People/Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist who is widely held to be one of the greatest and most influential scientists of all time. Best known for developing the theory of relativity. His contributions was a central figure in the revolutionary reshaping of the scientific understanding of nature that modern physics accomplished in the first decades of the twentieth century. His mass–energy equivalence formula $E=mc^{2}$ , which arises from relativity theory, has been called "the world's most famous equation". In 1921, He received the Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect", a pivotal step in the development of quantum theory. His work is also known for its influence on the philosophy of science. His intellectual achievements and originality have made the word Einstein broadly synonymous with genius.

Childhood

Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, in the Kingdom of Württemberg in the German Empire, on 14 March 1879. His parents, secular Ashkenazi Jews, were Hermann Einstein, a salesman and engineer, and Pauline Koch. In 1880, the family moved to Munich, where Einstein's father and his uncle Jakob founded Elektrotechnische Fabrik J. Einstein & Cie, a company that manufactured electrical equipment based on direct current.

Albert attended a Catholic elementary school in Munich from the age of five. When he was eight, he was transferred to the Luitpold-Gymnasium (now known as the Albert-Einstein-Gymnasium) where he received advanced primary and then secondary school education. In 1894, Hermann and Jakob's company tendered for a contract to install electric lighting in Munich, but without success—they lacked the capital that would have been required to update their technology from direct current to the more efficient, alternating current alternative. The failure of their bid forced them to sell their Munich factory and search for new opportunities elsewhere. The Einstein family moved to Italy, first to Milan and a few months later to Pavia, where they settled in Palazzo Cornazzani. Einstein, then fifteen, stayed behind in Munich in order to finish his schooling.

It is said that Einstein excelled at physics and mathematics from an early age, and soon acquired the mathematical expertise normally only found in a child several years his senior. He began teaching himself algebra, calculus and Euclidean geometry when he was twelve; he made such rapid progress that he discovered an original proof of the Pythagorean theorem before his thirteenth birthday.

In 1895, at the age of sixteen, Einstein sat the entrance examination for the Federal polytechnic school in Zürich, Switzerland. He failed to reach the required standard in the general part of the test, but performed with distinction in physics and mathematics. On the advice of the polytechnic's principal, he completed his secondary education at the Argovian cantonal school (a gymnasium) in Aarau, Switzerland, graduating in 1896.

In January 1896, with his father's approval, Einstein renounced his citizenship of the German Kingdom of Württemberg in order to avoid conscription into military service.

At seventeen, he enrolled in the four-year mathematics and physics teaching diploma program at the Federal polytechnic school. Over the next few years, he spent many hours discussing shared interests and learning about topics in physics with Mileva Marić. In his letters to Marić, Einstein confessed that exploring science with her by his side was much more enjoyable than reading a textbook in solitude. Eventually the two students became not only friends but also lovers. (this was before Albert loved and married his cousin)

Albert was horrified by the Nazi "war of extermination" against his fellow Jews, Einstein decided to remain in the US, and was granted American citizenship in 1940. On the eve of World War II, he endorsed a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt alerting him to the potential German nuclear weapons program and recommending that the US begin similar research. Einstein supported the Allies but generally viewed the idea of nuclear weapons with great dismay. (This was before Franklin D. Roosevelt gave the Nazis cush jobs in NASA with Operation Paperclip in 1945 ).

All in the family

Albert Einstein’s biography is one of the most lurid in the annals of science, but most of it has been hid from the public for many years. Although Time magazine named him “Person of the Century” (Dec. 31, 1999), up until recently few in modern history have had the privilege of being shrouded in as much impenetrable media insulation as Einstein, that is, until the executors of his estate had deceased (Helen Dukas d. 1982; Otto Nathan d. 1987). Helen Dukas had motivation to protect Einstein, since she met him in 1928 when his marriage to his cousin Elsa Löwenthal was badly deteriorating, of which Elsa “sought as far as possible to block the subject of infidelity from her mind”

Dukas became fiercely loyal to her employer: she was liable to attack any biography that dared shed light on Einstein’s personal life, and she saw newsmen as her ‘natural enemies’.

Commonly portrayed by the wire-haired, absent-minded professor, Albert fathered a daughter out of wedlock with Mileva Mari?, although the couple eventually married. They named the child Lieserl, but that is all the affection she would ever receive from Einstein. He persuaded Mileva to give up the child to an orphanage so that he could avoid the social repercussions of having an illegitimate daughter. He handled it as a mere business transaction, for he never saw Lieserl face-to-face.

It's rumored that Lieserl had a severe mental handicap which helped seal the Einsteins’ decision, and that she died at twenty-one months old, on September 21, 1903. Mileva’s father was given the task of making sure that no official records concerning her short life remained in any governmental or church repositories.

Einstein later forsook his son Eduard and consigned him to a sanatorium so that he could be relieved of the financial responsibility for his care and take full advantage of the public funding available. Eduard eventually died in the sanatorium. Mileva wrote to Albert: “‘You have here a dear, seriously ill child. Often he asks if his father will come, and with each postponement, he becomes even more morose. He is terribly wounded.’ Albert refused to come back to Zurich to see Eduard. And he refused to acknowledge the financial and psychological battles that Mileva had to wage over his care”

Einstein’s indifference to his children, however, was outshone by the animosity he showed to his wife. According to the divorce papers, Mileva was the victim of physical violence in the marriage, and Einstein’s adultery was the final straw that led to the legal separation in 1914 and final divorce in 1919.

“…It is true that I have committed adultery. I have been living for approximately four and one-half years with my cousin, the widow Elsa Löwenthal, and since then I have had intimate relations with her. My wife, the plaintiff, has been informed that I have had intimate relations with my cousin since the summer of 1914”
-Einstein’s Daughter, p. 87

As the marriage to Mileva began to deteriorate, “Einstein established himself in a bachelor apartment around the corner from Elsa,” his cousin and next love interest, whom he eventually married in 1919, only four months after his divorce

Prior to his involvement with Elsa, Einstein had a short fling with Paula Einstein, Elsa’s sister, but soon ended the relationship. He then wondered why he had become involved with her, settling for the rationale that “she was young, a girl, and complaisant. That was enough”

In one of his more audacious moves, Einstein had actually pleaded with Mileva to allow him to marry Elsa, using as his excuse that Elsa’s daughter “…had to suffer from rumors that have been circulating regarding my relationship with her mother. That weighs upon me and needs to be remedied through a formal marriage” (Einstein’s Daughter, p. 85.). If this had been the real motive for Einstein’s pleading, we might be tempted to conclude that he was a deranged individual who had lost touch with reality. The real truth is more sinister and shocking. The thirty-nine-year-old Einstein was actually in a debate with himself whether he should marry Elsa or Elsa’s twenty-year-old daughter, Ilse, while all along he had been shacking up with Elsa (for the four years prior), while still married to Mileva.

In one of his love letters to Elsa, Einstein wrote: “I treat my wife as an employee whom I cannot fire. I have my own bedroom and avoid being alone with her” (Einstein’s Daughter, p. 73). Mileva was apparently no fool. A few months after receiving the above conditions she moved to Zurich with her children and never returned to Einstein.

Things fared no better for Elsa, the eventual winner of the Elsa versus Ilse contest. Einstein persuaded her to divorce her husband, Max Löwenthal, so that the two lovers could marry. But this marriage also began to deteriorate due to Einstein’s sexual affairs. According to a biographer, “she told him he could have a woman on the side, but only one at a time” (Discover, September 2004, pp. 29-30), and consequently, to her dismay, Einstein’s adultery was serial. Highfield and Carter write: “It has to be said that Elsa was not the only one of Einstein’s female relatives to catch his eye. It appears that, either during this trip or some time earlier, he had also flirted with her younger sister, Paula” (The Private Lives of Albert Einstein, p. 148). They add: “Einstein joked that he preferred ‘silent vice to ostentatious virtue,’ but there was little that was furtive about his affairs. Either they were conducted in open view, or easy clues were left for Elsa to discover. Another incident…gives the impression that Einstein was eager for his wife to know what he was up to…”

Theories ≠ Facts

In 1905, a year sometimes described as his "annus mirabilis" (miracle year), Einstein published four groundbreaking papers. These outlined a theory of the photoelectric effect, explained Brownian motion, introduced his special theory of relativity—a theory which addressed the inability of classical mechanics to account satisfactorily for the behavior of the electromagnetic field—and demonstrated that if the special theory is correct, mass and energy are equivalent to each other.

Note: 1666 was also labeled "annus mirabilis" (miracle year) for the occultist Isaac Netwon's discoveries.

Zurich, June 25, 1913

Highly esteemed Colleague,
You have probably received a few days ago my new paper on relativity and gravitation, which is now finally completed after unceasing toil and tormenting doubts. Next year, during the solar eclipse, we shall learn whether light rays are deflected by the sun, or in other words, whether the underlying fundamental assumption of the equivalence of the acceleration of the reference system, on the one hand, and the gravitational field, on the other hand, is really correct.
If yes, then - in spite of Planck's unjustified criticism - your brilliant investigations on the foundation of mechanics will have received a splendid confirmation. For it follows of necessity that inertia has its origin in some hind of interaction of the bodies, exactly in accordance with your argument about Newton's bucket experiment.
You will find a first consequence in this sense on the top of page 6 of the paper. Beyond that, the following results have been obtained. 1. If one accelerates an inertial spherical shell S, then, according to the theory, a body enclosed by it experiences an accelerating force.
2. If the shell S rotates about an axis passing through it's center (relative to the fixed stars ("Restsystem"), then a Coriolis field arises inside the shell, i.e., the plane of the Foucault pendulum is being carried along (though with a practically immeasurably small velocity).
It gives me great pleasure to be able to tell you about this, all the more so because Planck's criticism always seemed to me to be most unjustified.

Plagiarism

One of the biggest myths surrounding the aura of Einstein is that he was the inventor of the famous E=mc2 formula, but there were at least a dozen scientists who had either helped develop or employed the formula prior to Einstein. It wasn’t until five years before his death (d. 1955) that Einstein publicly attributed E = mc2 to the 1862 charge-momentum field equations of James Clerk Maxwell. Previous to this was the work of J. Soldner who assigned mass to light and thus could calculate its deflection in a gravitational field. There were also Michael Faraday’s 1831 experiments with electricity and induction coils which had already introduced the energy/mass relationship, and Maxwell put this in the reciprocal equation m = E/c2. In fact, one can go back as far as Isaac Newton in 1704 for the theoretical relationship between mass and energy. Samuel Tolver Preston used the formula in 1875. Julius Robert Mayer put the formula in terms of aether pressure.

Henri Poincaré had used the basis for the E = mc2 formula long before Einstein commandeered it for his Special and General Relativity theories. In 1889, Oliver Heaviside used the E = mc2 principle in his work with capacitors. In 1903 the Italian scientist Olinto De Pretto had already published E = mc2 two years before Einstein, but which Einstein did not mention in his 1905 paper on Special Relativity, which is odd considering that he spoke fluent Italian and, by his own admission, read all the Italian physics journals. In 1907, Max Planck, expanding the work of Hasenöhrl and using Poincaré’s momentum of radiation formula, gave the final derivation of the E = mc2 formula. All in all, E = mc2 is readily derivable apart from the theory of Relativity, as both Joseph Larmor in 1912 and Wolfgang Pauli in 1920 demonstrated independently.

Views on religion

On the religious side of things, Mileva and her children converted to Catholicism in 1905, a fact little advertised by the secular press, then or now (Einstein: The Life and Times, p. 139). The year 1905, of course, saw the introduction of his Relativity theory to the scientific community. Unmoved by his wife’s religious life, Einstein wrote to his confidante Professor Hurwitz: “They’ve turned Catholic. Well, it’s all the same to me” (Einstein: Life and Times, p. 139.)

Einstein was, for all intents and purposes, an atheist. In The Private Lives of Albert Einstein, the authors write: “Einstein’s views were atheistic in almost every important respect. He found it impossible to conceive of a personal deity, had no belief in an afterlife and considered morality an entirely man-made affair. His worship of cosmic harmony was genuine; his claims that this was the face of God were at best benign affectation” (p. 18). Highfield and Carter add that Einstein’s pupil in Zurich, David Reichinstein, writes of a “Messiah-feeling” unfolding in Einstein’s psyche, so much so that “his account contains dark hints that Einstein’s arrogance bordered on hubris” (ibid., p. 127). “Einstein was well aware that his harsh attitude disturbed people” (ibid., p. 180).

Any notions he had of God were of an entity completely impersonal and uninvolved with human affairs. His path toward allowing science to unseat Scripture and the Church as the ultimate authority for any intellectual endeavor that crossed its domain had begun very early in his life. After receiving instruction up until the age of twelve at Bavarian schools, which included teaching on the Catholic faith (and in particular the traditional six-day creation), Einstein later reflected that in “reading of popular scientific books” he “soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true.”

Kinky and ill

Physically speaking, the youthful Einstein was the epitome of strength and vigor, since he was by common standards very muscular and attractive. But as the years wore on Einstein became grossly unhygienic, refusing to brush his teeth or even change his clothes. The image of the unkempt, wire-haired professor is not the prop of a Hollywood producer but the symptoms of a man who seemed to be loosing his grip on life.

Eventually, the promiscuous lifestyle of his earlier years may have finally caught up with him. Einstein’s personal doctor, János Plesch, who knew him quite well, concluded that he died of syphilis, demonstrating from the results of the autopsy that the abdominal aneurysm that took his life is always associated with the tertiary stage of the disease, which can be 25 years or longer from time of onset. Highfield and Carter write that, in an April 18, 1955 letter to his son Peter, remarking on Einstein’s sexual escapades.

Mileva’s letters reveal that in Albert’s reading of the book "Die Sexuelle Frage", he had underlined the parts dealing with venereal disease. Janos Plesch, who described his friend Albert as a man with a strong sex drive… ‘in the choice of sex partners he was not too discriminating,’ wrote ‘Einstein loved women, and the commoner and sweatier and smellier they were, the better he liked them’.

Einstein was also voicing deep misgivings about the institution of holy matrimony. He told Plesch that it must have been invented ‘by an unimaginative pig,’ and…it was ‘slavery in a cultural garment’

Quotes

But when I was a student, I saw that experiments of this kind have already been made, in particular by your compatriot, Michelson. He proved that one does not notice anything on earth that it moves, but everything takes place on earth as if the Earth is in a state of rest.

My opinion about Millers experiments is the following. ..Should the positive results be confirmed, then the special theory of relativity and with it the general theory of relativity, in it's current form, would be invalid. Expiramentum summus judex. Only the equivalence of inertia and gravitation would remain, however they would have to lead to a significantly different theory.
Albert Einstein in a letter to Edwin E. Slosson, July 1925

The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.

Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.

The only thing more dangerous than ignorance is arrogance

Failure is success in progress

The more I study science, the more I believe in God.

It would be my greatest sadness to see Zionists (Jews) do to Palestinian Arabs much of what Nazis did to Jews.

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Just because you believe in something does not mean that it is true.

Knowledge and ego are directly related. the less knowledge, the greater the ego

Any government is evil if it carries within it the tendency to deteriorate into Tyranny. The danger of such deterioration is more acute in a country in which the government has authority not only over the armed forces but also over every channel of education and information.

Never underestimate your own ignorance.

Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous.

Imagination is more important than knowledge. Imagination is the language of the soul. Pay attention to your imagination and you will discover all you need to be fulfilled.

Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.

Gallery

Einstein as a child
Helios?
Fruit Loops
Teaching pseudo science
Albert Einstein 1947
Albert's Wife & Cousin
What is Relativity?