Albert Einstein

Term Paper Title	Albert Einstein
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# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	3.91

Albert Einstein

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     Albert Einstein was a German-born American physicist best known as the creator of the special and general theories of relativity and for his bold hypothesis concerning the particle nature of light.  He is perhaps the most well-known scientist of the 20th century.
     Einstein was born in Ulm on March 14, 1879, and spent his youth in Munich where his family owned a small shop that manufactured electric machinery.  He did not talk until the age of three, but even as a youth he showed a brilliant curiosity about nature and an ability to understand difficult mathematical concepts.  At the age of 12 he taught himself Euclidean geometry.
     Albert hated the dull regimentation of school in Munich.  When repeated business failure led the family to leave Germany for Milan, Italy, Einstein, who was 15 years old, used the opportunity to withdraw from the 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 didn’t enjoy the methods of instruction there.  He often cut classes and used the time to study physics on his own or to play his beloved violin.  He passed his examinations and graduated in 1900 by studying the notes of a classmate.  His professors did not think highly of him and would not recommend him for a university position.
     For two years Einstein worked as a tutor and substitute teacher.  In 1902 he secured 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.  He later remarried.
     Albert wrote many scientific publications.  His 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 Sir Isaac Newton, natural philosophers (as physicists and chemists were known) had been trying to understand the nature of matter and radiation, and how they interacted in some unified world
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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, however, is capable of providing a consistent explanation for the way radiation (light, for example) and matter interact when viewed from different inertial frames of reference, that is, an interaction viewed simultaneously by an observer at rest and an observer moving at uniform speed.
     In the spring of 1905, after considering these problems for ten years, Einstein realized that the crux 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 jud...

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