The brilliant theories that Albert Einstein created throughout his life, including ground-breaking work in the fields of space, time, and relativity, are what define him. His contributions have influenced numerous areas of physics and related technologies. From understanding the functioning of the universe to the precision of the Global Positioning System (GPS), from unraveling the structure of the atom to laying the foundations for the invention of the laser, Albert Einstein’s impact is far-reaching.
In 1905, based on a study of laboratory data on the photoelectric effect, Einstein formulated the quantum theory of light, a milestone he referred to as his “revolutionary” achievement. This groundbreaking work earned him the Nobel Prize in 1921. However, the subsequent development of quantum theory was carried forward by scientists like Niels Bohr, Max Born, and Werner Heisenberg. Among the other notable figures was Erwin Schrödinger, who took Einstein’s quantum theory in a direction that Einstein did not fully endorse during the 1920s. Despite this, Einstein’s legacy remains an essential pillar of modern physics and continues to inspire new generations of scientists and researchers.
“Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That’s relativity.”
Albert Einstein’s simple explanation of relativity to his secretary.
When Did Albert Einstein Develop the Theory of Relativity?
Albert Einstein’s most renowned contribution to physics began with his formulation of “special relativity” in 1905. He further expanded on this theory in 1915 by introducing “general relativity,” which encompassed the concept of “acceleration due to gravity.”
Einstein’s theories have brought about a significant revolution in our comprehension of space and time since Isaac Newton‘s establishment of the laws of motion and gravity in the 17th century. In general relativity, the concept of the mysterious “ether substance” that fills space, as well as the notion of “the impact of gravity,” is discarded. Instead, the cosmos is viewed as a space-time continuum, where matter influences the bending of space, and space dictates the movement of matter.
Interestingly, while working as a full-time patent officer in Switzerland, Albert Einstein developed his special theory of relativity. According to Einstein himself in 1952, the time between conceiving his ideas in May-June 1905 and composing his essay “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” was just five or six weeks. However, attributing this short duration as the sole starting point for his theories would be misleading, as the foundational arguments and building blocks likely took years to develop and mature.
Albert Einstein’s Childhood
Albert Einstein’s exceptional intellectual ability cannot be solely attributed to his ancestry. His father, Hermann Einstein, worked as an average businessman and faced challenges in the field of electrical engineering. His mother, Pauline Einstein, while skilled at playing the piano, did not exhibit exceptional intellectual aptitude. Her affluent family ran a successful grain firm. Although both branches of his family were Jewish, they were not Orthodox Jews and did not engage in the study of the Torah, as they were not familiar with Hebrew.
In the 1920s, Einstein became a Zionist, advocating for the establishment of a Jewish homeland. However, later in life, he expressed regret over this decision. Einstein’s remarkable intellectual accomplishments were the result of his own talents, curiosity, and dedication to scientific pursuits, rather than any particular influence from his family’s background or religious affiliation.
When reviewing Einstein’s childhood, there were initially few indications of his intellect. He was born in Ulm, Württemberg, which was part of the German Empire at that time, and he was the first child in a two-child household. As a baby, he did not speak, which caused concern for his family, leading them to seek medical advice to understand the reason behind his silence. It was only when his sister Maja Einstein was born in 1881, when Einstein was about two years old, that he began attempting to communicate.
He asked about the wheels of his new toy, seemingly trying to form whole sentences. At first, he moved his lips and carefully weighed his words in his thoughts before speaking them aloud. This behavior continued until he was about seven years old and even beyond. The household maid was skeptical about his intellectual abilities, suspecting that he might be mentally impaired. However, as history would later show, Albert Einstein’s true brilliance emerged in his later years as he made groundbreaking contributions to science and reshaped our understanding of the universe.
Indeed, Albert Einstein was not a perfect student, but he demonstrated remarkable academic achievements during his time at schools in Germany and Switzerland, as well as at the University of Zurich. Despite his academic excellence, he did not have a liking for the traditional school environment. Later in life, he strongly opposed Germany’s formal education system, particularly the aspects that reflected the conventional Prussian military culture, such as games and physical education.
With the rise of the Nazi regime in the early 1930s, Einstein fled from Germany and sought refuge in the United States. There, he continued his scientific work and became renowned for his post-war anti-nuclear weapon campaign, advocating for peace and disarmament. Through his activism, he made his objectives clear to the rest of the world and established himself as a prominent figure in the pursuit of a safer and more peaceful world.
Albert Einstein’s strong inclination for self-learning undoubtedly played a significant role in his challenges at school. From an early age, he exhibited curiosity and began reading mathematics and science books out of his own interest. Even during his time at the Zurich school, he explored various fields of study, including the latest scientific publications. Throughout his life, Einstein never read a book solely because it was considered a classic; he only delved into books that piqued his curiosity and interest.
Similarly, Sir Isaac Newton was also an eclectic reader. Newton’s vast knowledge and discoveries were not the result of following established norms or reading many famous works of his time or from the past. Like Einstein, he pursued his own intellectual curiosity and explored topics that captivated his mind, leading to his groundbreaking contributions to science.
Both Einstein and Newton exemplify the power of individual curiosity and self-directed learning in making groundbreaking discoveries and contributions to the field of science. Their pursuit of knowledge based on genuine interest has left an enduring impact on our understanding of the universe.
How Did Albert Einstein Explain Relativity?
When Albert Einstein was 16 in 1895-96, he began to think about objects, space, and time. Based on Newton’s laws and James Clerk Maxwell’s electromagnetism equations, he reached the culmination of his work by releasing the special relativity equations in 1905 and the general relativity equations in 1915. He did this not by disagreeing with Newton or Maxwell, but by putting their ideas into a bigger picture, like putting together country maps to make a world map.
Einstein created a new point of view. He argued that mechanical rules, and even all scientific laws in the physical universe, should be the same for all observers, whether they were moving or not. In the introduction of his book ‘Über die spezielle und die allgemeine Relativitätstheorie’ (the Special and General Theory of Relativity) intended for general audiences in 1916, Albert Einstein presents a simple but profound discovery.
Consider sitting at the window of a carriage that travels uniformly—at a constant speed that never accelerates or decelerates—and letting a stone fall simply by opening your hand. If you do not account for air resistance, you will see that the stone fell in a straight line even if you are moving. However, a pedestrian standing near the tracks can see the stone falling, drawing a parabola.
Albert Einstein wonders which of these observed trajectories is the “truth”: the straight line or the parabola. Both answers are accurate. The “truth” in this case is founded on the reference object to which the observer is connected—in geometric words, the coordinate system. Is the observer on the train or on the ground? Furthermore, unlike in classical physics, there is no absolute reference frame for the cosmos in which velocity can be measured approximately. For Newton, this frame of reference was “God,” and for Maxwell, it was “ether.”
However, if the initial proposition for the immutability of natural laws was true, it should have been true not only for moving objects but also for electricity, magnetism, and light. In 1905, Maxwell’s electromagnetic wave was known to be moving at a steady speed of about 300,000 kilometers (about 186,000 miles) per second in a stationary ether. This was producing a major issue. Einstein was willing to abandon the idea of ether or aether, which had never satisfied him. However, the constant speed of light was a different problem.”
Albert Einstein and the Limits of Light
Albert Einstein had been thinking about what would happen when he chased a beam of light and reached it. In 1905, he made the following conclusion:
If I pursue a beam of light with the velocity c (velocity of light in a vacuum), I should observe such a beam of light as an electromagnetic field at rest though spatially oscillating. There seems to be no such thing, however, neither on the basis of experience nor according to Maxwell’s equations.
Albert Einstein
It is impossible to attempt to reach the speed of light, which would be like watching a chase scene in a movie by freezing the image: light is only there while it moves, just as the frames of the chase scene move. Albert Einstein thought that if we could travel faster than the speed of light, we could run away from a light signal while capturing previous light signals.
As a result, our eyes must initially detect the most recent light signal before progressively detecting older signals. As a result, Einstein summarized the situation and claimed that exceeding the speed of light is impossible:
“We should catch them in a reverse order to that in which they were sent, and the train of happenings on our Earth would appear like a film shown backwards, beginning with the happy ending.”
Albert Einstein
Following that, Einstein made a daring second claim: the speed of light is the same in all coordinate systems. It is not affected by the movement of a source or sensor, unlike the train example. The light beam will always appear to move away at the speed of light, no matter how quickly a hypothetical vehicle chasing it moves.
Einstein finally realized that for this to be valid, time must be relative, not absolute like space. In order for his first proposition about the “theory of invariance” to be compatible with the second proposition about the constant velocity of light, Newton’s “unproven hypothesis” of “classical” mechanics had to be abandoned. The first one to abandon is “the time interval between the two events is independent of the state of the reference object’s motion.” Thus, time passes at a different speed according to the person chasing the light wave. As the person’s vehicle accelerates, its time will slow down and thus cover less distance (because the distance traveled is equal to the time multiplied by the speed).
This required abandoning the idea that there is a universal quantity called time that all clocks measure. Instead, everyone would have his own personal time.
Relativity, in the words of Stephen Hawking.
In the context of space, there is a distinction between the person chasing the light and the light wave. As the person goes faster, the space contracts, and thus the person travels less. According to Albert Einstein’s relativity equations, the rate at which a person approaching the speed of light travels in a vehicle extends and contracts the time and space of an outside observer at the same rate.
Just as the train passenger who lets the stone fall from a uniformly moving train sees that the stone falls not by following a curve but by following a straight line, the person chasing the light wave does not perceive that his time is slowing or his body is contracting; only the external observer sees these effects. Everything in the vehicle is normal for the moving person. Because the person’s brain and body are affected by this speed in the same way. The brain thinks and ages slower, and its retina contracts at the same rate as the vehicle; therefore, the brain does not perceive the difference in the size of the vehicle or body.
Newton’s System Weakens
When these concepts are initially heard, they are uncommon since humans do not travel even at a very tiny proportion of the speed of light. As a result, we don’t have any relativity observations or experiences involving time slowing or space shrinking. Newton’s rules seem to regulate all human motions. These laws make no mention of the speed of light. Einstein had to work hard to make the notion of relativity stick, which is so far outside our everyday experience.
Einstein was aware of the similar ideas of Danish physicist Hendrik Lorentz and his Irish colleague George FitzGerald in the 1890s, who adopted a different theory of space contraction. These scientists believed in the concept of ether, which was rejected by Einstein. Obviously, the abandonment of the idea of an absolute time required a much greater leap in imagination. In 1902, Henri Poincare mentioned the concept of simultaneity in his book La Science et l’Hypothèse (which Einstein read at the time it was published). Poincare wrote:
We have not a direct intuition of simultaneity, nor of the equality of two durations. If we think we have this intuition, this is an illusion.
Henri Poincare, La Science et l’Hypothèse
In fact, Poincare was quite close to Einstein’s theory of relativity. However, it seems that he was unable to proceed far enough since his results were too disturbing for Newtonian physics. Simultaneity is an ongoing illusion for us on Earth. We’re accustomed to it; we don’t discriminate between what is seen and what occurs at the same time. As a result, the distinction between time and local time becomes murky. Einstein, who was a generation younger than Poincare and had nothing to lose since he was unknown in 1905, could afford to be radical in his views on time.
E=mc2 and the Atomic Bomb
When Albert Einstein arrived in the United States in 1933 to join the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, most scientists had already accepted special relativity—also known for the famous E=mc^2 formula, which relates the speed of energy, mass, and light. Regrettably, this theory was also utilized in the calculations for the atomic bomb in 1945. However, it took a considerable amount of time for general relativity, introduced in 1915, to gain full acceptance.
In his later years, from 1925 until his death in Princeton in 1955, Einstein obsessively pursued a unified theory of gravity and electromagnetism, but it appears that this endeavor may have been futile. With the advent of more precise experimental testing in both space and on Earth, Einstein’s theory of relativity, along with Newton’s and Maxwell’s equations, now forms the foundation of physics. Today, Einstein’s once arcane realm of ideas has become widely understood and acknowledged.
Albert Einstein Quotes
- Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.
- Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
- I am by heritage a Jew, by citizenship a Swiss, and by makeup a human being, and only a human being, without any special attachment to any state or national entity whatsoever.
- A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.
- Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.
- I would teach peace rather than war. I would inculcate love rather than hate.
- Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.
- Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.
- All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.
- I believe in intuitions and inspirations. I sometimes feel that I am right. I do not know that I am.
- Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.
Albert Einstein at a Glance
What was Albert Einstein’s contribution to the field of physics?
His most famous contribution, the theory of relativity, introduced the concept of spacetime. Einstein also made contributions to the development of quantum mechanics and the study of Brownian motion.
How did Albert Einstein’s upbringing shape his scientific work?
He grew up in a secular Jewish family in Germany and received an education in math and science. As a young man, he was exposed to the work of philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and Ernst Mach, who influenced his views on the nature of reality. Later, his experiences as a patent clerk in Switzerland gave him the time and freedom to develop his ideas about relativity.
What was the significance of the famous equation E=mc²?
The equation E=mc² expresses the relationship between mass and energy. It was first proposed by Albert Einstein in 1905, as part of his special theory of relativity. The equation showed that mass and energy are interchangeable, and it has had important implications for nuclear physics and energy generation.
How did Albert Einstein’s political beliefs influence his scientific work?
He was a political activist and pacifist. He was an outspoken critic of war and militarism, and his experiences living through World War I and witnessing the rise of Nazi Germany led him to advocate for internationalism and cooperation among nations. He also believed that science had a moral responsibility to promote social justice and equality.
How did Albert Einstein die?
Albert Einstein died on April 18, 1955, at the age of 76. He had been in declining health for several years, suffering from a variety of ailments including heart problems, digestive issues, and internal bleeding.
On the day of his death, Einstein experienced an abdominal aortic aneurysm, which is a bulge in the wall of the aorta that ruptured and caused severe internal bleeding. He was rushed to the hospital but refused surgery, stating that he had lived his life and was ready to go.
Einstein’s condition quickly worsened, and he fell into a coma. He passed away early the next morning, surrounded by his family and close friends.
References
- Featured Image: Derived from Wikimedia Commons.
- Wolfram Research – Biography of Albert Einstein
- Nobel Prize – Biography of Albert Einstein
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