Albert Einstein

We cannot despair of humanity, since we ourselves are human beings.

Albert Einstein

The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.

Albert Einstein

Only one who devotes himself to a cause with his whole strength and soul can be a true master. For this reason mastery demands all of a person.

Albert Einstein

Everyone should be respected as an individual, but no one idolized.

Albert Einstein

As our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it.

Albert Einstein

Human beings must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.

Albert Einstein

Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them.

Albert Einstein

Any fool can know. The point is to understand.

Albert Einstein

A person starts to live when he can live outside himself.

Albert Einstein

It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.

Albert Einstein

It is a scale of proportions which makes the bad difficult and the good easy.

Albert Einstein

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds...

Albert Einstein

If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.

Albert Einstein

Yes, we have to divide up our time like that, between our politics and our equations. But to me our equations are far more important, for politics are only a matter of present concern. A mathematical equation stands forever.

Albert Einstein

What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world.

Albert Einstein

What does a fish know about the water in which it swims all its life?

Albert Einstein

One of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires.

The end of a GENIUS

1879: Albert Einstein is born to Hermann Einstein (a featherbed
salesman) and his wife Pauline in Ulm, Germany.

1884: Around this time, Albert receives his first compass,
beginning his quest to investigate the natural world.

1889: At age 10, Albert sets into a program of self education and
reads as much about science as he can.

1894: The Einsteins move from Munich to Pavia, Italy and
Albert, 15, stays on in Munich to finish the school year. Albert
lasts only a term on his own and follows his family to Pavia

1895: Albert attempts to skip high school by taking an entrance
exam to the Swiss Polytechnic, a top technical university, but he
fails the arts portion. His family sends him to the Swiss town of
Aarau to finish high school.

1896: Albert graduates from high school at the age of 17 and
enrolls at the ETH (the Federal Polytechnic) in Zurich.

1898: Albert falls in love with Mileva Maric, a Hungarian
classmate at the ETH.

1900: Albert graduates from the ETH.

1901: Albert becomes a Swiss citizen. Unemployed, he searches
for work. He and Mileva meet in northern Italy for a tryst.
Mileva becomes pregnant. In the fall, Albert finds work in
Schaffhausen, Switzerland as a tutor. Mileva, visibly pregnant,
moves to Stein Am Rhein, three miles upriver. Mileva then moves
to Hungary to give birth to their baby at her parent's home.
Albert moves to Bern.

1902: In January, Mileva gives birth to their daughter, Lieserl,
whom they eventually put up for adoption. She reportedly
becomes ill and then all record of her disappears. Albert takes a
job at the Swiss Patent Office. Hermann Einstein becomes ill and
dies.

1903: Albert and Mileva marry in January
1904: Mileva gives birth to their first son, Hans Albert.
1905: "Annus Mirabilis" -- Einstein's "Miracle Year": his Special
Theory of Relativity is born. June 30th, Einstein, submits his
paper, "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" to the leading
German physics journal. At age 26, he applies his theory to mass
and energy and formulates the equation e=mc2.

1906: Still living in Bern, Einstein continues as an Examiner at
the Swiss Patent Office.

1907: Einstein begins applying the laws of gravity to his Special
Theory of Relativity.

1910: Son Eduard is born.

1911: The Einsteins move to Prague where Albert is given a full
professorship at the German University there. Albert is the
youngest to attend the invitation-only Solvay Conference in
Brussels, the first world physics conference.

1912: The Einsteins move to Zurich where Albert is given a
position as a professor of Theoretical Physics at the ETH.

1913: Einstein works on his new Theory of Gravity.

1914: Einstein becomes director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute
in Berlin and professor of theoretical physics at the University of
Berlin. The family moves there in April, but Mileva and the sons
return to Zurich after 3 months. The divorce prodeedings begin.
In August, World War I begins.

1915: Einstein completes the General Theory of Relativity.
1917: Einstein collapses and, near death, falls seriously ill. He is
nursed back to health by his cousin, Elsa. He publishes his first
paper on cosmology.

1919: Albert marries Elsa. May 29, a solar eclipse proves
Einstein's General Theory of Relativity works.

1922: Is awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for 1921.

1927: Attends fifth Solvay Conference and begins developing the
foundation of quantum mechanics with Bohr.

1928: Einstein begins pursing his idea of a unified field theory.

1932: Einstein is 53 and at the height of his fame. Identified as a
Jew, he begins to feel the heat of Nazi Germany.

1933: Albert and Elsa set sail for the United States. They settle in
Princeton, New Jersey where he assumes a post at the Institute for
Advanced Study.

1936: Elsa dies after a brief illness.

1939: World War II begins. Einstein writes a famous letter to
President Franklin D. Roosevelt warning of the possibility of
Germany's building an atomic bomb and urging nuclear research.

1940: Einstein becomes an American citizen; retains Swiss
citizenship.

1949: Mileva dies.

1955: Einstein dies of heart failure on April 16.

The end of a GENIUS

Albert Einstein

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Later Life

When British eclipse expeditions in 1919 confirmed his predictions about the general theory of relativity, Einstein was bombarded by the popular press. Einstein's personal ethics also fired public imagination. Einstein, who after returning to Germany in 1914 did not reapply for German citizenship, was one of only a handful of German professors who remained a pacifist and did not support Germany's war aims. After the war, when the victorious allies sought to exclude German scientists from international meetings, Einstein--a Jew traveling with a Swiss passport--remained an acceptable German envoy. Einstein's political views as a pacifist and a Zionist pitted him against conservatives in Germany, who branded him a traitor and a defeatist. The public success accorded his theories of relativity evoked savage attacks in the 1920s by the anti-Semitic physicists Johannes Stark and Philipp Lenard, men who after 1932 tried to create a so-called Aryan physics in Germany. Just how controversial the theories of relativity remained for less flexibly minded physicists is revealed in the circumstances surrounding Einstein's reception of a Nobel Prize in 1921--awarded not for relativity but for his 1905 work on the photoelectric effect.

With the rise of fascism in Germany, Einstein moved, in 1933 to the United States and abandoned his pacifism. He reluctantly agreed that the new menace had to be put down through force of arms. In this context Einstein sent a letter, in 1939, to President Franklin D. Roosevelt that urged that the United States proceed to develop an atomic bomb before Germany did. The letter, composed by Einstein's friend Leo Szilard, was one of many exchanged between the White House and Einstein, and it contributed to Roosevelt's decision to fund what became the Manhattan Project.

As much he appeared to the public as a champion of unpopular causes, Einstein's central concerns always revolved around physics. At the age of 59, when other theoretical physicists would long since have abandoned original scientific research, Einstein and his co-workers Leopold Infeld and Banesh Hoffmann achieved a major new result in the general theory of relativity.

Until the end of his life Einstein sought a unified field theory, whereby the phenomena of gravitation and electromagnetism could be derived from one set of equations. After 1920, however, while retaining relativity as a fundamental concept, theoretical physicists focused more attention on the theory of quantum mechanics, as elaborated by Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and others, and Einstein's later thoughts went somewhat neglected for decades. This picture has changed in more recent years. Physicists are now striving to combine Einstein's relativity theory with quantum theory in a "theory of everything," by means of such highly advanced mathematical models as superstring theories.

Albert Einstein

Innovation is not the product of logical thought, even though the final product is tied to a logical structure.

General Theory of Relativity

After 1905, Einstein continued working in all three of his works in "The 1905 Papers". He made important contributions to the quantum theory, but increasingly he sought to extend the special theory of relativity to phenomena involving acceleration. The key to an elaboration emerged in 1907 with the principle of equivalence, in which gravitational acceleration was held a priori indistinguishable from acceleration caused by mechanical forces; gravitational mass was therefore identical with inertial mass. Einstein elevated this identity, which is implicit in the work of Isaac Newton, to a guiding principle in his attempts to explain both electromagnetic and gravitational acceleration according to one set of physical laws. In 1907 he proposed that if mass were equivalent to energy, then the principle of equivalence required that gravitational mass would interact with the apparent mass of electromagnetic radiation, which includes light. By 1911, Einstein was able to make preliminary predictions about how a ray of light from a distant star, passing near the Sun, would appear to be attracted, or bent slightly, in the direction of the Sun's mass. At the same time, light radiated from the Sun would interact with the Sun's mass, resulting in a slight change toward the infrared end of the Sun's optical spectrum. At this juncture Einstein also knew that any new theory of gravitation would have to account for a small but persistent anomaly in the perihelion motion of the planet Mercury.

About 1912, Einstein began a new phase of his gravitational research, with the help of his mathematician friend Marcel Grossmann, by phrasing his work in terms of the tensor calculus of Tullio Levi-Civita and Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro. The tensor calculus greatly facilitated calculations in four-dimensional space-time, a notion that Einstein had obtained from Hermann Minkowski's 1907 mathematical elaboration of Einstein's own special theory of relativity. Einstein called his new work the general theory of relativity. After a number of false starts, he published the definitive form of the general theory in late 1915. In it the gravitational field equations were covariant; that is, similar to Maxwell's equations, the field equations took the same form in all equivalent frames of reference. To their advantage from the beginning, the covariant field equations gave the observed perihelion motion of the planet Mercury. In its original form, Einstein's general relativity has been verified numerous times in the past 60 years, especially during solar-eclipse expeditions when Einstein's light-deflection prediction could be tested.

Albert Einstein

In the matter of physics, the first lessons should contain nothing but what is experimental and interesting to see. A pretty experiment is in itself often more valuable than twenty formulae extracted from our minds.

Albert Einstein

In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep.

Scientific Works - The 1905 Papers

In the first of three seminal papers that were published in 1905, Einstein examined the phenomenon discovered by Max Planck, according to which electromagnetic energy seemed to be emitted from radiating objects in quantities that were ultimately discrete. The energy of these emitted quantities, the so-called light-quanta, was directly proportional to the frequency of the radiation. This circumstance was perplexing because classical electromagnetic theory, based on Maxwell's equations and the laws of thermodynamics, had assumed that electromagnetic energy consisted of waves propagating in a hypothetical, all-pervasive medium called the luminiferous ether, and that the waves could contain any amount of energy no matter how small. Einstein used Planck's quantum hypothesis to describe visible electromagnetic radiation, or light. According to Einstein's heuristic viewpoint, light could be imagined to consist of discrete bundles of radiation. Einstein used this interpretation to explain the photoelectric effect, by which certain metals emit electrons when illuminated by light with a given frequency. Einstein's theory, and his subsequent elaboration of it, formed the basis for much of quantum mechanics.

The second of Einstein's 1905 papers proposed what is today called the special theory of relativity. At the time Einstein knew that, according to Hendrik Antoon Lorentz's theory of electrons, the mass of an electron increased as the velocity of the electron approached the velocity of light. Einstein also knew that the electron theory, based on Maxwell's equations, carried along with it the assumption of a luminiferous ether, but that attempts to detect the physical properties of the ether had not succeeded. Einstein realized that the equations describing the motion of an electron in fact could describe the nonaccelerated motion of any particle or any suitably defined rigid body. He based his new kinematics on a reinterpretation of the classical principle of relativity, that the laws of physics had to have the same form in any frame of reference. As a second fundamental hypothesis, Einstein assumed that the speed of light remained constant in all frames of reference, as required by classical Maxwellian theory. Einstein abandoned the hypothesis of the ether, for it played no role in his kinematics or in his reinterpretation of Lorentz's theory of electrons. As a consequence of his theory Einstein recovered the phenomenon of time dilatation, wherein time, analogous to length and mass, is a function of the velocity of a frame of reference. Later in 1905, Einstein elaborated how, in a certain manner of speaking, mass and energy were equivalent. Einstein was not the first to propose all the elements that went into the special theory of relativity; his contribution lies in having unified important parts of classical mechanics and Maxwellian electrodynamics.

The third of Einstein's seminal papers of 1905 concerned statistical mechanics, a field of study that had been elaborated by, among others, Ludwig Boltzmann and Josiah Willard Gibbs. Unaware of Gibbs' contributions, Einstein extended Boltzmann's work and calculated the average trajectory of a microscopic particle buffeted by random collisions with molecules in a fluid or in a gas. Einstein observed that his calculations could account for brownian motion, the apparently erratic movement of pollen in fluids, which had been noted by the British botanist Robert Brown. Einstein's paper provided convincing evidence for the physical existence of atom-sized molecules, which had already received much theoretical discussion. His results were independently discovered by the Polish physicist Marian von Smoluchowski and later elaborated by the French physicist Jean Perrin.

Albert Einstein

If I give you a pfennig, you will be one pfennig richer and I'll be one pfennig poorer. But if I give you an idea, you will have a new idea, but I shall still have it, too.

Early life of a GENIUS

Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany on Mar. 14, 1879. Einstein's parents, who were non observant Jews, moved from Ulm to Munich when Einstein was an infant. The family business was the manufacture of electrical parts. When the business failed, in 1894, the family moved to Milan, Italy. At this time Einstein decided officially to relinquish his German citizenship. Within a year, still without having completed secondary school, Einstein failed an examination that would have allowed him to pursue a course of study leading to a diploma as an electrical engineer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. He spent the next year in nearby Aarau at the cantonal secondary school, where he enjoyed excellent teachers and first-rate facilities in physics. Einstein returned in 1896 to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, where he graduated, in 1900 as a secondary school teacher of mathematics and physics.

After two years he obtained a post at the Swiss patent office in Bern. The patent-office work required Einstein's careful attention, but while employed (1902-09) there, he completed an astonishing range of publications in theoretical physics. For the most part these texts were written in his spare time and without the benefit of close contact with either the scientific literature or theoretician colleagues. Einstein submitted one of his scientific papers to the University of Zurich to obtain a Ph.D. degree in 1905. In 1908 he sent a second paper to the University of Bern and became a lecturer there. The next year Einstein received a regular appointment as associate professor of physics at the University of Zurich.

By 1909, Einstein was recognized throughout German-speaking Europe as a leading scientific thinker. In quick succession he held professorships at the German University of Prague and at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. In 1914 he advanced to the most prestigious and best-paying post that a theoretical physicist could hold in central Europe, professor at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft in Berlin.

Albert Einstein

If A is a success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.

Albert Einstein

No, this trick won't work...How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?

Albert Einstein

I want to know God's thoughts; the rest are details.

Albert Einstein

I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.