Physicist Albert Einstein in one of the famous scientist in
physics. Albert Einstein (1879-1955), bitterly unhappy with the rigid
discipline of the schools of his native Germany, went at sixteen to Switzerland
to complete his education, and later got a job examining patent applications at
the Swiss Patent Office. Then, in 1905, ideas that had been germinating in his
mind for years when he should have been paying attention to other matters (one
of his math teachers called Einstein a “lazy dong”) blossomed into three short
papers that were to change decisively the course not only of physics but of
modern civilization as well.
The first
paper, on the photoelectric effect, proposed that light has a dual character
with both particle and were properties. The subject of the second paper was
Brownian motion, the irregular zigzag movement of tiny bits of suspended
matter, such as pollen grains in water. Einstein showed that Brownian motion
results from the bombardment of the particles by randomly moving molecules in
the fluid in which they are suspended. This provided the remaining doubters of
the molecular theory of matter. The third paper introduced the special theory
of relativity.
Although
much of the world of physics was originally either indifferent or skeptical,
even the most unexpected of Einstein’s conclusions modern physics began in
earnest. After university posts in Switzerland and Czechoslovakia, in 1913 he
took up an appointment at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin that left him
able to do research free of financial worries and routine duties. Einstein’s
interest was now mainly in gravitation, and he started where Newton had left
off more that two centuries earlier.
Einstein’s
general theory of relativity, published in 1916, related gravity to the
structure of space and time. In this theory the force of gravity can be thought
of as arising from a warping of space time around a body of matter so that a
nearly mass tends to move toward it, much as marble rolls toward the bottom of
a saucer-shaped hole. From general relativity came a number of remarkable
predictions, such as that the light should be subject to gravity, all of which
were verified experimentally. The later discovery that the universe is
expanding fit neatly into the theory. In 1917 Einstein introduced the idea of
stimulated emission of radiation, an idea that bore fruit forty years later in
the invention of the laser.
The development
of quantum mechanics in the 1920s disturbed Einstein, who never accepted its probabilistic
rather than deterministic view of events on an atomic scale. “God does not play
dice with the world”, he said, but for once his physical institution seemed to
be leading him in the wrong direction.
Einstein,
by now a world celebrity, left Germany in 1933 after Hitler came to power and
spent the rest of his life at the Institute for Advance Study in Princeton, New
Jersey, thereby escaping the fate of millions of other European Jews at the
hands of the Germans. His last year were
spent in an unsuccessful search for a theory that would bring gravitation and
electromagnetism together into a single picture, a problem worthy of his gift
but one that remains unsolved to this day.