The insanely intelligent genius called Albert Einstein

 In case you have not heard of him before; a case I would consider to be rare, there was a man who once lived between the late 19th century and mid-20^th century.

He developed the theory of special relativity, general relativity; he discovered the law of photoelectric effect, and the mass-energy equivalence formula E=mc² which is dubbed “the world’s most famous equation”

He was so prominent that he is generally considered as the most influential physicist of the 20th century.

This same man won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921 for his explanation of the photoelectric effect.

As if that is not enough, he was the TIME Magazine’s person of the 20th century. My dear friends, when you have to face competition from icons like Mahatma Gandhi, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr. Nelson Mandela, etc., it’s not an easy feat to pull off.

I introduce to you Albert Einstein.

Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany on the 14th of March, 1879.

Albert Einstein was reported to have had a slow start; in fact one of his teachers predicted that he would never amount to anything. There is another report that goes against the popular belief. It was reported that Albert Einstein’s archives didn’t show him as a poor student when he was young.

He later wrote about the two wonders that deeply affected his early years. The first was his encounter with a compass shown to him by his father. He was amazed at how the needle could move despite the empty space.

The second was at age 12 when he discovered a book of geometry, which he called the “sacred little geometry book”. Another important influence on the young Einstein was Max Talmud (later Max Talmey), a young Jewish medical student from Poland.

Talmud became Einstein’s informal tutor and consequently introduced him to higher mathematics and philosophy. He also gave him popular books like Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and Euclid’s Elements (his sacred little geometry book).

Initially, he was very religious until he began to read science books that contradicted his religious beliefs.

In 1895, he sat for the entrance exams into the Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Zurich. He failed in several subjects, but excelled in mathematics and physics. He was advised to complete his secondary school education before he could enter the polytechnic.

Einstein had initially left Germany as a dropout in order to avoid military service. Later in 1896, he renounced his German citizenship and later applied for Swiss citizenship which he got in 1901.

When Einstein was 16, he was introduced to a children science series by Aaron Bernstein. The author of the book imagined riding alongside electricity that was travelling inside a telegraph wire. Einstein asked an important question that would lead to a very important answer about ten years later: What would a light beam look like if you could run alongside it? If light were a wave then the light beam should appear stationary, like a frozen wave.

In January, 1903, Einstein and Maric married and gave birth to their first son Hans Albert Einstein, in 1904. Their second son Eduard was born in 1910. Previously before marriage, they had a daughter Lieserl, who was either adopted or died of scarlet fever in infancy. The exact story is unknown.

In 1905, Albert Einstein published four papers in Annalen der Physik which became ground-breaking in modern physics:

1.       “On a heuristic viewpoint concerning the production and transformation of light”. In this paper, he applied the quantum theory to light in order to explain the photoelectric effect. If light occur in tiny packets (photons), then it should knock out electrons in a metal in a precise way.

2.       “On the movement of small particles suspended in stationary liquids required by the molecular-kinetic theory of heat”. He offered the experimental proof of atom and also calculated the Avogadro’s constant.

3.       “On the electrodynamics of moving bodies”. This is where he laid out the mathematical theory of special relativity.

4.       “Does the inertia of a body depend upon its energy content?” this is where arguably the most popular equation, the mass-energy equation (E=mc²) was presented.

After developing the special theory of relativity, Einstein was consumed with the thought that there was no mention of gravity or acceleration in the theory which made it a flaw in the theory.

In 1915, Einstein completed the general theory of relativity, which he considered to be his masterpiece.

In 1921, during one of his world tours en route from Japan, Einstein received word that he had won the Nobel Prize for Physics. But he won it for photoelectric effect rather than his beloved relativity theories.

You know what Einstein did during his acceptance speech? He spoke about relativity instead of the photoelectric effect.

This is what Einstein wrote about his religious views:

“I’m not an atheist, and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangements of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God.”

Einstein was granted permanent residency in the United States in 1935 and became an American citizen in 1940.

In 1952, Israeli’s premier, David Ben-Gurion, offered Einstein the post of president which he respectfully declined.

Before his death, Einstein was obsessed with discovering a unified field theory – a theory that will unify the forces of the universe, and thereby the laws of physics, into one framework. This was uncompleted at the time of his death.

On the 18^th of April, 1955, the world said goodbye to one of the greatest scientists to ever grace the face of the earth. Albert Einstein died of an aortic aneurysm.

If you ask me what one most important trait contributed to Albert Einstein’s success, I’ll choose his holy curiosity.

What do you think contributed most to his success?
[Credit: Encyclopaedia Britannica]

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