Albert Einstein (1879-1955)


Albert Einstein (Courtesy of the Routledge Online)
One of the greatest physicists of all time, in 1905 he published four brilliant papers in the Annalen der Physik which were to transform twentieth-century scientific thought. He established the special theory of relativity, predicted the equivalence of mass (m) and energy (e) according to the equation e = mc2, where (c) represents the velocity of light; he created the theory of Brownian motion and founded the photon theory of light (photoelectric effect) for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1921.
**In 1916 Einstein published "Relativity, the Special and the General Theory: A Popular Exposition", which profoundly modified the simple concepts of space and time on which Newtonian mechanics had been based. His prediction of the deflection of light by the gravitational field of the sun was borne out by a British team of scientists at the time of the solar eclipse in 1919, making Einstein a household name.
** Throughout the Weimar years he was lionized, especially abroad, though in Germany not only his work but also his pacifist politics aroused violent animosity in extreme right-wing circles. Alarmed at the prospect that Hitler's Germany might acquire an atomic bomb after two German physicists had discovered the fusion of uranium, Einstein signed a letter to President Roosevelt in August 1939 which sparked off the Manhattan project. It was one of the great ironies of his career that the pacifist Einstein, through this action, should have helped initiate the era of nuclear weapons to whose use he was completely opposed.
** The best-known refugee from Nazism and one of its most adamant critics, Einstein died in Princeton on 18 April 1955.



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