| Term Paper Title | Albert Einstein |
| # of Words | 1790 |
| # of Pages (250 words per page double spaced) | 7.16 |
Albert Einstein
Recognized in his own time as one of the most creative people in human history, Albert Einstein, in the first 15 years of the 20th century, advanced a series of theories that for the first time asserted the equivalence of mass and energy and proposed entirely new ways of thinking about space, time, and gravitation. His theories of relativity and gravitation were a profound advance over the old Newtonian physics and revolutionized scientific and philosophic inquiry. He was a self-confessed lone traveller; his mind and heart soared with the cosmos, yet he could not armour himself against the intrusion of the often horrendous events of the human community. Almost reluctantly he admitted that he had a "passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility." His celebrity gave him an influential voice that he used to champion such causes as pacifism, and liberalism. The irony for this idealistic man was that his famous postulation of an energy-mass equation, which states that a particle of matter can be converted into an enormous quantity of energy, had its spectacular proof in the creation of the atomic and hydrogen bombs, the most destructive weapons ever known. Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany, on March 14, 1879. The following year his family moved to Munich, where Hermann Einstein, his father, and Jakob Einstein, his uncle, set up a small electrical plant and engineering works. In Munich Einstein attended rigidly disciplined schools. Under the harsh and pedantic regimentation of 19th-century German education, which he found intimidating and boring, he showed little scholastic ability. At the behest of his mother, Einstein also studied music; though throughout life he played mostly for relaxation, he became an great violinist. It was then only Uncle Jakob who stimulated in Einstein a fascination for mathematics and Uncle Cäsar Koch who stimulated a consuming curiosity about science. By the age of 12 Einstein had decided to devote himself to solving the riddle of the "huge world." Three years later, with poor grades in history, geography, and languages, he left school with no diploma and went to Milan to rejoin his family, who had recently moved there from Germany because of his father's business setbacks. Albert Einstein resumed his education in Switzerland, culminating in four years of physics and mathematics at the renowned Federal Polytechnic Academy in Zürich. After his graduation in the spring of 1900, he became a Swiss citizen, worked for two months as a mathematics teacher, and then was employed as examiner at the Swiss patent office in Bern. With his newfound security, Einstein married his university sweetheart, Mileva Maric, in 1903. Early in 1905 Einstein published in the prestigious German physics monthly Annalen der Physik a thesis, "A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions," that won him a Ph.D. from the University of Zürich. Four more important papers appeared in Annalen that year and forever changed man's view of the universe. The first of these, "On the Motion--Required by the Molecular Kinetic Theory of Heat--of Small Particles Suspended in a Stationary Liquid", provided a theoretical explanation of Brownian motion. In "On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light", Einstein postulated that light is composed of individual quanta later called photons, in addition to wavelike behaviour, demonstrate certain properties unique to particles. In a single stroke he thus revolutionized the theory of light and provided an explanation for, among other phenomena, the emission of electrons from some solids when struck by light, called the photoelectric effect. Einstein's special theory of relativity, first printed in "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies", had its beginnings in an essay Einstein wrote at age 16. The precise influence of work by other physicists on Einstein's special theory is still controversial. The theory held that, if, for all frames of reference, the speed of light is constant and if all natural laws are the same, then both t...Read entire document
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