Munich failed, and the family went to Italy, leaving Einstein behind to complete his high-school education. Einstein, however, who had little tolerance for the rigid discipline of the Gymnasium, soon dropped out of school and joined his family in Milan. This way, he also avoided being drafted into the German military. After completing his secondary education in Switzerland, he was eventually admitted to the Federal Polytechnic, now the ETH, in Zurich. There he met his first wife Mileva Maric (1875-1948). Einstein frequently skipped class, relying instead on the notes of his classmate Marcel Grossmann (1878-1936), and spent most of his time studying by himself more recent physics than was covered in the university curriculum. He thereby alienated some of his teachers, which was a factor in his failure to find an academic position upon graduation in 1900. In 1902 he finally got a job as a patent examiner third class in Bern. He had become a Swiss national the year before. He and Mileva married in 1903, over the strong objections of his parents. Before they were married, Albert and Mileva had a daughter, Lieserl, who was given up for adoption. No trace of her remains. They had two more children: Hans Albert (1904-1973) and Eduard (1910-1965). After establishing himself as a serious scholar with several papers on statistical mechanics in Annalen der Physik, the leading physics journal of the day, the young patent clerk submitted four ground-breaking papers to this same journal in 1905: one proposing the light- quantum hypothesis, one on Brownian motion that provided crucial evidence for the reality of atoms, one on electrodynamics in moving bodies introducing the special theory of relativity, and a final one on an important consequence of this theory, the inertia of energy or E = mc2. Einstein's approach in these papers was to work with what he later called "theories of principle." He started from generalizations supported by a wealth of empirical evidence, even if such generalizations appeared to be contradictory. With uncompromising logic, he then derived the consequences of these generalizations, in the process exposing various preconceived notions as prejudices that had to be cast aside (such as common-sense ideas about simultaneity). Proceeding in a similar vein, Einstein established in 1909 that any satisfactory theory of light must combine aspects of both a wave and a particle theory. This was the very first statement of wave-particle duality. Einstein presented this result in his first invited lecture as a regular member of the academic community. Earlier in 1909 he had become an associate professor at the University of Zurich. In 1911 he continued his ascent up the academic ladder, becoming a full professor in Prague. A year later he was back in Zurich, this time as a full professor at his alma mater, the ETH. Another year later he was recruited by Max Planck (1858-1947) and Walther Nernst 1
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