- 4489
- EINSTEIN - how
did he get so smart? - Albert Einstein was arguably the most
famous scientist of the 20th century. Most people are familiar with his iconic
E=mc^2 equation, but his life and work encompassed so much more than that. For
instance, the brilliant physicist actually won the Nobel Prize for very
different work. From his humble beginnings as a patent clerk to the offer to
run a small country (that he turned down).
---------------------------------------
------------------------------------- 4489
- EINSTEIN - how
did he get so smart?
-
- Albert Einstein was much more than a
scientific genius. From his political beliefs to his hatred of socks.
-
- Einstein discovered that the universe has a
"speed limit." His special
theory of relativity, which explains the relationship between mass, time and
space, suggests that as an object approaches the speed of light, its mass and
energy become infinite. That means that
it's impossible for an object to travel faster than light.
-
- He argued that space and time are
interwoven. While Einstein didn't
invent the concept of space-time, which was first proposed by German
mathematician Hermann Minkowski, his special theory of relativity showed that
space and time grow and shrink relative to one another in order to keep the
speed of light constant for the observer.
-
- Based on his theory, when we travel through
space, time moves a tiny bit slower. At incredible speeds, like the speed of
light, “time stands still”.
-
- The photoelectric effect is the observation
that metal plates eject electrons when hit by beams of high-energy light. The
photoelectric effect can't be explained by classical physics, which saw light
as a wave. Einstein proposed that we view light as both a particle and a wave
with the frequency of the wave determining the energy of the particle and vice
versa.
-
- Einstein transformed the way physicists
view light. Before Einstein's special
theory of relativity, physicists thought that light traveled through a
substance called "the luminiferous ether." Throughout the late 19th
century, scientists ran experiments to try to prove its existence.
-
- Beginning at age 5, Einstein became
captivated by the invisible forces that moved the needle of his compass. That
led to a lifelong quest to explain those invisible forces. At the age of 12, he taught himself
geometry. To study, he read out of a
textbook, which he dubbed his "holy geometry book" and "second
miracle" (the first being his compass needle).
-
- He wasn't well-liked by his
teachers. One of the instructors at the
Luitpold-Gymnasium in Munich, where Einstein received much of his early
education, told the young Einstein that nothing good would ever come of his
life.
-
- At 5 years old, his mother signed him up for
music lessons. At first, he didn't enjoy playing the violin at all. But, after discovering Mozart, he developed
a love for the hobby and played into his old age.
-
- He wrote his first scientific paper at the
age of 16. Einstein writing by
hand. It was titled "On the
Investigation of the State of the Ether in a Magnetic Field," the essay
asked how magnetic fields impact "ether," the theoretical substance
that at the time was believed to transmit electromagnetic waves.
-
- After university, Einstein was rejected from
every academic position he applied for.
There was a row of folders at
the a patent office, with a label tab that reads "new patent
applications" Eventually, he
settled for a job evaluating patent claims for the Swiss government. He
described the job, which gave him the time and energy to focus on solving the
physics problems that underlie our world, as "a kind of salvation."
-
- He helped convince the physics world that
atoms exist. Einstein was interested in the problem of “Brownian motion”, the
observation that if you put tiny objects (like pollen) in water, they appear to
jump around erratically. Einstein proposed that invisible particles were
colliding with the pollen, causing it to move, and came up with a formula
describing this phenomenon.
-
- In 1908, French physicist Jean Baptiste
Perrin tested and confirmed Einstein's theory, swaying the physics world to
accept the existence of atoms.
-
- Einstein was a pacifist. At 16, he left Germany to escape mandatory
military service. Later, he was one of only four German intellectuals to openly
declare their opposition to German participation in World War I, calling
nationalism "the measles of the human race."
-
- Einstein's theories of relativity
challenged the view that the universe was static. His equations predicted a dynamic universe,
one that was expanding or contracting. Flummoxed by this finding, Einstein
assumed there was a flaw in his equations and introduced a "cosmological
constant" which allowed for a universe that didn't change size. When Edwin
Hubble confirmed that the universe is, indeed, expanding, Einstein called the
cosmological constant "his greatest mistake."
-
- In 1905, dubbed his "year of
miracles," Einstein published his explanation of the photoelectric effect,
his theory on Brownian motion, and two papers on his general theory of
relativity.
-
- He was friends with Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin even invited Einstein and his wife,
Elsa Einstein, as his guests of honor at the premier of his 1931 film
"City Lights." There, Chaplin famously told Einstein: "The
people applaud me because everybody understands me, and they applaud you
because no one understands you."
-
- Einstein believed in God. However, he didn't believe in a personal god
that answered prayers. Instead, he thought that God revealed himself through
the "harmony" of the universe. "He does not play
dice," he famously wrote.
-
- Einstein was a target for the Nazis. They sponsored conferences and book burnings
against Einstein and labeled his theories "Jewish physics." In 1933,
Einstein fled Germany to escape Nazi death threats, settling first in Britain
and then eventually in Princeton, New Jersey.
-
- The equation E = mc2 provided the
theoretical basis for the weapon's potential, but didn't explain how to build
one. At the start of World War II, he
wrote to then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt, warning of possible German
nuclear weapons research.
-
- He urged the president to initiate
development of an atomic bomb, but later regretted doing so. In an interview
with Newsweek, he said: "Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in
developing an atomic bomb, I would have done nothing."
-
- After the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
he formed the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, an organization that
educated Americans about the dangers of atomic weapons.
-
- Einstein was a member of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He saw parallels between the experience of
Black Americans and his experience as a Jew living in Nazi Germany. In a 1946 commencement speech delivered at
the historically black college Lincoln University, Einstein decried segregation
and called it "a disease of white people,".
-
- The FBI kept a 1,400-page dossier on
Einstein. His pacifist stance and
left-leaning politics made him suspicious in the eyes of the agency as a
potentially "extreme radical".
This was especially true during the McCarthy era, when many people were
accused of communism or blacklisted from work.
-
- Einstein was asked to be the president of
Israel. However, when he was offered
the position in 1952, he was already near the end of his life. Due to his poor
health and lack of experience "dealing properly with people," he
declined.
-
- He did not believe that black holes could
exist. In a 1939 article, he laid out a
series of arguments trying to prove that black holes, objects with such high
gravity that even light can't escape them, are impossible. Ironically, It's
Einstein's general theory of relativity that shows us black holes do, in fact,
exist.
-
- He did believe in the possibility of
wormholes. In a 1935 paper published in
the journal Physics Reviews, Einstein and physicist Nathan Rosen proposed that
near objects of enormous mass, space-time might curve inward like a rubber
tube, creating a tunnel between two different regions. If they exist, these
objects would enable travel across vast distances of time and space.
-
- Einstein didn't wear socks. Black holes weren't the only holes this
physicist vehemently disagreed with. Because socks invariably develop holes, he
disliked them to such an extent that he refused to wear them.
-
- After his death in 1955, pathologist Thomas
Harvey dissected and stole Einstein's brain during an autopsy. Harvey, who
wanted to discover the anatomical secrets of genius, eventually received
permission from Einstein's son to use the brain for scientific research.
-
- The human brain's wrinkled surface gives it
a much larger surface area than a smooth brain and is an important part of
advanced cognition. Einstein's brain had extra folding in its gray matter, the
site of conscious thinking, especially in the frontal lobe, where abstract
thought and planning occurs.
-
- He loved sailing. However, the physicist was terrible at it,
so terrible, in fact, that his neighbors frequently had to rescue him when is
boat invariably capsized.
-
- His birthday is Pi Day. March 14 is a special date because written
numerically, it matches the first three digits of mathematical constant pi:
3.14. However, that's not the only reason it's significant. It's also the
birthday of Einstein, who was born in 1879.
-
- Einstein invented a refrigerator. The contraption, which he developed alongside
colleague Leo Szilard, didn't require motors or coolant. Instead, it used
boiling butane to suck energy from a compartment, lowering the temperature
inside.
-
- Einstein's ultimate goal was to describe the
workings of the entire universe from subatomic particles to the farthest
reaches of space in one theory. He
called the concept "The Grand Unified Theory." He never realized this
dream, but physicists are still working to find it.
-
-
May 22, 2024 EINSTEIN
- how did he get so smart? 4489
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