Albert Einstein

Einstein was born in Ulm as a subject to 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's borough of Ludwigsvorstadt-Isarvorstadt, where Einstein's father and his uncle Jakob founded Elektrotechnische Fabrik J. Einstein & Cie, a company that manufactured electrical equipment based on direct current.

When he was very young, his parents worried that he had a learning disability because he was very slow to learn to talk. When he was five and sick in bed, his father brought him a compass. This sparked his lifelong fascination with electromagnetism. He realized that "Something deeply hidden had to be behind things."

Einstein attended St. Peter's Catholic elementary school in Munich from the age of five. When he was eight, he was transferred to the Luitpold 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. His father wanted him to study electrical engineering, but he was a fractious pupil who found the Gymnasium's regimen and teaching methods far from congenial. He later wrote that the school's policy of strict rote learning was harmful to creativity. At the end of December 1894, a letter from a doctor persuaded the Luitpold's authorities to release him from its care, and he joined his family in Pavia. While in Italy as a teenager, he wrote an essay titled "On the Investigation of the State of the Ether in a Magnetic Field".

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. A family tutor, Max Talmud, said that only a short time after he had given the twelve year old Einstein a geometry textbook, the boy "had worked through the whole book. He thereupon devoted himself to higher mathematics ... Soon the flight of his mathematical genius was so high I could not follow." Einstein recorded that he had "mastered integral and differential calculus" while still just fourteen. His love of algebra and geometry was so great that at twelve, he was already confident that nature could be understood as a "mathematical structure".

At thirteen, when his range of enthusiasms had broadened to include music and philosophy, Talmud introduced Einstein to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Kant became his favorite philosopher; according to Talmud, "At the time he was still a child, only thirteen years old, yet Kant's works, incomprehensible to ordinary mortals, seemed to be clear to him."

In 1895, at the age of sixteen, Einstein sat the entrance examination for the federal polytechnic school (later the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, ETH) in Zurich, 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. While lodging in Aarau with the family of Jost Winteler, he fell in love with Winteler's daughter, Marie. (His sister, Maja, later married Winteler's son Paul.)

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. The Matura (graduation for the successful completion of higher secondary schooling), awarded to him in September 1896, acknowledged him to have performed well across most of the curriculum, allotting him a top grade of 6 for history, physics, algebra, geometry, and descriptive geometry. At seventeen, he enrolled in the four-year mathematics and physics teaching diploma program at the federal polytechnic school. He befriended fellow student Marcel Grossmann, who would help him there to get by despite his loose study habits, and later to mathematically underpin his revolutionary insights into physics. Marie Winteler, a year older than him, took up a teaching post in Olsberg, Switzerland.

The five other polytechnic school freshmen following the same course as Einstein included just one woman, a twenty year old Serbian, Mileva Marić. Over the next few years, the pair spent many hours discussing their shared interests and learning about topics in physics that the polytechnic school's lectures did not cover. 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.

Historians of physics are divided on the question of the extent to which Marić contributed to the insights of Einstein's annus mirabilis publications. There is at least some evidence that he was influenced by her scientific ideas, but there are scholars who doubt whether her impact on his thought was of any great significance at all.

Correspondence between Einstein and Marić, discovered and published in 1987, revealed that the couple had a daughter named Lieserl. She was born in early 1902 while Marić was visiting her parents in Novi Sad. When Marić returned to Switzerland the child was no longer with her. What happened to Lieserl is uncertain. In a letter written in September 1903, Einstein suggested that the girl was either given up for adoption or died of scarlet fever in infancy.

Einstein and Marić married in January 1903. In May 1904, their son Hans Albert was born in Bern, Switzerland. Their son Eduard was born in Zurich in July 1910. In letters that Einstein wrote to Marie Winteler in the months before Eduard's arrival, he described his love for his wife as "misguided" and mourned the "missed life" that he imagined he would have enjoyed if he had married Winteler instead: "I think of you in heartfelt love every spare minute and am so unhappy as only a man can be."

In 1912, Einstein entered into a relationship with Elsa Löwenthal, who was both his first cousin on his mother's side and his second cousin on his father's. When Marić learned of his infidelity soon after moving to Berlin with him in April 1914, she returned to Zurich, taking Hans Albert and Eduard with her. Einstein and Marić were granted a divorce on 14 February 1919 on the grounds of having lived apart for five years. As part of the divorce settlement, Einstein agreed that if he were to win a Nobel Prize, he would give the money that he received to Marić; he won the prize two years later.

Einstein married Löwenthal in 1919. In 1923, he began a relationship with a secretary named Betty Neumann, the niece of his close friend Hans Mühsam. Löwenthal nevertheless remained loyal to him, accompanying him when he emigrated to the United States in 1933. In 1935, she was diagnosed with heart and kidney problems. She died in December 1936.

A volume of Einstein's letters released by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2006 added some other women with whom he was romantically involved. They included Margarete Lebach (a married Austrian), Estella Katzenellenbogen (the rich owner of a florist business), Toni Mendel (a wealthy Jewish widow) and Ethel Michanowski (a Berlin socialite), with whom he spent time and from whom he accepted gifts while married to Löwenthal. After being widowed, Einstein was briefly in a relationship with Margarita Konenkova, thought by some to be a Russian spy; her husband, the Russian sculptor Sergei Konenkov, created the bronze bust of Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

Following an episode of acute mental illness at about the age of twenty, Einstein's son Eduard was diagnosed with schizophrenia. He spent the remainder of his life either in the care of his mother or in temporary confinement in an asylum. After her death, he was committed permanently to Burghölzli, the Psychiatric University Hospital in Zurich.

Einstein graduated from the federal polytechnic school in 1900, duly certified as competent to teach mathematics and physics. His successful acquisition of Swiss citizenship in February 1901 was not followed by the usual sequel of conscription; the Swiss authorities deemed him medically unfit for military service. He found that Swiss schools too appeared to have no use for him, failing to offer him a teaching position despite the almost two years that he spent applying for one. Eventually it was with the help of Marcel Grossmann's father that he secured a post in Bern at the Swiss Patent Office, as an assistant examiner – level III.

Patent applications that landed on Einstein's desk for his evaluation included ideas for a gravel sorter and an electric typewriter. His employers were pleased enough with his work to make his position permanent in 1903, although they did not think that he should be promoted until he had "fully mastered machine technology". It is conceivable that his labors at the patent office had a bearing on his development of his special theory of relativity. He arrived at his revolutionary ideas about space, time and light through thought experiments about the transmission of signals and the synchronization of clocks, matters which also figured in some of the inventions submitted to him for assessment.

In 1902, Einstein and his friends Conrad Habicht and Maurice Solovine, whom he had met in Bern, formed a group that held regular meetings to discuss science and philosophy. Their choice of a name for their club, the Olympia Academy, was an ironic comment upon its far from Olympian status. Sometimes they were joined by Marić, who limited her participation in their proceedings to careful listening. The thinkers whose works they reflected upon included Henri Poincaré, Ernst Mach and David Hume, all of whom significantly influenced Einstein's own subsequent ideas and beliefs.

Einstein's first paper, "Folgerungen aus den Capillaritätserscheinungen" ("Conclusions drawn from the phenomena of capillarity"), in which he proposed a model of intermolecular attraction that he afterwards disavowed as worthless, was published in the journal Annalen der Physik in 1901. His 24-page doctoral dissertation also addressed a topic in molecular physics. Titled "Eine neue Bestimmung der Moleküldimensionen" ("A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions") and dedicated "Meinem Freunde Herr Dr. Marcel Grossmann gewidmet" (to his friend Marcel Grossman), it was completed on 30 April 1905 and approved by Alfred Kleiner of the University of Zurich three months later. (Einstein was formally awarded his PhD on 15 January 1906.) Four other pieces of work that Einstein completed in 1905—his famous papers on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, his special theory of relativity and the equivalence of mass and energy—have led to the year being celebrated as an annus mirabilis for physics akin to the miracle year of 1666 when Isaac Newton experienced his greatest epiphanies. The publications deeply impressed Einstein's contemporaries.

Einstein's sabbatical as a civil servant approached its end in 1908, when he secured a junior teaching position at the University of Bern.

Throughout his life, Einstein published hundreds of books and articles. He published more than 300 scientific papers and 150 non-scientific ones. On 5 December 2014, universities and archives announced the release of Einstein's papers, comprising more than 30,000 unique documents. In addition to the work he did by himself, he also collaborated with other scientists on additional projects, including the Bose–Einstein statistics, the Einstein refrigerator and others.

Einstein's first paper, submitted in 1900 to Annalen der Physik, was on capillary attraction. It was published in 1901 with the title "Folgerungen aus den Capillaritätserscheinungen", which translates as "Conclusions from the capillarity phenomena". Two papers he published in 1902–1903 (thermodynamics) attempted to interpret atomic phenomena from a statistical point of view. These papers were the foundation for the 1905 paper on Brownian motion, which showed that Brownian movement can be construed as firm evidence that molecules exist. His research in 1903 and 1904 was mainly concerned with the effect of finite atomic size on diffusion phenomena.

Einstein returned to the problem of thermodynamic fluctuations, giving a treatment of the density variations in a fluid at its critical point. Ordinarily, the density fluctuations are controlled by the second derivative of the free energy with respect to the density. At the critical point, this derivative is zero, leading to large fluctuations. The effect of density fluctuations is that light of all wavelengths is scattered, making the fluid look milky white. Einstein relates this to Rayleigh scattering, which is what happens when the fluctuation size is much smaller than the wavelength, and which explains why the sky is blue. Einstein quantitatively derived critical opalescence from a treatment of density fluctuations, and demonstrated how both the effect and Rayleigh scattering originate from the atomistic constitution of matter.

The Annus Mirabilis papers are four articles pertaining to the photoelectric effect (which gave rise to quantum theory), Brownian motion, the special theory of relativity, and E = mc2 that Einstein published in the Annalen der Physik scientific journal in 1905. These four works contributed substantially to the foundation of modern physics and changed views on space, time, and matter. The four papers are:

Einstein's "Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper" ("On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies") was received on 30 June 1905 and published 26 September of that same year. It reconciled conflicts between Maxwell's equations (the laws of electricity and magnetism) and the laws of Newtonian mechanics by introducing changes to the laws of mechanics. Observationally, the effects of these changes are most apparent at high speeds (where objects are moving at speeds close to the speed of light). The theory developed in this paper later became known as Einstein's special theory of relativity.

This paper predicted that, when measured in the frame of a relatively moving observer, a clock carried by a moving body would appear to slow down, and the body itself would contract in its direction of motion. This paper also argued that the idea of a luminiferous aether—one of the leading theoretical entities in physics at the time—was superfluous.

In his paper on mass–energy equivalence, Einstein produced E = mc2 as a consequence of his special relativity equations. Einstein's 1905 work on relativity remained controversial for many years, but was accepted by leading physicists, starting with Max Planck.

Einstein originally framed special relativity in terms of kinematics (the study of moving bodies). In 1908, Hermann Minkowski reinterpreted special relativity in geometric terms as a theory of spacetime. Einstein adopted Minkowski's formalism in his 1915 general theory of relativity.

General relativity (GR) is a theory of gravitation that was developed by Einstein between 1907 and 1915. According to it, the observed gravitational attraction between masses results from the warping of spacetime by those masses. General relativity has developed into an essential tool in modern astrophysics; it provides the foundation for the current understanding of black holes, regions of space where gravitational attraction is so strong that not even light can escape.

As Einstein later said, the reason for the development of general relativity was that the preference of inertial motions within special relativity was unsatisfactory, while a theory which from the outset prefers no state of motion (even accelerated ones) should appear more satisfactory. Consequently, in 1907 he published an article on acceleration under special relativity. In that article titled "On the Relativity Principle and the Conclusions Drawn from It", he argued that free fall is really inertial motion, and that for a free-falling observer the rules of special relativity must apply. This argument is called the equivalence principle. In the same article, Einstein also predicted the phenomena of gravitational time dilation, gravitational redshift and gravitational lensing.

In 1911, Einstein published another article "On the Influence of Gravitation on the Propagation of Light" expanding on the 1907 article, in which he estimated the amount of deflection of light by massive bodies. Thus, the theoretical prediction of general relativity could for the first time be tested experimentally.

In 1916, Einstein predicted gravitational waves, ripples in the curvature of spacetime which propagate as waves, traveling outward from the source, transporting energy as gravitational radiation. The existence of gravitational waves is possible under general relativity due to its Lorentz invariance which brings the concept of a finite speed of propagation of the physical interactions of gravity with it. By contrast, gravitational waves cannot exist in the Newtonian theory of gravitation, which postulates that the physical interactions of gravity propagate at infinite speed.

The first, indirect, detection of gravitational waves came in the 1970s through observation of a pair of closely orbiting neutron stars, PSR B1913+16. The explanation for the decay in their orbital period was that they were emitting gravitational waves. Einstein's prediction was confirmed on 11 February 2016, when researchers at LIGO published the first observation of gravitational waves, detected on Earth on 14 September 2015, nearly one hundred years after the prediction.

While developing general relativity, Einstein became confused about the gauge invariance in the theory. He formulated an argument that led him to conclude that a general relativistic field theory is impossible. He gave up looking for fully generally covariant tensor equations and searched for equations that would be invariant under general linear transformations only.

In June 1913, the Entwurf ('draft') theory was the result of these investigations. As its name suggests, it was a sketch of a theory, less elegant and more difficult than general relativity, with the equations of motion supplemented by additional gauge fixing conditions. After more than two years of intensive work, Einstein realized that the hole argument was mistaken and abandoned the theory in November 1915.

In 1917, Einstein applied the general theory of relativity to the structure of the universe as a whole. He discovered that the general field equations predicted a universe that was dynamic, either contracting or expanding. As observational evidence for a dynamic universe was lacking at the time, Einstein introduced a new term, the cosmological constant, into the field equations, in order to allow the theory to predict a static universe. The modified field equations predicted a static universe of closed curvature, in accordance with Einstein's understanding of Mach's principle in these years. This model became known as the Einstein World or Einstein's static universe. This paper is widely regarded as marking the emergence of modern theoretical cosmology.

Following the discovery of the recession of the galaxies by Edwin Hubble in 1929, Einstein abandoned his static model of the universe, and proposed two dynamic models of the cosmos, the Friedmann–Einstein universe of 1931 and the Einstein–de Sitter universe of 1932. In each of these models, Einstein discarded the cosmological constant, claiming that it was "in any case theoretically unsatisfactory".

In many Einstein biographies, it is claimed that Einstein referred to the cosmological constant in later years as his "biggest blunder", based on a letter George Gamow claimed to have received from him. The astrophysicist Mario Livio has cast doubt on this claim.

In late 2013, a team led by the Irish physicist Cormac O'Raifeartaigh discovered evidence that, shortly after learning of Hubble's observations of the recession of the galaxies, Einstein considered a steady-state model of the universe. In a hitherto overlooked manuscript, apparently written in early 1931, Einstein explored a model of the expanding universe in which the density of matter remains constant due to a continuous creation of matter, a process that he associated with the cosmological constant. As he stated in the paper, "In what follows, I would like to draw attention to a solution to equation (1) that can account for Hubbel's [sic] facts, and in which the density is constant over time [...] If one considers a physically bounded volume, particles of matter will be continually leaving it. For the density to remain constant, new particles of matter must be continually formed in the volume from space."

It thus appears that Einstein considered a steady-state model of the expanding universe many years before Hoyle, Bondi and Gold. However, Einstein's steady-state model contained a fundamental flaw and he quickly abandoned the idea.

General relativity includes a dynamical spacetime, so it is difficult to see how to identify the conserved energy and momentum. Noether's theorem allows these quantities to be determined from a Lagrangian with translation invariance, but general covariance makes translation invariance into something of a gauge symmetry. The energy and momentum derived within general relativity by Noether's prescriptions do not make a real tensor for this reason.

Einstein argued that this is true for a fundamental reason: the gravitational field could be made to vanish by a choice of coordinates. He maintained that the non-covariant energy momentum pseudotensor was, in fact, the best description of the energy momentum distribution in a gravitational field. While the use of non-covariant objects like pseudotensors was criticized by Erwin Schrödinger and others, Einstein's approach has been echoed by physicists including Lev Landau and Evgeny Lifshitz.

In 1935, Einstein collaborated with Nathan Rosen to produce a model of a wormhole, often called Einstein–Rosen bridges. His motivation was to model elementary particles with charge as a solution of gravitational field equations, in line with the program outlined in the paper "Do Gravitational Fields play an Important Role in the Constitution of the Elementary Particles?". These solutions cut and pasted Schwarzschild black holes to make a bridge between two patches. Because these solutions included spacetime curvature without the presence of a physical body, Einstein and Rosen suggested that they could provide the beginnings of a theory that avoided the notion of point particles. However, it was later found that Einstein–Rosen bridges are not stable.

In order to incorporate spinning point particles into general relativity, the affine connection needed to be generalized to include an antisymmetric part, called the torsion. This modification was made by Einstein and Cartan in the 1920s.

In general relativity, gravitational force is reimagined as curvature of spacetime.

While traveling, Einstein wrote daily to his wife Elsa and adopted stepdaughters Margot and Ilse. The letters were included in the papers bequeathed to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Margot Einstein permitted the personal letters to be made available to the public, but requested that it not be done until twenty years after her death (she died in 1986). Barbara Wolff, of the Hebrew University's Albert Einstein Archives, told the BBC that there are about 3,500 pages of private correspondence written between 1912 and 1955.

In his final four years, Einstein was involved with the establishment of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City.

In 1979, the Albert Einstein Memorial was unveiled outside the National Academy of Sciences building in Washington, D.C. for the Einstein centenary. It was sculpted by Robert Berks. Einstein can be seen holding a paper with three of his most important equations: for the photoelectric effect, general relativity and mass-energy equivalence.

Einstein's right of publicity was litigated in 2015 in a federal district court in California. Although the court initially held that the right had expired, that ruling was immediately appealed, and the decision was later vacated in its entirety. The underlying claims between the parties in that lawsuit were ultimately settled. The right is enforceable, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem is the exclusive representative of that right. Corbis, successor to The Roger Richman Agency, licenses the use of his name and associated imagery, as agent for the university.

Mount Einstein in the Chugach Mountains of Alaska was named in 1955. Mount Einstein in New Zealand's Paparoa Range was named after him in 1970 by the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research.

In 1999, Einstein was named Time's Person of the Century.

In 1999, a survey of the top 100 physicists voted for Einstein as the "greatest physicist ever", while a parallel survey of rank-and-file physicists gave the top spot to Isaac Newton, with Einstein second.

The physicist Lev Landau ranked physicists from 0 to 5 on a logarithmic scale of productivity and genius, with Newton receiving the highest ranking of 0, followed by Einstein with 0.5, while fathers of quantum mechanics such as Paul Dirac, Niels Bohr, and Werner Heisenberg were ranked 1, with Landau himself a 2.

Science writer John G. Simmons ranked Einstein second after Newton in The Scientific 100, based on a qualitative assessment in which he ordered the scientists according to overall influence, and noted that the work of Einstein "forms the source of twentieth-century physics".

Physicist Eugene Wigner noted that while John von Neumann had the quickest and most acute mind he ever knew, it was Einstein who had the more penetrating and original mind of the two, stating that:But Einstein's understanding was deeper than even Jancsi von Neumann's. His mind was both more penetrating and more original than von Neumann's. And that is a very remarkable statement. Einstein took an extraordinary pleasure in invention. Two of his greatest inventions are the Special and General Theories of Relativity; and for all of Jancsi's brilliance, he never produced anything so original. No modern physicist has.

The International Union of Pure and Applied Physics declared 2005 the "World Year of Physics", also known as "Einstein Year", in recognition of Einstein's "miracle year" in 1905. It was also declared the "International Year of Physics" by the United Nations.

Einstein received numerous awards and honors, and in 1922, he was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect". The Nobel committee decided that none of the nominations in 1921 met the criteria set by Alfred Nobel, so the 1921 prize was carried forward and awarded to Einstein in 1922.

Einsteinium, a synthetic chemical element, was named in his honor in 1955, a few months after his death.

Einstein, Albert; et al. (4 December 1948). "To the editors of The New York Times". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 17 December 2007. Retrieved 25 May 2006.

Einstein, Albert (May 1949). Sweezy, Paul; Huberman, Leo (eds.). "Why Socialism?". Monthly Review. 1 (1): 9–15. doi:10.14452/MR-001-01-1949-05_3.

—————— (May 2009) [May 1949]. "Why Socialism? (Reprise)". Monthly Review. New York: Monthly Review Foundation. Archived from the original on 11 January 2006. Retrieved 16 January 2006 – via MonthlyReview.org.

Einstein, Albert (September 1960). Foreword to Gandhi Wields the Weapon of Moral Power: Three Case Histories. Introduction by Bharatan Kumarappa. Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House. pp. v–vi. OCLC 2325889. Foreword originally written in April 1953.