Albert Einstein
USABiography of Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein was a theoretical physicist and one of the founders of modern theoretical physics. He is best known as the author of the theory of relativity. Einstein also made significant contributions to the development of quantum mechanics, statistical physics, and cosmology. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921 for his explanation of the photoelectric effect.
Einstein was born on March 14, 1879, in Ulm, in the Kingdom of Württemberg in the German Empire. His ancestors had settled in Swabia about 300 years ago, and he maintained a soft southern German accent throughout his life, even when speaking English. He attended a Catholic elementary school in Ulm and later moved with his family to Munich, where he attended high school. Although he attended school, he preferred independent study. He was particularly drawn to geometry and popular science books, and soon surpassed his peers in the exact sciences. By the age of 16, Einstein had mastered the basics of mathematics, including differential and integral calculus.
In 1895, without completing high school, Einstein went to Zurich, where the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School, which had a high reputation, was located. After failing exams in modern languages and history, he entered the senior class of the Aargau Cantonal School. After graduating from school in 1896, Einstein became a student at the Zurich Polytechnic. One of his teachers there was the excellent mathematician Hermann Minkowski, who later gave the special theory of relativity a complete mathematical form. However, Einstein spent most of his time working in the physics laboratory and reading classical works by Gustav Kirchhoff, James Clerk Maxwell, Hermann von Helmholtz, and others.
After passing his final exam in 1900, Einstein spent two years without a permanent job. He briefly taught physics in Schaffhausen, gave private lessons, and then, on the recommendation of friends, obtained a position as a technical expert at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. He worked at this "secular monastery" for 7 years (1902-1907) and considered it the happiest and most productive period of his life.
In 1905, Einstein's works were published in the journal "Annalen der Physik," which brought him worldwide fame. The special theory of relativity forever changed our understanding of space and time. His work on the photoelectric effect and Brownian motion gave atoms and quanta a concrete reality. The famous equation E = mc^2 showed that mass is a form of energy.
Einstein's research on molecular physics, which began in 1902, focused on the statistical description of the motion of atoms and molecules and the relationship between motion and heat. In his work, Einstein expanded on the results previously obtained by Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann and American physicist Josiah Gibbs. He focused on Brownian motion, and in his article "On the Movement of Small Particles Suspended in a Resting Liquid Required by the Molecular-Kinetic Theory of Heat" (1905), he used statistical methods to show a quantitative relationship between the speed of movement of suspended particles, their size, and the viscosity of liquids. Einstein gave a complete mathematical form to the statistical explanation of this phenomenon previously presented by Polish physicist Marian Smoluchowski. Einstein's theory of Brownian motion was fully confirmed by the experiments of French physicist Jean Perrin in 1908.
Einstein's works in molecular physics demonstrated the validity of the idea that heat is a form of energy associated with the disordered motion of molecules. At the same time, they confirmed the atomic hypothesis. Einstein's method of determining the sizes of molecules and his formula for Brownian motion allowed for the determination of the number of molecules. If his work on the theory of Brownian motion continued and logically completed previous work in the field of molecular physics, his work on the theory of light, which was also based on a previous discovery, was truly revolutionary.
In 1900, Einstein relied on Max Planck's hypothesis of the quantization of energy of a material oscillator. However, Einstein went further and postulated the quantization of light itself, considering it as a stream of light quanta or photons (the photon theory of light). This provided a simple explanation for the photoelectric effect - the ejection of electrons from metal by light rays, a phenomenon discovered by Heinrich Hertz in 1886 that could not be explained within the framework of the wave theory of light. Nine years later, Einstein's interpretation was confirmed by the research of American physicist Robert Millikan, and in 1923, the reality of photons became evident with the discovery of the Compton effect (the scattering of X-rays by electrons weakly bound to atoms).
Einstein's hypothesis of light quanta marked a whole epoch in purely scientific terms. Without it, Niels Bohr's famous model of the atom (1913) and Louis de Broglie's brilliant hypothesis of "matter waves" (early 1920s) could not have emerged. In the same year, 1905, Einstein published his work "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies," in which he presented the special theory of relativity. This theory generalized Newton's laws of motion and reduced to them at low speeds (v << c).
Einstein's discoveries and theories have revolutionized our understanding of the fundamental principles of physics and have had a lasting impact on scientific research and technological advancements. His contributions to the fields of theoretical physics and cosmology continue to inspire and influence scientists to this day.
