Albert Einstein ( Ulm , 14 March as as 1879 – Princeton , 18 as April as 1955 ). German physicist , creator of the theory of relativity and several other physical theories that have led to new representations about space , time , motion , substance , light and gravitation . In 1905 he formulated the theory of “Brownian motion”, that is, of the motion of small suspended bodies in a liquid under the influence of impulses given by the molecules . This theory was a convincing demonstration of the reality of molecules and their movements. In that same year, Einstein arrived at the representation of the particles of light as quanta of light or photons. Also in 1905, Einstein published his first work on the special theory of relativity (theory of relativity).
In 1916 , he formulated the ideas of the general theory of relativity. The fascist terror forced Einstein to leave Germany – he took up residence in Princeton ( United States ). In the 1930s and 1940s , Einstein sought to create a unified field theory that would reveal the nature not only of gravitational fields, but of other fields as well.
Biographical synthesis
He was born on 14 of March of 1879 in the German city of Ulm, a hundred kilometers to the east of Stuttgart , in a Jewish family. The parents were Hermann Einstein and Pauline Koch . The father worked as a salesman, although he later joined the Hermann electrochemical company. From the beginning, he showed some difficulty in expressing himself, which is why he appeared to have some delay that would cause him some problems.
Unlike the younger sister Maya, who was more lively and cheerful, Albert was patient and methodical and did not like to show off. She used to avoid the company of other infants her age and despite the fact that as children, they also had differences from time to time, she only admitted her sister in solitude. He attended primary school in a Catholic school; a difficult period that he would endure thanks to the violin lessons that his mother would give him, (an instrument that he was passionate about and which he continued to play throughout his life) and the introduction to algebra that Uncle Jacob would discover for him.
His uncle, Jacob Einstein, a man with great incentives and ideas, convinced Albert’s father to build a house with a workshop, where they would carry out new projects and technological experiments of the time in order to obtain a profit, but, Because the gadgets and gadgets they tuned and manufactured were products for the future, they currently lacked buyers and the deal failed.
He grew up motivated by the investigations that were carried out in the workshop and all the devices that were there. In addition, the uncle encouraged his scientific concerns by providing him with science books. As Einstein himself recounts in his autobiography, from reading these popular science books a constant questioning of the claims of religion would be born; a determined free thought that was associated with other forms of rejection towards the State and authority. A rare skepticism at that time, according to Einstein himself.
The passage through the Gymnasium (high school) was not very gratifying: the rigidity and military discipline of the secondary schools of Bismarck’s time won him many controversies with the teachers: «your mere presence undermines the respect that class owes it , ”one of them once told him. Another told him that he would “never get anywhere . “
He was not motivated by school, and although he was excellent in mathematics and physics, he was not interested in other subjects. At the age of 15, without a tutor or guide, he undertook the study of the infinitesimal calculus. The clearly unfounded idea that he was a bad student comes from the first biographers to write about Einstein, who confused the Swiss school grading system with German (a six in Switzerland was the best grade).
In 1894 the Hermann company was in serious financial trouble and the Einsteins moved from Munich to Pavia in Italy near Milan . Albert remained in Munich to finish his courses before reuniting with his family in Pavia, but the separation was short-lived: before obtaining his bachelor’s degree, he decided to leave the Gymnasium.
The Einstein family then tried to enroll Albert at the Zurich Polytechnic Institute (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule) but, lacking a bachelor’s degree, he had to take an entrance exam, which he failed because of a poor grade in a subject from letters. This meant that he was initially rejected, but the director of the center, impressed by his results in science, advised him to continue his high school studies and obtain the degree that would give him direct access to the Polytechnic.
His family sent him to Aarau to finish his secondary studies and Einstein obtained a German bachelor’s degree in 1896 , at the age of 16. That same year he renounced his German citizenship and began the procedures to become a Swiss citizen. Shortly after the young Einstein entered the Polytechnic Institute of Zurich, enrolling in the School of mathematical and scientific orientation, with the idea of studying physics.
During the years in the politically vibrant Zurich, he discovered the work of various philosophers: Marx, Engels, Hume, Kant, Ernst Mach, and Spinoza. He also made contact with the socialist movement through Friedich Adler and with a certain nonconformist and revolutionary thought in which his friend Michele Besso had a lot to do with it. In 1898 he met Mileva Maric , a Serbian classmate, also a friend of Nikola Tesla , with a feminist and radical disposition, with whom he fell in love.
In 1900 Albert and Mileva graduated from the Zürich Polytechnic and in 1901 they obtained Swiss citizenship. During this period he discussed his scientific ideas with a group of close friends, including Mileva, with whom he had a daughter in January 1902 , named Liserl. On January 6, 1903, the couple married.
Youth
He graduated in 1900 , obtaining the diploma of professor of mathematics and physics , but could not find work at the University, so he worked as a tutor in Winterthur, Schaffhausen and in Bern. The classmate’s father, Marcel Grossmann , helped him find a permanent job at the Bern Confederal Intellectual Property Office , a patent office, where he worked from 1902 to 1909 . The personality who poetry also caused him problems with the director of the Office, who taught him to “express himself correctly.”
At this time, Einstein lovingly referred to his wife Mileva as “a person who is my equal and as strong and independent as I am.” Abram Joffe, in Einstein’s biography, argues that during this period he was assisted in research by Mileva. This is contradicted by other biographers such as Ronald W. Clark, who affirms that Einstein and Mileva had a distant relationship that gave him the solitude necessary to concentrate on his work.
In May of 1904 , Einstein and Mileva had a son named Hans and later that year got a permanent job at the Patent Office. Shortly afterwards, he finished his doctorate presenting a thesis entitled A new determination of molecular dimensions, consisting of a 17-page paper that emerged from a conversation with Michele Besso , while they had a cup of tea; As Einstein sweetened his, he asked Besso, “Do you think calculating the dimensions of sugar molecules could be a good PhD thesis?”
In 1905 he wrote several fundamental works on physics of small and large scale. In the first of them he explained the Brownian motion, in the second the photoelectric effect and the remaining two developed special relativity and mass-energy equivalence. The first of them earned him a doctorate from the University of Zurich in 1906 , and his work on the photoelectric effect would earn him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921 , for his work on Brownian motion and his interpretation of the effect. photoelectric. These articles were submitted to the journal Annalen der Physik and are generally known as the articles of theAnnus Mirabilis (extraordinary year).
Maturity
In 1908 he was hired at the University of Bern, Switzerland, as a professor and lecturer (Privatdozent). Einstein and Mileva had a new son, Eduard, born on July 28 , 1910 . Shortly after the family moved to Prague , where Einstein obtained the position of professor of theoretical physics, the equivalent of Professor, at the German University of Prague. At this time he worked closely with Marcel Grossmann and Otto Stern . He also began to call the fourth dimension mathematical time.
In 1913 , just before the First World War, he was elected to the Prussian Academy of Sciences. He established his residence in Berlin, where he stayed for seventeen years. Emperor Wilhelm invited him to direct the Physics section of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics.
The 14 of February of 1919 she divorced Mileva and some months later, the 2 of June of 1919 he married a cousin, Elsa Loewenthal, whose maiden name was Einstein: Loewenthal was the surname of her first husband, Max Loewenthal. Elsa was three years older than him and had been taking care of him after suffering a severe state of exhaustion. Einstein and Elsa had no children. The fate of Albert and Mileva’s daughter, Lieserl, born before her parents married or found work, is unknown. Of her two sons, the first, Hans Albert, moved to California, where he became a university professor, although with little interaction with his father; the second, Eduard, suffered from schizophrenia and was admitted to an institution for the treatment of mental illnesses.
In the 1920s , in Berlin , Einstein’s fame stirred heated discussions. Editorials attacking his theory could be read in conservative newspapers. Spectacle conferences were held trying to argue how crazy the special theory of relativity was. He was even attacked, in a veiled way, not openly, as a Jew. In the rest of the world, the Theory of Relativity was passionately debated in popular lectures and texts.
Faced with the rise of Nazism, (Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933 ), so he decided to leave Germany in December 1932 and go to the United States , where he taught at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, adding to his Swiss nationality the American in 1940 .
In Germany, expressions of hatred towards Jews reached very high levels. Several Nazi-ideological physicists, some as notable as Nobel laureates in Physics Johannes Stark and Philipp Lenard , tried to discredit his theories. Other physicists who taught the theory of relativity, such as Werner Heisenberg , were banned in their attempts to access teaching positions.
Einstein, in 1939 decides to exert his influence by participating in political issues that affect the world. He wrote the famous letter to Roosevelt, to promote the Atomic Project and prevent the “enemies of humanity” from doing it before: “since given the mentality of the Nazis, they would have consummated the destruction and enslavement of the rest of the world.” During his last years, Einstein worked to integrate the four Fundamental Forces into a single theory, a task still unfinished.
Contributions
During 1905 , he published five works in the Annalen der Physik : the first of them earned him a doctorate from the University of Zurich , and the remaining four ended up imposing a radical change in the image that science offers of the universe. Of these, the first provided a theoretical explanation, in statistical terms, of Brownian motion , and the second gave an interpretation of the photoelectric effect based on the hypothesis that light is made up of individual quanta, later called photons; The two remaining works laid the foundations of the restricted theory of relativity , establishing the equivalence between the energy Eof a certain amount of matter and its mass m , in terms of the famous equation E = mc² , where c is the speed of light, which is assumed constant.
On a scientific level, his activity focused, between 1914 and 1916 , on the improvement of the general theory of relativity , based on the postulate that gravity is not a force but a field created by the presence of a mass in the space-time continuum. The confirmation of his forecasts came in 1919 , when the solar eclipse of May 29 was photographed ; The Times presented him as the new Newton, and his international fame grew, forcing him to multiply his outreach conferences around the world and popularizing his image as a third-class railway traveler, with a violin case under his arm.
For the next decade, Einstein concentrated his efforts on finding a mathematical relationship between electromagnetism and gravitational attraction , determined to advance towards what, for him, should be the ultimate goal of physics: discovering the common laws that, supposedly, had to govern the behavior of all objects in the universe, from subatomic particles to stellar bodies. Such research, which took up the rest of his life, was unsuccessful and ended up causing him the astonishment of the rest of the scientific community.
In 1921 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his theory of the photoelectric effect and his numerous contributions to theoretical physics, and not for the Theory of Relativity , since the scientist who was entrusted with the task of evaluating it, did not understand it, and they feared the risk that it would be proven wrong later. At that time it was still considered somewhat controversial by many scientists.
In 1932 he left the Prussian Academy and bravely faced Hitler . The Nazi persecution against the Jews began, he went to America and taught at the Institute of Higher Studies in Princeton ( New Jersey ).
In 1945 he retired to private life, despite which he intensely continued his scientific activity.
In his first formulation (special theory of relativity) he extended the Galileo-Newtonian principle of relativity to optical and electromagnetic phenomena, previously limited only to the field of Mechanics , and affirmed the validity of the latter’s laws both with respect to a system Galilean reference K, as in relation to another reference K ‘in rectilinear and uniform motion with respect to K.
According to Einstein’s theories, the law of the propagation of light in a vacuum must have, like any other general law of nature, the same expression already referred, for example, to a railway gate or a train car in rectilinear movement and uniform in relation to it; In other words, the speed of light does not conform to that of reference systems that move in a straight line and uniformly with respect to the movement of the same light. In fact, the Michelson-Morley experiment , repeated a thousand times and verified since 1881 , had shown the difference between the speed of light and that of the Earth .
Photoelectric effect
In 1905 Albert Einstein proposed a mathematical description of this phenomenon that seemed to work correctly and in which the emission of electrons was produced by the absorption of quanta of light that would later be called photons.
In an article entitled A heuristic point of view on the production and transformation of light, he showed how the idea of discrete particles of light could explain the photoelectric effect and the presence of a characteristic frequency for each material below which no noise was produced. effect.
Einstein’s work predicted that the energy with which electrons escaped from the material increased linearly with the frequency of the incident light. Surprisingly this aspect had not been observed in previous experiences on the photoelectric effect. The experimental demonstration of this aspect was carried out in 1915 by the American physicist Robert Andrews Millikan .
Special relativity
Special relativity offers the reason for this previously inexplicable fact. In turn, the invariance of the speed of light leads to the introduction, in Physics , of the Lorentz transformations , according to which the temporal distance between two events and the one that separates two points of a rigid body are found as a function of the movement of the reference frame, and therefore they are different for K and K ‘ . This frees us, in the formulation of the optical and electromagnetic laws, from the relationship with the hypothetical fixed “absolute” system, a metaphysical puzzle of classical Physics, since such laws, as they appear formulated in special relativity, are valid for K and equally forK ‘ , the same as those of Mechanics .
Unit field theory
During the last years of its existence, Einstein established the foundations of a third theory, that of the ” unit field “, which unifies in a single system both the equations of the electromagnetic field and those of the gravitational field.
In the year 1950 , he exhibited his unified field theory in an article entitled On the generalized theory of gravitation (On the Generalized Theory of Gravitation) in the famous journal Scientific American .
Although Albert Einstein was world famous for his work in theoretical physics, he gradually became isolated in his research, and his attempts were unsuccessful.
Pursuing the unification of the fundamental forces, Albert ignored some important developments in physics, being remarkably visible on the subject of strong nuclear forces and weak nuclear forces, which were not well understood until fifteen years after Einstein’s death (near from the year 1970 ) through numerous experiments in high-energy physics. The attempts proposed by String Theory or M Theory show that their impetus to demonstrate the great theory of the unification of the laws of physics still persists.
The further development of this theory, left by the sage as an inheritance, will surely allow obtaining – according to Infeld , a disciple of Einstein – not only the equations of both fields, but also those corresponding to the theory of quanta.
Einstein and education
Although in his youth he aspired to be a physics and mathematics teacher, when he succeeded he did not show much enthusiasm for the classrooms, preferring to work with few students and if possible without a specific schedule. He was, therefore, an unequal professor, more appreciated in his direct dealings with the students than for the large classes, but neither did they give him the direction of any doctoral thesis, as would be expected of someone who preferred to work with small groups.
In a letter to a young woman, complaining about the treatment she received from her teachers, Einstein reminds her of receiving similar treatment:”They hated me for my independence and excluded me when they wanted helpers.”
This corroborates his maladjustment to formal education, at least the one practiced in Prussian schools during childhood and youth. And later he writes:”On the other hand, I have come to Princeton only to investigate, not to teach. There is too much formal education, especially in North American centers.”
. However, he highly appreciated those who felt they had a vocation for teaching:”Teaching has always been the most important means of transmitting the treasure of tradition from one generation to the next … The continuity and health of mankind depends, therefore, to an even greater degree than before, on the institutions of teaching”.
A maxim that he always held out as a remedy for the ills and disappointments of which he was a victim or witness throughout his life.
He valued school not only as a center to acquire knowledge , he thought that:”Valuable qualities and aptitudes for the common good should be cultivated in young individuals.”
He put personal and civic training before mere learning, but the method to influence the development of personality should not, in his opinion, be verbal transmission.”Great personalities are not formed with what is heard and said, but with work and activity … with the performance of specific tasks”, tasks to be carried out freely, without fear or coercion to promote “that divine curiosity that every child possesses, but is so often prematurely weakened. “
On the scientific training of youth, he opined:«” The mind of a young person should not be crammed with facts, names and formulas: all that can be found in books, without the need to take any university course. The years of study should be used solely to teach the young person to think, to give him a training that no manual can substitute. It is a true miracle that modern pedagogy has not completely stifled the holy curiosity of the search. I believe that the voracity of a healthy wild beast could even be made to disappear, by forcing it , under the threat of the whip, to eat constantly even if he was not hungry and, above all, choosing appropriately the food that would force him to swallow “» .
Einstein and literature
One of the tasks that Habicht, Solovine and Einstein set themselves, in their youth, when grouping together as “Olympia Academy” in Bern, was to read and make literary comments. His favorite readings were the classics, including Sophocles, Racine and Cervantes. In a writing dated 1952, Einstein writes about classical literature:A person who reads only newspapers and at most books by contemporary authors, says that I am like a myopic who makes fun of glasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his time, since he never sees or hears anything else. And what a person thinks on his own, without the stimulation of the thoughts and experiences of others, is, even at best, quite petty and monotonous.There are only a few enlightened people with a clear mind and good style in every century. What remains of his work is one of humanity’s most precious treasures. It is to a few writers of antiquity that we owe the people of the Middle Ages gradually rid themselves of the superstitions and ignorance that had overshadowed life for more than five centuries. There is nothing better to overcome modernist presumptuousness.
From contemporary literature, Einstein was seduced by the worldviews of HG Wells and Bernard Shaw. In a lecture on The Jewish Community delivered at the Savoy Hotel in London in 1934 , attended by those writers, addressing Shaw, whom he describes as a physician of the soul because of the moral principles contained in his works, he says: ‘«” You, Mr. Shaw, have won the admiration and affection of men by taking a path impossible for many to follow. You have not only preached morality to humanity, you have mocked so many things that seemed untouchable. What you only an artist can do it. Thanks to this he has managed to rid existence of a bit of its heaviness. “»
Einstein himself was at the same time a literary motive for some writers. During his stay as a teacher in Prague he met the writer Max Brod , friend, biographer and editor of Franz Kafka , who in his novel The Redemption of Tycho Brahe ( 1916 ), the character representing Kepler is inspired by Albert Einstein. Portraits of him were written by other authors, including the Spaniards Juan Ramón Jiménez , Ramiro de Maeztu , Pedro Salinas , Ortega y Gasset , Jorge Guillén , Ramón Pérez de Ayala , Salvador de Madariaga , and others.
In the black comedy The Physicists , written by Friedrich Dürrenmatt in 1962 , Einstein shares the limelight with Newton, names adopted by patients confined to an asylum, in which the protagonist of the play, a nuclear physicist, Möbius, takes refuge fleeing from his own horrors , discoverer of the formula for the manufacture of the atomic bomb.
Just as Albert Einstein was a select reader and literary motive, his work, along with Planck’s and those who made possible the relativistic and quantum revolutions of the 20th century, is considered by some scholars of cultural movements as remarkably influential in literature and in the plastic arts, which in the first third of that century were opened to forms as revolutionary as those produced in physics.
In authors such as William Carlos Williams , Archibald MacLeish , Virginia Woolf , Vladimir Nabokov , Lawrence Durrell , William Faulkner and James Joyce , to name the most outstanding and contemporary of Einstein, they find a language inspired by new scientific conceptions of the world. Alan J. Friedman and Carol C. Donley address these influences, particularly their impact on literature, in Einstein as Myth and Muse ( 1985 ). Gerald Holton in Einstein, history and other passions ( Madrid ,1998 ) advocates greater caution in attributing such influences: “The tempting task of finding the detailed culmination of the hidden causal ties linking the capital works and the spirit of the age remains for future researchers.”
Einstein and philosophy
Einstein considered that his scientific activity was part of the philosophical contributions that have occurred throughout history to understand the mysteries of nature. In the book written together with his assistant Leopold Infeld The Physics, Adventure of Thought ( Buenos Aires , 1939 ), about the reciprocity between physics and philosophy, in the section “The philosophical background”, they write:
«” The results of scientific investigations often determine profound changes in the philosophical conception of problems whose scope is beyond the restricted domain of science. What is the object of science? What requirements must a theory that claims to describe nature meet? “These questions, even when they exceed the limits of physics, are intimately related to it, since they have their origin in science. Philosophical generalizations must be based on scientific conclusions. But, established and widely accepted, they influence in turn in the further development of scientific thought, indicating one of the many paths to follow.A successful rebellion against what is accepted generally results in unexpected advances that bring new philosophical conceptions.These observations will seem vague and insubstantial as long as they are not illustrated by examples from the history of physics. “»
However, Einstein’s attitude to knowledge was peculiar like everything else in his life, that is to say, it was not without contradictions. Although at the beginning of his career he was influenced by positivist philosophers such as Ernst Mach and the mathematician Poincaré, in his mature years he moved away from positivism, even going so far as to qualify Mach as “a bad philosopher”, increasingly convinced that the formulation of scientific theories need not be associated with the experience of observation. From his encounter with Einstein, Karl Popper reaches this conclusion: “It is our inventiveness, our imagination, our intellect, and especially the use of our critical faculties to discuss and compare our theories that makes it possible for our knowledge to develop.”What Einstein used to summarize in a few words: “There is no goal here, only the opportunity to indulge in the pleasant task of thinking.” This is how Popper relates the personal impression that Einstein made on him: «” It is difficult to convey the impression that Einstein’s personality made on me and my wife. You just had to trust him, you had to surrender unconditionally to his kindness, to his goodness , to his wisdom, his sincerity and an almost childlike simplicity. He speaks for our world and for America that a man so alien to the world could not only survive in it, but be appreciated and respected. “»
In relation to his way of working and behaving, the conversations with Einstein’s son, Hans Albert , and a large representation of Einstein’s collaborators throughout his life, broadcast by the BBC in 1966 , published by GJ Whitrow in Einstein: the man and his work ( Mexico , 1961 ). These are some ideas taken from Banesh Hoffmann’s responses regarding the time when he and Leopold Infeld worked under the direction of Einstein from 1937 on , after daring to present themselves to the distinguished scientist for advice on a research topic:“” I was fortunate to work with Einstein. Anyone would have thought of it as a wonderful opportunity to see how his mind worked and learn how to become a great scientist yourself. Unfortunately, such revelations do not occur. to a series of simple rules for everyone to follow.
When we hit a dead end … we all paused and then Einstein would quietly stand up and say, in his curious English, “I will a little think” (“I’m going to think a little”). Saying this, he began to walk up and down or in circles, while playing with a lock of his long gray hair, turning it with his index finger. In these highly dramatic moments, Infeld and I were completely silent, not daring to move or make the slightest sound, so as not to interrupt the course of his thought. There was a dreamy look on his face, distant and yet internalized. There was no appearance of intense concentration. Another minute passed and another, and suddenly Einstein visibly relaxed and his face lit up with a smile …it seemed to come back to reality and become aware of our presence. Then he gave us the solution to the problem and almost always the solution worked. “»
Einstein and pacifism
The rejection of the military, the parades were ridiculous and grotesque, reaching the point of renouncing German nationality at 17 years of age in order not to do military service, and aversion to the arms race were a constant in life. Einstein manifests in his writings and in his adherence to societies for peace. His attitude was radicalized increasingly calling the objection of conscience of the peoples to frontally oppose governments that opted for war as a way of “achieving peace.” However, as a result of the persecution and extermination of the Jewish people by German Nazism, their message was no longer so clearly opposed to non-participation in the war. He himself, in order to raise funds for the Allied cause in the Second World War, in 1939 rewrote the 1905 article on relativity by hand for auction. $ 6 million was paid for him.
The fatal outcome of the war, with the dropping of atomic bombs, made him radically rebellion once again against the production of weapons, insisting time and again that the solution was not in international treaties that no one complies at critical moments. nor in global organizations, from which he ended up resigning, because they never get to the bottom of the problems.
Albert Einstein’s last pacifist action was his acceptance to head the so – called Einstein-Russell Manifesto in 1955. In the presentation speech of the same in London, Russell tells how the first steps were agreed between him and Einstein. When Einstein’s letter signing the manuscript was received, he had died the week before. Their call for world peace is summarized in the final paragraph of the manifesto: “In view of the fact that nuclear weapons will undoubtedly be used in any future world war, and that such weapons threaten the continued existence of humanity We urge the governments of the world to recognize, and publicly declare, that their purposes cannot be achieved through a world war, and we urge them, accordingly, to find peaceful means to resolve all the grounds of dispute between them. “
Joseph Rotblat , who was part of the Manhattan project team for the manufacture of the first atomic bomb in the United States , although he resigned before completion of the manufacture, accused for this of being a Russian spy, and the only one still alive of the signers of the manifesto, he says in The World ( April 14 , 2005) how the manifesto was conceived from Great Britain at the initiative of Russell and the collaboration of Rotblat. They wanted the most prestigious scientists; 11 were the signatories, but the most recognized worldwide was, without a doubt, Einstein. About him, Rotblat writes: “He was a scientist, but also a realist, aware of what was going on in the world. He was almost the opposite of what people think of scientists: absent, immersed in their work and naive. He was totally conscious and trying to do something. I admire him not only as a great man of science, but also as a great human being. I think that if he were alive, he would continue working on his theories, but also working for peace. “
The Einstein-Russell Manifesto led to the 1995 Pugwash lectures on science and world affairs recognized with the Nobel Peace Prize .