2. Albert Einstein
• Albert Einstein rewrote the laws of
nature. He completely changed the
way we understand the behavior of
things as basic as light, gravity, and
time.
3. His Beginnings
• Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879 in Ulm, Germany. He
was not talkative in his childhood, and until the age of three he
hardly talked at all. He spent his teenage years in Munich, where his
family had an electric equipment business. As a teenager, he was
interested in nature and showed a high level of ability in
mathematics and physics.
• Einstein loved to be creative and innovative. He loathed the
uncreative spirit in his school at Munich. His family’s business failed
when he was aged 15, and they moved to Milan, Italy. Aged 16, he
moved to Switzerland, where he finished high school.
• In 1896 he enrolled for a science degree at the Swiss Federal
Institute of Technology in Zurich. He didn’t like the teaching
methods there, so he bunked classes to carry out experiments in
the physics laboratory or play his violin. With the help of his
classmates’ notes, he passed his exams; he graduated in 1900.
4. • Einstein was not considered a good student by his teachers,
and they refused to recommend him for further
employment.
• While studying at the Polytechnic, Einstein learned about
one of the biggest problems of the day that was baffling
physicists. This was how to marry together Isaac
Newton’s laws of motion with James Clerk Maxwell’s
equations of electromagnetism. He thought a lot about this
problem.
• In 1902 he obtained the post of an examiner in the Swiss
Federal patent office. In 1903 he wedded his former
classmate Mileva Maric. He had two sons with her but they
later divorced. After some years Einstein married Elsa
Loewenthal.
5. Quick Guide to Albert Einstein’s
Scientific Achievements
Albert Einstein:
• provided powerful evidence that atoms and molecules
actually exist, through his analysis of Brownian motion.
• explained the photoelectric effect, proposing that light
comes in bundles. Bundles of light (he called them quanta)
with the correct amount of energy can eject electrons from
metals.
• proved that everyone, whatever speed we move at,
measures the speed of light to be 300 million meters per
second in a vacuum. This led to the strange new reality that
time passes more slowly for people traveling at very high
speeds compared with people moving more slowly.
6. • discovered the hugely important and iconic equation E = mc2, which
shows that energy and matter can be converted into one another.
• rewrote the law of gravitation, which had been unchallenged
since Isaac Newton published it in 1687. In his General Theory of
Relativity, Einstein:
» showed that matter causes space to curve, which produces gravity.
» showed that light follows the path mapped out by the gravitational
curve of space.
» showed that time passes more slowly when gravity becomes very
strong.
• became the 20th century’s most famous scientist when the strange
predictions he made in his General Theory of Relativity were
verified by scientific observations.
• spent his later years trying to find equations to unite quantum
physics with general relativity. This was an incredibly hard task, and
it has still not been achieved.
