Albert Einstein Biography
In the seventeenth century, simplicity and elegance with which Isaac Newton had failed to explain the laws governing the movement of bodies and of the stars, unifying celestial and terrestrial physics, so much dazzled his contemporaries who came to be considered mechanical completed. In the late nineteenth century, however, it was unavoidable and the relevance of some phenomena that classical physics could not explain. Albert Einstein corresponded to overcome these shortcomings by creating a new paradigm: the theory of relativity, the starting point of modern physics.
In the seventeenth century, simplicity and elegance with which Isaac Newton had failed to explain the laws governing the movement of bodies and of the stars, unifying celestial and terrestrial physics, so much dazzled his contemporaries who came to be considered mechanical completed. In the late nineteenth century, however, it was unavoidable and the relevance of some phenomena that classical physics could not explain. Albert Einstein corresponded to overcome these shortcomings by creating a new paradigm: the theory of relativity, the starting point of modern physics.
While common sense entirely from the explanatory model, relativity is among those advances in the early twentieth century, they would lead to divorce between ordinary people and an increasingly specialized and unintelligible science. However, in life and physical or posthumously, even the most surprising and incomprehensible aspects of relativity would end up being confirmed. No wonder, then, that Albert Einstein is one of the most famous and admired in the history of science characters: know that many barely conceivable are certain ideas (eg, the mass of a body increases with speed) leaves choice but to surrender to his genius.
A poor student
Albert Einstein was born in the Bavarian city of Ulm on March 14, 1879. He was the eldest son of Hermann Einstein and Pauline Koch, both Jews whose families came from Swabia. The following year they moved to Munich, where his father was established, along with his brother Jakob, as a trader in electrotechnical innovations of the time.
Little Albert was a quiet, self-absorbed child, and had a slow intellectual development. Einstein himself attributed to the fact that slowly have been the only person to elaborate a theory of relativity as "a normal adult is not disturbed by the problems posed by space and time, believing that everything to know about known since early childhood. I, however, have had such a slow development that have not begun to wonder questions about space and time to which I have been greater. "
In 1894, the economic difficulties that the family did (increased from 1881 with the birth of a daughter, Maya) moved to Milan; Einstein remained in Munich to finish high school, meeting with parents the following year. In the fall of 1896 he began his studies at the Technische Hochschule Zurich Eidgenossische, where he was student of the mathematician Hermann Minkowski, who later generalized the four-dimensional formalism introduced by the theories of his former student.
The June 23, 1902, Albert Einstein began to serve in the Confederal Bureau of Intellectual Property in Bern, where he worked until 1909. In 1903 he married Mileva Maric, a former fellow student in Zurich, with whom he had two children Hans Albert and Eduard, born respectively in 1904 and 1910. In 1919 they divorced and remarried Einstein with his cousin Elsa.
Relativity
In 1905, he published five papers in Annalen der Physik, the first of them earned his doctorate from the University of Zurich, and the remaining four would eventually impose a radical change in the image that science offers the universe. Of these four, the first provided a theoretical explanation, in statistical terms, the Brownian motion, and the second was an interpretation of the photoelectric effect based on the assumption that light is composed of individual quanta, later called photons. The remaining two papers laid the foundations of the restricted theory of relativity, establishing equivalence between the energy E of a certain amount of matter and its mass m in terms of the famous equation E = mc, where c is the speed of light , assumed constant.
The effort of Einstein immediately placed him among the most eminent of European physicists, but the public recognition of the true extent of his theories came quickly; the Nobel Prize in Physics, which he received in 1921, was granted exclusively "for his work on Brownian motion and its interpretation of the photoelectric effect." In 1909 he began his career as a university lecturer in Zurich, moving to Prague and back again to Zurich in 1912 to become a professor of the Polytechnic, where he had done his studies.
In 1914 he went to Berlin as a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. The outbreak of the First World War forced him to leave his family (then vacation in Switzerland), who did not return to meet him. Against the general feeling of the Berlin academic community, Einstein said that time openly antiwar, influenced their attitudes by the pacifist teachings of Romain Rolland.
In scientific terms, its activity focused, between 1914 and 1916, in improving the general theory of relativity, based on the assumption that gravity is not a force but a field created by the presence of a mass in the space-time continuum. Confirmation of its forecasts came in 1919, when photographed a solar eclipse on May 29; The Times introduced him as the new Newton and his international fame grew, forcing him to multiply their outreach conferences worldwide and popularizing the image of third class commuter rail, with a violin case under his arm.
Toward a unifying theory
Over the next decade, Einstein focused his efforts on finding a mathematical relationship between electromagnetism and gravitational pull, determined to move towards that, for him, should be the ultimate goal of physics: discover the common law that supposedly had govern the behavior of all objects in the universe, from subatomic particles to the stellar bodies, and group them into a single theory "unified field". Such research, which occupied the rest of his life, was unsuccessful and ended was destined to bring estrangement from the rest of the scientific community. From 1933, with Hitler's accession to power, his loneliness was compounded by the need to give up German citizenship and moved to the United States; Einstein spent the last twenty years of his life at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (New Jersey), city where he died on April 18, 1955.
Einstein once said that politics had a temporary value, while a value equation for eternity. In the last years of his life, bitterness not find the formula to reveal the secret of world unity was accentuated by the need he felt to dramatically intervene in the political sphere. In 1939, at the behest of Paul physicists Leo Szilard and Wigner, and convinced of the possibility that the Germans were able to make an atomic bomb, he addressed to President Roosevelt urging him to undertake a program of research on atomic energy.
After the explosions of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Einstein joined scientists seeking ways to prevent future use of the pump and proposed the formation of a world government from the embryo formed by the United Nations. But his proposals towards humanity avoid threats of individual and collective destruction, made on behalf of a unique amalgam of science, religion and socialism, received a comparable political rejection of respectful criticism raised among scientists successive versions of the idea of a unified field.
Albert Einstein remains a mythic figure of our time; more, even, of what came to be in life, if you consider that this picture of him in displaying an unusual gesture of mockery (sticking out his tongue in a comic and irreverent expression) has been raised to the dignity of icon home after being converted into a so common as the idols of the song and the stars of Hollywood poster. However, not his scientific genius and his human size that best explain it as myth, but perhaps the accumulation of paradoxes contained in his own biography, accented with historical perspective. The champion of pacifism Einstein is remembered still as the "father of the bomb"; and still it shows current principle that "everything is relative" precisely him, who fought bitterly against the possibility of knowing reality is attributed to her meant playing blind man's buff.
Extracted from site: BiografĂas y Vidas
Extracted from site: BiografĂas y Vidas
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