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Albert Einstein 3 Essay, Research Paper

Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany on March 14, 1879, and died in 1955.

He was an American physicist and Nobel Laureate, also known as the creator of

the special and general theories of relativity and for his hypothesis concerning

the particle nature of light. He is perhaps the most well known scientist of

the 20th century.

Albert Einstein spent most of his youth in Munich, Germany, where his family

owned a small shop that manufactured electric machinery. He did not talk until

the age of seven, but even as a youth he showed a brilliant curiosity about

nature and an ability to understand difficult mathematical problems. At the age

of 12 he taught himself geometry.

Repeated business failure led the family to leave Germany for Milan, Italy,

when he was 15 yrs old. He then used the opportunity to withdraw from school.

He spent a year with his parents in Milan, and when it became clear that he

would have to make his own way in the world, he finished secondary school in

Arrau, Switzerland, and entered the Swiss National Polytechnic in Zurich.

Einstein often cut classes and used the time to study physics on his own or to

play his violin. He passed all of his tests and graduated in 1900 by studying

the notes of a classmate. His professors did not think highly of him and would

not recommend him to a university.

For two years Einstein worked as a tutor and substitute teacher. In 1902 he

got a position as an examiner in the Swiss patent office in Bern. In 1903 he

married Mileva Maric, who had been his classmate at the polytechnic. They had

two sons but eventually divorced. Einstein later remarried.

In 1905, Einstein received his doctorate from the University of Zurich for a

theoretical dissertation on the dimensions on the dimensions of molecules. He

also published 3 papers of central importance to the development of the 20th

century physics. In the first paper, Brownian Motion, he made a significant

prediction about the motion of the particles that are randomly distributed in a

fluid. These predictions were later confirmed by experiments.

The second paper on photoelectric effect, contained a revolutionary hypotheses

concerning the nature of light. Einstein not only proposed that under certain

circumstance’s light can be considered as consisting of particles, but he also

hypothesized that the energy frequency of the radiation. The formula for this

is E = hu, where E is the energy of the radiation. And h is a universal

constant known as Planck s constant. And u, is the frequency of the radiation.

This offer that the energy contained within a light beam is transferred in

individual units. Virtually no one accepted Einstein s proposal. In fact, when

the American physicist Robert Andrews Millikan experimentally confirmed the

theory almost a decade later, he was surprised and somewhat troubled by the

outcome.

Einstein, whose prime concern was to understand the nature of electromagnetic

radiation, subsequently urged the development of a theory that would be a fusion

of the wave and particle models for light. Again, very few physicists

understood or were sympathetic to these ideas.

Einstein s third major paper in 1905, On the Electrodynamics of Moving

Bodies, contained what became known as the special theory of relativity. Since

the time of the English mathematician and physicist Sire Isaac Newton, had been

trying to understand the nature of matter and radiation, and how they interacted

in some unified world picture. The position that mechanical laws are

fundamental has become known as the mechanical world view, and the position that

electrical laws are fundamental has become known as the electromagnetic world

view. Neither approach, is capable of providing a consistent explanation for

the way radiation (light for example) and matters interact. When viewed from

different inertial frames of reference, an interaction viewed simultaneously by

an observer at rest and an observer moving at uniform speed.

In spring of 1905, after considering these problems for ten years, Einstein

realized that the basis of the problem lay not in a theory of matter but in a

theory of measurement. At the heart of his special theory of relativity was the

realization that all measurements of time and space depend on judgments as the

whether two distant events occurred simultaneously. This led him to develop a

theory based on two postulates. The principle of relativity, that physical laws

are the same in all inertial reference systems, and the principle of the

invariance of the speed of light, that the speed of light in a vacuum is a

universal constant. He was thus able to provide a consistent and correct

description of physical events in different inertial frames of reference without

making special assumptions about the nature of matter or radiation, or how they

interact. Virtually no one understood Einstein s argument.

The difficulty that others had with Einstein s work was not because it was too

mathematically complex or technically obscure, it was rather from Einstein s

beliefs about the nature of good theories and the relationship between

experiment and theory. Although he maintained that the only source of knowledge

is experience, he also believed that scientific theories are the free creations

of a finely

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