| Einstein, Albert (1879- 1955)
American physicist, was born at Ulm, Germany, March 14, 1879. He was educated at Luitpold gymnasium, Munich the cantonal school of Aarau, Switzerland; and the Technische Hochschule, Zurich. In 1901 he was appointed examiner of patents in the patent office at Bern, a post he held until 1909 During this period he published his first scientific papers, which attracted so much favorable attention that he was made a professor at the University of Zurich in 1909. The following year he became professor of theoretical physics at the German university in Prague. In 1912 he returned to Zurich as professor at the Technische Hochschule. At the end of 1913 he accepted a research appointment to the Prussian Academy of Science, Berlin, with the further titles of professor in the University of Berlin and director Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics. In the political turbulence of Germany in the early 1930's, Einstein became increasingly disturbed about the position of science and the scientists in the German state. He traveled widely In England, and the United States, and finally accepted of a professorship at the newly established Institute for Advanced Study st Princeton, N.J., where he took up his duties in 1933. In 1934 the Hitler regime deprived him of his German citizenship and property. He subsequently became a naturalized citizen of the United States. Einstein is best known for his development of the theory of relativity but he made many other contributions to modern science. In 1905 he gave the theory of the "Brownian motion" describing the irregular motion of microscopic particles of smoke or dust suspended in liquid or gas. Acting on a suggestion of Max Planck that light is emitted and absorbed in "quanta"--bundles of energy of a size depending on the frequency of the light considered-- Einstein offered an explanation of the emission of electrons from metal surfaces illuminated by light: the so-called photoelectric effect. He then pursued the quantum theory of radiation further and established a law for the effect of radiation in producing chemical changes. A later achievement, announced in 1949 described the phenomena of electromagnetism and of gravitation In a single "unified field theory." The mathematical formulas of this theory, said to describe the fundamental, all-embracing laws by which the universe operates, were published in 1953 as an appendix to the fourth edition of The Meaning of Relativity, first published in 1922. The importance of Einstein’s work was widely recognized and he received numerous honorary degrees and prizes, including the 1921 Nobel Prize in Builders of the Universe (1932), On the method of theoretical physics (1933), The World As I See It (1934), The Evolution of Physics (1938), a collaboration, and Out of My Latin Years (1950)· Einstein died April 18, 1955 in Princeton, N.J. His Theory of the Non-Symmetric Field, a further appendix to The Meaning of Relativity, was posthumously published in 1956. |