Rupert sebag montefiore biography of albert einstein

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Video Audio icon An illustration of an audio speaker. During the s, other scientists started developing the work of Einstein and coming to different conclusions on Quantum Physics. In and , Einstein took part in debates with Max Born about the nature of relativity and quantum physics. Although the two disagreed on physics, they shared a mutual admiration.

As a German Jew, Einstein was threatened by the rise of the Nazi party. He later wrote that he never had strong opinions about race and nationality but saw himself as a citizen of the world. Race is a fraud. All modern people are the conglomeration of so many ethnic mixtures that no pure race remains. Once in the US, Einstein dedicated himself to a strict discipline of academic study.

He would spend no time on maintaining his dress and image. Einstein was notoriously absent-minded. In his youth, he once left his suitcase at a friends house. Although a bit of a loner, and happy in his own company, he had a good sense of humour. On January 3, , Einstein received a letter from a girl who was having difficulties with mathematics in her studies.

Einstein consoled her when he wrote in reply to her letter. I can assure you that mine are still greater. But, he followed no established religion. His view of God sought to establish a harmony between science and religion. Einstein described himself as a Zionist Socialist. He did support the state of Israel but became concerned about the narrow nationalism of the new state.

In , he was offered the position as President of Israel, but he declined saying he had:. Albert Einstein was involved in many civil rights movements such as the American campaign to end lynching. But he also spoke highly of the meritocracy in American society and the value of being able to speak freely. On the outbreak of war in , Einstein wrote to President Roosevelt about the prospect of Germany developing an atomic bomb.

He warned Roosevelt that the Germans were working on a bomb with a devastating potential.

Rupert sebag montefiore biography of albert einstein

Roosevelt headed his advice and started the Manhattan project to develop the US atom bomb. But, after the war ended, Einstein reverted to his pacifist views. Toward the end of the s, Max Talmud, a Polish medical student who sometimes dined with the Einstein family, became an informal tutor to young Einstein. Hermann relocated the family to Milan, Italy, in the mids after his business lost out on a major contract.

Einstein was eventually able to gain admission into the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, specifically due to his superb mathematics and physics scores on the entrance exam. He was still required to complete his pre-university education first and thus attended a high school in Aarau, Switzerland, helmed by Jost Winteler. Einstein later renounced his German citizenship and became a Swiss citizen at the dawn of the new century.

The maximum score of the current version is , with an IQ of or higher ranking in the 99 th percentile. Magazine columnist Marilyn vos Savant has the highest-ever recorded IQ at and was featured in the Guinness Book of World Records in the late s. However, Guinness discontinued the category because of debates about testing accuracy. After graduating from university, Einstein faced major challenges in terms of finding academic positions, having alienated some professors over not attending class more regularly in lieu of studying independently.

Einstein eventually found steady work in after receiving a referral for a clerk position in a Swiss patent office. While working at the patent office, Einstein had the time to further explore ideas that had taken hold during his university studies and thus cemented his theorems on what would be known as the principle of relativity. Two focused on the photoelectric effect and Brownian motion.

The theory explains that space and time are actually connected, and Einstein called this joint structure space-time. Einstein considered this theory the culmination of his life research. It also offered a more expansive, nuanced explanation of how gravitational forces worked. Today, the theories of relativity underpin the accuracy of GPS technology, among other phenomena.

Even so, Einstein did make one mistake when developing his general theory, which naturally predicted the universe is either expanding or contracting. His later theories directly contracted this idea and asserted that the universe could be in a state of flux. Then, astronomer Edwin Hubble deduced that we indeed inhabit an expanding universe.

This equation suggested that tiny particles of matter could be converted into huge amounts of energy, a discovery that heralded atomic power. Famed quantum theorist Max Planck backed up the assertions of Einstein, who thus became a star of the lecture circuit and academia, taking on various positions before becoming director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics today is known as the Max Planck Institute for Physics from to In , Einstein won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his explanation of the photoelectric effect, since his ideas on relativity were still considered questionable.

Einstein married Mileva Maric on January 6, While attending school in Zurich, Einstein met Maric, a Serbian physics student. Einstein continued to grow closer to Maric, but his parents were strongly against the relationship due to her ethnic background. Nonetheless, Einstein continued to see her, with the two developing a correspondence via letters in which he expressed many of his scientific ideas.

Einstein and Mavic had three children. Her ultimate fate and whereabouts remain a mystery. Einstein, as part of a settlement, agreed to give Maric any funds he might receive from possibly winning the Nobel Prize in the future. Einstein saw this wave—particle duality in radiation as concrete evidence for his conviction that physics needed a new, unified foundation.

In a series of works completed from to , Planck reformulated his quantum theory and introduced the idea of zero-point energy in his "second quantum theory". Soon, this idea attracted the attention of Einstein and his assistant Otto Stern. Assuming the energy of rotating diatomic molecules contains zero-point energy, they then compared the theoretical specific heat of hydrogen gas with the experimental data.

The numbers matched nicely. However, after publishing the findings, they promptly withdrew their support, because they no longer had confidence in the correctness of the idea of zero-point energy. In , at the height of his work on relativity, Einstein published an article in Physikalische Zeitschrift that proposed the possibility of stimulated emission , the physical process that makes possible the maser and the laser.

This paper was enormously influential in the later development of quantum mechanics, because it was the first paper to show that the statistics of atomic transitions had simple laws. Einstein discovered Louis de Broglie 's work and supported his ideas, which were received skeptically at first. In another major paper from this era, Einstein observed that de Broglie waves could explain the quantization rules of Bohr and Sommerfeld.

Einstein played a major role in developing quantum theory, beginning with his paper on the photoelectric effect. However, he became displeased with modern quantum mechanics as it had evolved after , despite its acceptance by other physicists. He was skeptical that the randomness of quantum mechanics was fundamental rather than the result of determinism, stating that God "is not playing at dice".

The Bohr—Einstein debates were a series of public disputes about quantum mechanics between Einstein and Niels Bohr , who were two of its founders. Their debates are remembered because of their importance to the philosophy of science. Einstein never fully accepted quantum mechanics. While he recognized that it made correct predictions, he believed a more fundamental description of nature must be possible.

Over the years he presented multiple arguments to this effect, but the one he preferred most dated to a debate with Bohr in Einstein suggested a thought experiment in which two objects are allowed to interact and then moved apart a great distance from each other. The quantum-mechanical description of the two objects is a mathematical entity known as a wavefunction.

But because of what would later be called quantum entanglement , measuring one object would lead to an instantaneous change of the wavefunction describing the other object, no matter how far away it is. Moreover, the choice of which measurement to perform upon the first object would affect what wavefunction could result for the second object.

Einstein reasoned that no influence could propagate from the first object to the second instantaneously fast. Indeed, he argued, physics depends on being able to tell one thing apart from another, and such instantaneous influences would call that into question. Because the true "physical condition" of the second object could not be immediately altered by an action done to the first, Einstein concluded, the wavefunction could not be that true physical condition, only an incomplete description of it.

A more famous version of this argument came in , when Einstein published a paper with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen that laid out what would become known as the EPR paradox. Then, no matter how far the two particles were separated, a precise position measurement on one particle would imply the ability to predict, perfectly, the result of measuring the position of the other particle.

Likewise, a precise momentum measurement of one particle would result in an equally precise prediction for of the momentum of the other particle, without needing to disturb the other particle in any way. They argued that no action taken on the first particle could instantaneously affect the other, since this would involve information being transmitted faster than light, which is forbidden by the theory of relativity.

They invoked a principle, later known as the "EPR criterion of reality", positing that: If, without in any way disturbing a system, we can predict with certainty i. From this, they inferred that the second particle must have a definite value of both position and of momentum prior to either quantity being measured. But quantum mechanics considers these two observables incompatible and thus does not associate simultaneous values for both to any system.

Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen therefore concluded that quantum theory does not provide a complete description of reality. In , John Stewart Bell carried the analysis of quantum entanglement much further. He deduced that if measurements are performed independently on the two separated particles of an entangled pair, then the assumption that the outcomes depend upon hidden variables within each half implies a mathematical constraint on how the outcomes on the two measurements are correlated.

This constraint would later be called a Bell inequality. Bell then showed that quantum physics predicts correlations that violate this inequality. Consequently, the only way that hidden variables could explain the predictions of quantum physics is if they are "nonlocal", which is to say that somehow the two particles are able to interact instantaneously no matter how widely they ever become separated.

Despite this, and although Einstein personally found the argument in the EPR paper overly complicated, [ ] [ ] that paper became among the most influential papers published in Physical Review. It is considered a centerpiece of the development of quantum information theory. Encouraged by his success with general relativity, Einstein sought an even more ambitious geometrical theory that would treat gravitation and electromagnetism as aspects of a single entity.

In , he described his unified field theory in a Scientific American article titled "On the Generalized Theory of Gravitation". Although most researchers now believe that Einstein's approach to unifying physics was mistaken, his goal of a theory of everything is one to which his successors still aspire. Einstein conducted other investigations that were unsuccessful and abandoned.

These pertain to force , superconductivity , and other research. In addition to longtime collaborators Leopold Infeld , Nathan Rosen , Peter Bergmann and others, Einstein also had some one-shot collaborations with various scientists. In , Owen Willans Richardson predicted that a change in the magnetic moment of a free body will cause this body to rotate.

This effect is a consequence of the conservation of angular momentum and is strong enough to be observable in ferromagnetic materials. These measurements also allow the separation of the two contributions to the magnetization: that which is associated with the spin and with the orbital motion of the electrons. The Einstein-de Haas experiment is the only experiment concived, realized and published by Albert Einstein himself.

It was lost among the museum's holdings and was rediscovered in This absorption refrigerator was then revolutionary for having no moving parts and using only heat as an input. Their invention was not immediately put into commercial production, but the most promising of their patents were acquired by the Swedish company Electrolux. Einstein also invented an electromagnetic pump, [ ] sound reproduction device, [ ] and several other household devices.

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 [ ].

Barbara Wolff, of the Hebrew University's Albert Einstein Archives , told the BBC that there are about 3, pages of private correspondence written between and Einstein's right of publicity was litigated in 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. Mount Einstein in the Chugach Mountains of Alaska was named in In , Einstein was named Time 's Person of the Century. In , a survey of the top 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.

Physicist Lev Landau ranked physicists from 0 to 5 on a logarithmic scale of productivity and genius, with Newton and Einstein belonging in a "super league", with Newton receiving the highest ranking of 0, followed by Einstein with 0. Physicist Eugene Wigner noted that while John von Neumann had the quickest and acute mind he ever knew, the understanding of Einstein was deeper than von Neumann's, 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 year was labeled the " World Year of Physics ", and was also known as "Einstein Year", in recognition of Einstein's " miracle year " in Einstein became one of the most famous scientific celebrities after the confirmation of his general theory of relativity in In the period before World War II, The New Yorker published a vignette in their "The Talk of the Town" feature saying that Einstein was so well known in America that he would be stopped on the street by people wanting him to explain "that theory".

Eventually he came to cope with unwanted enquirers by pretending to be someone else: Pardon me, sorry! Always I am mistaken for Professor Einstein. Einstein has been the subject of or inspiration for many novels, films, plays, and works of music. Time magazine's Frederic Golden wrote that Einstein was "a cartoonist's dream come true". Many popular quotations are often misattributed to him.

Einstein received numerous awards and honors, and in , he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect. None of the nominations in met the criteria set by Alfred Nobel , so the prize was carried forward and awarded to Einstein in Einsteinium , a synthetic chemical element, was named in his honor in , a few months after his death.

Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read View source View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. German-born physicist — For other uses, see Einstein disambiguation and Albert Einstein disambiguation. Princeton, New Jersey , U. See list. Coining the term unified field theory Describing mass—energy equivalence Explaining Brownian motion Explaining gravitational waves Explaining the photoelectric effect Formulating Einstein field equations Introducing Bose—Einstein statistics Introducing the cosmological constant Postulating the Bose—Einstein condensate Proposing the EPR paradox Proposing general relativity Proposing special relativity.

Albert Einstein's voice. This article is part of a series about. Political views Religious views Family Oppenheimer relationship. Childhood, youth and education. See also: Einstein family. Einstein's parents, Hermann and Pauline. Marriages, relationships and children. Resident scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study. Main article: Political views of Albert Einstein.

Relationship with Zionism. Religious and philosophical views. Main article: Religious and philosophical views of Albert Einstein. Thermodynamic fluctuations and statistical physics. Main articles: Statistical mechanics , thermal fluctuations , and statistical physics. Theory of critical opalescence. Main article: Critical opalescence.

Main article: History of special relativity. General relativity and the equivalence principle. Main article: History of general relativity. See also: Theory of relativity and Einstein field equations. Hole argument and Entwurf theory. Main article: Physical cosmology. Energy momentum pseudotensor. Main article: Stress—energy—momentum pseudotensor.

Einstein—Cartan theory. Main article: Einstein—Cartan theory. Main article: Einstein—Infeld—Hoffmann equations. Main article: Old quantum theory. Photons and energy quanta. Quantized atomic vibrations. Main article: Einstein solid. Bose—Einstein statistics. Main article: Bose—Einstein statistics. Wave—particle duality. Einstein's objections to quantum mechanics.

Main article: Bohr—Einstein debates. Einstein—Podolsky—Rosen paradox. Main article: EPR paradox. Main article: Classical unified field theories. Main article: Einstein's unsuccessful investigations. Collaboration with other scientists. Einstein—de Haas experiment. Main article: Einstein—de Haas effect. Main article: Albert Einstein in popular culture.

Main article: List of awards and honors received by Albert Einstein. Further information: List of scientific publications by Albert Einstein. Einstein, Albert [Completed 13 December and manuscript received 16 December ]. Written at Zurich, Switzerland. Paul Karl Ludwig Drude ed. Annalen der Physik. Vierte Folge in German. Bibcode : AnP Einstein, Albert a [Completed 17 March and submitted 18 March ].

Written at Berne, Switzerland. Einstein, Albert b [Completed 30 April ]. Berne, Switzerland: Wyss Buchdruckerei published 20 July Einstein, Albert c [Manuscript received: 11 May ]. Einstein, Albert d [Manuscript received 30 June ]. Annalen der Physik Submitted manuscript. Einstein, Albert e [Manuscript received 27 September ]. Einstein, Albert [Completed 25 November ].

Sitzungsberichte in German. Einstein, Albert [Issued 29 June ]. Sitzungsberichte Bibcode : SPAW Einstein, Albert a. Einstein, Albert b. Physikalische Zeitschrift in German. Bibcode : PhyZ Einstein, Albert 31 January Retrieved 14 November Einstein, Albert [First published , in English ]. Written at Gothenburg. Nobel Lectures, Physics — in German and English.

Stockholm: Nobelprice. Einstein, Albert [Published 10 July ]. Archived from the original Online page images on 14 October First of a series of papers on this topic. Written at Berlin. Die Naturwissenschaften in German. Heidelberg, Germany: — Bibcode : NW ISSN S2CID Translated by Cowper, A. US: Dover Publications published ISBN Retrieved 4 January Einstein, Albert Sonderasugabe aus den Sitzungsb.

Einstein, A. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Bibcode : PNAS PMC PMID Einstein, Albert; Rosen, Nathan Physical Review. Bibcode : PhRv Physical Review Submitted manuscript. Scientific American. Bibcode : SciAm. Ideas and Opinions. New York: Crown Publishers. New York: Three Rivers Press. Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung.

Stachel, John ; Martin J. Klein; A. Kox; Michel Janssen; R. Schulmann; Diana Komos Buchwald; et al. The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein. Princeton University Press. Further information about the volumes published so far can be found on the webpages of the Einstein Papers Project [ ] and on the Princeton University Press Einstein Page.

Einstein, Albert; et al. The New York Times. Melville, New York. Archived from the original on 17 December Retrieved 25 May Einstein, Albert May Sweezy, Paul; Huberman, Leo eds. Monthly Review. Reprise ". New York: Monthly Review Foundation. Archived from the original on 11 January Retrieved 16 January — via MonthlyReview. Einstein, Albert September Introduction by Bharatan Kumarappa.

Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House. OCLC Foreword originally written in April Autobiographical Notes. Paul Arthur Schilpp Centennial ed. Chicago: Open Court. The chasing a light beam thought experiment is described on pages 48— The center was once the Palmer Physical Laboratory. Heinrich Burkhardt Heinrich Zangger History of gravitational theory List of coupled cousins List of German inventors and discoverers List of Jewish Nobel laureates List of peace activists Relativity priority dispute Sticky bead argument.

She has chosen the cream of her culture and has suppressed it. She has even turned upon her most glorious citizen, Albert Einstein, who is the supreme example of the selfless intellectual The man, who, beyond all others, approximates a citizen of the world, is without a home. How proud we must be to offer him temporary shelter.

He was quoted as saying that improving the design and changing the types of gases used might allow the design's efficiency to be quadrupled. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. JSTOR Royal Astronomical Society. Archived PDF from the original on 20 December Retrieved 20 December National Academy of Sciences. Archived from the original on 20 December Longman Pronunciation Dictionary 3rd ed.

Pearson Longman. Modern Atomic and Nuclear Physics. World Scientific. New York: Walker. Nobel Prize. Archived from the original on 3 July Retrieved 11 July