Albert Einstein: biography and contributions of this German physicist

Considered the greatest physicist since the time of Isaac Newton, and has become the stereotype of appearance of a scientist, Albert Einstein is the first person that comes to mind when we talk about science.

Originally from Germany and raised in a Jewish family, his early childhood was that of a boy who didn't seem to be as smart as he would turn out to be. However, his genius was so great that he basically laid the foundation for what we now call modern physics.

Today we are going to see what was the life of this scientist through a biography of albert einstein, seeing how he became so famous and why he is so important to physicists today.

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Brief biography of Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein was a German physicist of Jewish origin who is, probably the most important scientist of modern times. If Isaac Newton is credited with having laid the foundations for classical physics, it is Einstein who set the starting point for modern physics with his well-known theory of relativity.

Einstein's science was not exactly easy to understand. Even the most expert physicists of his time had trouble understanding some of Einstein's postulates, sometimes considered unintelligible. However, both during the life of the physicist and after his death, many of the most surprising and incomprehensible aspects of relativity would end up being confirmed, demonstrating his great genius and making Albert Einstein one of the most famous and admired characters in history. history.

In fact, he is so admired to this day that he transcends physics books. He remains a mythical figure of our time, emblazoned on posters and T-shirts with his peculiar sneer, sticking out his tongue irreverently. There are not a few who have a photo of Albert Einstein in his room, as if it were a famous actor or singer. He is known by many as the accidental "father of the atomic bomb", despite having held pacifist and anti-war positions. most of his life.

early years

Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany, on March 14, 1879.. He was the firstborn son of Hermann Einstein and Pauline Koch, both Ashkenazi Jews originally from Swabia. A year after Albert was born, his family moved to Munich, where his father established himself as a dealer in electrical appliances together with his brother Jakob.

Despite the faith of his family, little Einstein went to a Catholic elementary school in the city of Munich, where some of his teachers saw him as a slow boy, even not very intelligent. Albert Einstein is described as a quiet and self-absorbed child. Many say that she had a slow intellectual development and even that he was a poor student as a child.

In 1881 his sister Maya was born. In 1894, the Einstein family had to move to Milan, Italy, due to financial problems, but Albert continued to live in Munich to finish his high school studies. He would be reunited with his parents the following year.

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higher education

In the fall of 1896 he began his higher studies at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zurich. There he had the opportunity to be a disciple of the mathematician Hermann Minkowski. He would graduate as a high school teacher in mathematics and physics. As soon as he finished these studies, he would spend some time rendering his services at the Confederal Office for Intellectual Property in Bern (1902-1909).

in 1903 he married Mileva Marić, a Serbian mathematician who had been his former classmate at the Zurich Polytechnic. With Mileva he had had a daughter out of wedlock in January 1902, named Lieserl.

It is not known what exactly became of the girl, although it is hypothesized that, due to the couple's economic problems, she was given up for adoption in Serbia shortly after getting married. Later, they had two other sons who did stay: Hans Albert (1904) and Eduard (1910).

The couple moved to Berlin in 1914, but spent the next few years apart. Finally, in 1919, Albert and Mileva divorced. This rupture was exploited by Einstein, who he remarried, this time to his cousin Elsa Einstein. He had no children with her.

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Laying the foundations of relativity

The year 1905 was Albert Einstein's Annus Mirabilis when he published five papers in the Annalen der Physik, a prestigious German journal specializing in physics. The first of them, "A new determination of molecular dimensions", allowed him to obtain a doctorate in the University of Zurich, and the rest would end up imposing a 360-degree turn on the image that science had of the universe.

Of these four, the first provided a theoretical explanation in statistical terms of Brownian motion, the second gave an interpretation of the photoelectric effect based on the hypothesis that light is made up of individual elements, today known as photons.

The two remaining works are no less important, since they were the ones that laid the foundations for the restricted theory of relativity. It is in these works that he presented his well-known formula: E = mc², being that the Energy (E) equals a certain amount of matter and its mass (m) times the speed of light (c), which is assumed constant.

Einstein's great genius and effort made him known among the most important German and European physicists.. However, public recognition on a global scale came when his theories earned him the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921, awarded for his work on Brownian motion and his interpretation of the effect photoelectric.

In 1909 he began his teaching career at the University of Zurich, moving on to Prague and back. to Zurich again in 1912, this time as a professor at the Federal Polytechnic of Zurich, where he had studied. Finally, in 1913 he was appointed director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics in Berlinn.

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First World War

In 1914 he moved to Berlin to become a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. He had to separate from his family with the outbreak of the First World War, who was on vacation in Switzerland at the time. He never met her again. At that time Albert Einstein was totally against the war, unlike the Berlin academic community. His attitudes were influenced by the pacifist doctrines of the French writer Romain Rolland.

Between 1914 and 1916, his scientific activity was focused on perfecting the general theory of relativity.. He was based on the idea that gravity is not a force but a field created by the presence of a mass in the space-time continuum.

At the end of the Great War, the confirmation of his predictions regarding celestial bodies were confirmed when the solar eclipse of May 29, 1919 was photographed. The Times introduced Albert Einstein as the new Isaac Newton, causing his international fame to grow to unexpected heights. This forced him to multiply his popular conferences all over the world, always traveling in third class rail and with his inseparable violin case.

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Last years: searching for a unifying theory

During the 1920s, Albert Einstein he focused on finding a mathematical relationship between electromagnetism and gravitational attraction.

He invested so much effort trying to advance what he believed to be the ultimate goal of physics: to discover the common laws that they were to govern the behavior of all objects in the universe, from subatomic particles to galaxies and other bodies stellar. He wanted to group them into a single unified field theory, but he did not get good results and ended up arming him, isolating himself little by little from the rest of the scientific community.

With the arrival of Adolf Hitler to power in 1933, Albert Einstein's loneliness was compounded by needing to renounce German citizenship and having to move to the United States.

He would spend the rest of his life there, working at the Graduate Institute of Princeton, New Jersey. in that same city he would die on April 18, 1955, at the age of 76, due to internal bleeding caused by a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm.

It is said that just before he died, he said his last words in German. Sadly, the nurse caring for him at Princeton Hospital didn't speak that language, so what he said was lost to time.

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The development of the atomic bomb and the pacifist cause

During the last years of his life, the bitterness for not finding the formula that would reveal the secret of the unity of the world increased when he had to intervene dramatically in defense issues. In 1939, at the request of physicists Leo Szilard and Eugene Paul Wigner, and convinced that the Nazis were about to build the atomic bomb, Einstein addressed President Franklin D. Roosevelt asking him to start a research program on atomic energy.

The atomic development of the United States led to the end of World War II, but at a very high human cost. With the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Albert Einstein joined other scientists who were looking for ways to prevent the use of atomic bombs again and proposed the formation of a world government from the newly founded United Nations United. He became an international disarmament activist, as well as contributing to the Zionist cause.