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Albert Einstein was a Theoretical Physicist of German origin. He is the one who developed a pillar of modern Physics, the Theory of Relativity. Be it his mass-energy equivalence formula or his law of photoelectric effect, the theories he postulated changed the history of science forever. His works are still studied in standard institutions of learning throughout the world.

About Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein was born on 14th March 1879 in Ulm in the Kingdom of Wurttemberg in the German empire. His father's name was Herman Einstein and his mother's name was Pauline Koch. His father worked as a salesman and as an engineer. In 1880, his father along with his family moved to Munich. His father and his uncle founded Elektrotechnische Fabrik J. Einstein & Cie. It is a company that manufactures electrical equipment based on direct current.

After birth, Albert Einstein's head was much larger than his body and he was born as a deformed abnormal child. Usually, children start speaking at the age of 2, but Albert Einstein started speaking after 4 years of age. When Einstein was 5 years old, his father gifted him with a magnetic compass on his birthday. The needle of the compass used to be in the North Direction, and seeing this, he became very fascinated and developed an interest to explore science well.

His Childhood

Albert Einstein was born on 14th March 1879, in Ulm, where his family ran a small shop. He had two siblings, an elder sister named Maja and a younger brother named Hans Albert. The Einsteins were non-observant Jews and moved to Munich when Albert was one year old. His parents wanted him to become a businessman, but he showed scientific inclinations from his childhood days. From 1890, the family resided in Milan where Einstein underwent Technical High School education. Since his father had relocated to Italy for work purposes, Albert Einstein decided not to move with his family to Berlin after matriculating from the Zurich Polytechnic in 1896.

He had problems with authority and left his academic institutions without a degree on several occasions. He started working as a patent clerk at the Swiss Patent Office in 1902, where he spent most of his time on theoretical physics. In 1905, he published four papers that revolutionized Physics. They were on (I) Brownian motion, (ii) photoelectric effect, (iii) special relativity and (iv) equivalence of mass and energy, which is famously known as the E=mc 2 equation. He worked on unified field Theory for more than ten years but was unable to complete it.

At the age of 5, he joined the Catholic Elementary School in Munich. After that, he enrolled in Luitpold Gymnasium, where he received his primary and secondary school education. When Albert Einstein was 15 years old, his father wanted him to do electrical engineering but Einstein used to fight with the authority of his school, about their way of teaching. He believed that due to so many strict rules and regulations in the school, the creative mind of children was lost and they only knew the strict rote learning. Einstein was thrown out of school too many times due to this behavior of his. He used to fight with his teachers, he also raised questions about their way of teaching.

At the age of 12, Einstein started learning Calculus on his own, and when he became 14 years old, he mastered Integral and Differential Calculus. Einstein got married in 1903 to Marci. In 1904 his son named Hans Albert Einstein was born, and in 1910 his second son Eduard was born.

Contribution Towards Science

Albert received a patent officer job at the Federal Office for Intellectual Property in Bern, Switzerland, at the age of 23, after completing college. While working there, he completed his Ph.D., after which he became a professor at the University of Zurich. During this period he gave the theory of mass-energy (E = mc 2 ). The atomic bombs dropped in Japan were built on this principle. However, throughout his life, Albert Einstein was against the atomic bomb dropped on Japan. He then gave a new theory of relativity, falsifying the old rules of relativity given by Isaac Newton, which proved that time and light are not constant. If traveling at the speed of light, i.e. 300000 km, it will be slow, and millions of years have passed on Earth. That is, he proved that time travel can be done. However, till date scientists have not been able to build a spaceship that can travel at the speed of light. 

In 1977, NASA conducted an experiment to prove this theory in which they set the clock in a satellite and were left to orbit the Earth. After a few years, when the satellite's clock was checked, it was much slower than the Earth's clock. In this theory of quantum physics, Indian scientist Satyendra Nath Bose wrote a letter from India to Albert Einstein in which he said that Newton's relativity theory is wrong. Albert Einstein then agreed to the letter of Satyendra Nath Bose, and he published that paper and later gave a new theory of relativity. Albert Einstein made many other inventions with this theory. 

He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1981 for his photoelectric effect. In 1933, Hitler killed millions of people in Germany, and at the same time, Albert Einstein was changing the whole world with science. He went to America from Europe forever, taking the citizenship there because Hitler placed a reward of \[$\]5000 on Albert Einstein's head and burned all his research books.

Moving to the United States

During World War-I, he was invited to join the Bureau of Standards in Washington before accepting its offer officially. He moved to the United States of America with his family in April 1933 after Hitler's rise to power.

He advised breaking up Bell Labs and nationalizing the electricity supply industry, worked on defense projects during World War II, and became a citizen of the United States in 1940.

In 1951, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect."

Albert Einstein died on 18th April 1955 at Princeton Hospital, New Jersey. He was 76 years old.

Death and Awards

On 17th April 1955, Einstein underwent internal bleeding in the Lower Abdominal, and he was taken to a hospital where the doctor asked him to undergo a surgery. Albert Einstein refused to undergo the surgery, and said that he would go when he wanted, and that it is tasteless to prolong life artificially. He told me that he would like to die like that. Later research was done on Albert Einstein's brain and it was found that the parts of Einstein's brain that were for mathematical calculus had developed 15% more as compared to the brains of normal people.

The whole world celebrates Albert Einstein's birthday on 14th March as World Genius Day. He had published more than 300 research papers on science in his life and had contributed to the advancement of science. This is the reason that Times magazine has awarded Albert Einstein the title of Person of the Century. Einstein received numerous awards and honors, and in 1922, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect".

Conclusion  

Albert Einstein was one of the best scientists, mathematicians, and physicists of the 20th century. In the early twentieth century, Albert Einstein formulated theories that changed the thinking of physicists and non-specialists alike. He will always be remembered for his law of photoelectric effect and mass-energy equivalence formula. His body of work is studied in universities across the world to this day. He is a famous and known name in the world of Physics, he also achieved a lot, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for his commendable research and accomplishments.

FAQs on Albert Einstein Essay

1. Why did Albert Einstein Have No Social Life?

Albert Einstein was a very intelligent person. He had no time for a social life because he was always busy with his research and work. Albert Einstein had more than 40 publications to his credit. His life and work were on research and inventions. His life revolved around his work and family. The work-life of Albert Einstein is an inspiration to all the people who are working day and night to achieve something great in their lives. One of the best scientists, mathematicians and physicists of the 20th century was none other than Albert Einstein. His achievement includes the most discussed formula in his name- the mass-energy equivalence equation. He was known for the impact he made on the world of physics and also for the awards and honors he received in his lifetime.

2. What Was the Theory of Relativity by Albert Einstein?

The theory of relativity is the scientific theory developed by Albert Einstein between 1905 and 1915. It is a theory of gravity and space-time. The theory revolutionized physics by proposing that the laws of physics are the same for all inertial frames of reference. That is, the laws of physics are the same whether an observer is stationary or in motion. The theory also proposed that the speed of light is a constant for all observers, regardless of their relative motion. This was a radical departure from classical mechanics and Newton's view of the universe. His theory is the basis for many features of our modern life and is used in daily applications. You can learn more about the theory of relativity in any good physics textbook.

3. What Did Albert Einstein Do for Science?

Albert Einstein was a German theoretical physicist who developed the theory of general relativity, effecting a revolution in physics. He is best known in popular culture for his mass-energy equivalence formula E = mc 2 (which has been dubbed "the world's most famous equation"). He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect". This makes Einstein the only physicist to win twice. He is also known for his other great works, such as the world's smallest unit of time and explaining the Brownian motion of particles. His life's work has had a great impact on the modern world and the way we see things.

4. What Awards Did Albert Einstein Receive in His Lifetime?

Albert Einstein was one of the most genius scientists of all time. He is known for his great works in Physics. He also received a lot of awards in his lifetime. Albert Einstein won the Nobel Prize in 1921 for physics "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect". He is the only physicist to have been awarded a Nobel Prize twice. In 1921, he received the Nobel Prize in physics. In his acceptance lecture, titled "The Field Theory of Matter", he provided what is now viewed as a foundation for relativistic quantum field theory. Einstein was voted number 3 in BBC's poll of the 100 Greatest Britons.

5. Why Was Einstein Thought of as a Genius?

Albert Einstein was a brilliant and intelligent man. He changed the world because of his scientific ideas and theories. He is known for the mass-energy equivalence formula (E=mc 2 ); he came up with it in 1905; before coming to this theory, he did not have any notable publications. However, by the end of this year, he had already submitted two articles to Annalen der Physik. One of these was on the photoelectric effect, while the other was on "A new determination of molecular dimensions". Albert Einstein is considered a genius because he looked at things in an entirely different way than anyone else did before him. He also had wonderful ideas about space and time that changed the way we think about those things.

6. What Were the Names of Albert Einstein’s Father and Mother?

Albert Einstein was born on 14th March 1879 in Ulm in the Kingdom of  Wurttemberg in the German empire. His father’s name was Herman Einstein and His Mother’s name was Pauline Koch.

7. How Albert Einstein Was Different from Normal Kids?

After birth, Albert Einstein's head was much larger than his body and he was born as a deformed abnormal child. Usually, children start speaking at the age of 2, but in the case of Albert Einstein, he started speaking after 4 years of age. At the age of 12, Einstein learning Calculus and when he became 14 years old he had mastered Integral and Differential Calculus which is obviously not normal for any other kid.

Albert Einstein: The Life of a Genius Essay (Biography)

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Albert Einstein is arguably one of the most influential individuals in the modern world. He played a role in the development and physics, and also dabbled with the politics of his day-even though at a small scale level. During the period around the First World War, Einstein was among the individuals that were against the usage of violence in resolution of conflicts. This was one of the ethical standpoints that have made him receive credence, years after his death.

Albert Einstein was born in Württemberg, Germany, on March 14, 1879 (Meltzer 2). Less than two months after his birth his family relocated to Munich where he started his education. As years passed by, Einstein and his family again relocated, this time to Switzerland, where the young Albert gained a diploma in physics and mathematics (Lakin 20). After his graduation, Einstein tried to find a job as a teacher but instead landed a position in Switzerland’s patent office (Frisch 12).

In 1905, at just 26, Einstein received a doctoral degree. It was during this period that he published most his remarkable theories. By 1911 he had been declared Professor Extraordinary and Professor of Theoretical Physics in different cities across Switzerland (Frisch 23). Einstein was fundamentally a pacifist when it came to conflict resolution and this was well manifested in the First World War.

During this time, 93 German professors supported a manifesto for the conduct of the nation in war, while Einstein and three other intellectuals gave their support to an anti-war counter manifesto (Calaprice and Lipscombe 121).

Einstein played a critical role in the establishment of a non-partisan coalition that fronted the idea of just piece and international cooperation in the prevention of wars in the future. During his stay in Switzerland, Einstein spent his days as a theoretical physicist but also dedicated some time to uniting the warring factions. He even once declared his stand thus:

“My pacifism is an instinctive feeling, a feeling that possesses me because the murder of men is disgusting. My attitude is not derived from any intellectual theory but is based on my deepest antipathy to every kind of cruelty and hatred ” (Calaprice and Lipscombe 55.)

In 1914, he moved back to Germany where he stayed as a citizen for the next nineteen years, only to renounce his citizenship on political grounds. He moved the United States where he stayed for seven years before acquiring American Citizenship. In the meantime, he continued teaching Theoretical Physics at Princeton University.

After the Second World War, Albert Einstein was a key official in the World Government Movement. He was even accorded the presidency of Israel but he turned down the offer instead choosing to spearhead the establishment of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

When it came to science, Einstein had a proper knowledge of the challenges in the field and also had a well developed way of dealing with them. His was a methodological approach with clear-cut steps towards the attainment of the goal. According to Einstein, any of his achievements was merely seen as a stepping stone to even more achievements.

In his early professional years, Albert Einstein hypothesized that the right explanation of the special theory of relativity should also inform the theory of gravitation (McPherson 21). In 1916 he published his paper on the general theory of relativity (McPherson 26). It was around this period that he took time to find solutions to the challenges of the theory of radiation. In the 1920’s, Einstein started working on the unified field theories but still continued his work on the quantum theory (Calaprice and Lipscombe 92). By the time he was retiring, Einstein had made substantial achievements in relativistic cosmology and unification of basic concepts of Physics.

Owing to his accomplishments, Einstein was awarded several honorary doctorate degrees in various scientific fields by many European and American universities (Lakin 33-35). A number of prestigious societies also accorded him awards, most notably the Copley Medal of the Royal Society of London in 1925 (Lakin 43). Because of his involvement in research, Einstein spent a lot of time in solitude and his only form of recreation was listening to music. In 1903, he got married and had two children before filing for a divorce sixteen years later only to marry his cousin, Elsa Löwenthal, who passed away in 1936 (Meachen 13). Einstein died in New Jersey, 19 years after Elsa’s death

Einstein’s theories survived the test of time primarily because of two reasons. One, because most of his work was based on the findings of scholars that became before him, and two because the field in which he was involved had no room for more advancement without scholars taking his findings into consideration.

His ethical views regarding the war have long been overshadowed by the entry of other more popular individuals, most of them being politicians. As a pacifist, his political views did not initially find popularity with the rulers of his time because most of them believed in national supremacy. As a matter of fact, most individuals dismissed his and his associate’s viewpoints as the ranting of mad scientists.

Various life lessons can be picked from how Einstein conducted himself. First is the commitment to one’s job. Most individuals always complain of how bad their current job is without even making an effort to attain their best in what they do. For instance, with the global boundaries becoming more and more irrelevant owing to increasing international migration, the United States is gradually becoming multicultural. Individuals from all over the world have over time appreciated the United States as the land of opportunity.

Hence, most persons ranging from professionals to unskilled individuals are looking for ways to gain an entry into America where they earnings are thought to be better than in other regions around the world.

The search for jobs and better livelihoods has resulted in an increased diversification of the American workforce which in turn calls for institutions to adopt and develop strategies for strengthening the relationship between individuals of varied socio-cultural backgrounds. What most individuals fail to notice, is that if they commit themselves to what they are good at, they can end up making notable achievements in their lives.

Another ethical lesson that can be picked from Einstein’s life is his belief in peaceful resolution of national and international conflicts. This is something that Einstein directly linked to leadership whereby leadership is the definite role assigned to each and every president/country.

The most common and wrong presumption by most presidents is that since their job title puts them in a position of leadership, the individuals who work under them will automatically be subject to their every word. In actual sense, however, the title presidency is not necessarily directly linked to leadership.

Einstein believed in proper communication among communities as a way of reaching amicable solutions to disagreements. Community communication is the practice of sharing information amongst individual of a given society. Communication has always been hailed as one of the key unifiers of members of particular communities. The easier it is for individuals to share what is in their minds, the easier it is for them to relate with one another.

Communication as a social aspect is multi faceted in the sense that it comprises various different aspects working both independently and in conjunction with other components to maintain a harmonious understanding between parties. In most societies around the world business is regarded as the mainstay. All activities within a given community generally tend to be under the influence of economic activities both directly and indirectly.

In order for effectiveness to be achieved in leadership, the person in charge must constantly ensure that his/her influence to the people subordinate to him/her is always positive and intended to achieve the unique goals of the country. Furthermore, and in line with Einstein’s beliefs, it has been proven that the leadership style adopted can make people in governmental control either excellent or terrible leaders. In this regard, if the leaders of two nations are pacifiers, then there is a reduced likelihood of international wars.

Another trait that made Einstein a great person was his belief in giving everyone a chance to be heard. Good listenership has been given immense appreciation amongst the most successful communities in the world. The doctrines of these societies propose that for anyone to have a meaningful conversation and particularly in business, he or she must be in a position to take time and listen to what the other person is saying. It is quite unlikely that communication can occur if both of the parties involved talk at the same time.

Communication is a two way event that calls for one of the parties to stay quite and receive the message and then respond as the other party stays quiet. At national levels, if all the leaders sit down and agree to communicate sanely, then there is little likelihood of disagreements occurring on account of misunderstanding.

Einstein’s persona and ethical beliefs redefined the meaning of the word school as a place where people spend time with an aim of becoming more knowledgeable. According to him, it is in schools that students are exposed to basic political values particularly of their country as well as going through extensive studies of how political systems operate.

As a result, the students are able to come up with independent opinions regarding politics and the political elites. This is fundamentally the root of conservatism which has a number of assumptions. One of these sensible assumptions is the imperfection of the human nature. This is because human beings are inherently selfish and will generally be driven to act in ways that are only beneficial to them.

Human imperfection also reveals in the corruptible nature of persons. Another sensible assumption of conservatism, and which was also reflected in Einstein’s persona, is the belief that people basically get their individual identity from their nation and family.

This is practically true because the learning process demands that persons learn from the people closest to them as well as from their country of habitation. The traditionalism ideology based on the fact that institutions which have existed for long periods of time have most credibility also makes a lot of sense. This is a self-explanatory concept especially since it is well known that experience makes the best teacher.

Einstein also put strong emphasis on respect of the rule of law by citizens. This is a very sensible conservative assumption as it is by individuals observing established regulations and trusting the various arms of government to implement such regulations that stability can be obtained now and in the future.

Annotated Bibliography

Calaprice, Alice and Trevor Lipscombe. Albert Einstein: A biography. Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2005. Print.

Selecting this book for research was practically easy owing to the usage of online library catalogues. The search word used was Einstein which was a straight forward choice and it listed this book as one of the favorite choices. The authors of this book recognize Einstein as one of the most recognizable scientists of all time. They however go on to point out that most people do not know much about Einstein’s life outside his profession.

This book provides a clear evaluation of his life beginning with his birth going all the way to his marriage and children. The authors, in this book, confirm that aside from being a genius, Einstein was just an average person with weaknesses. This is clearly presented in the way Einstein comfortably went through school only to fail to get a job, ending up as a government clerk.

His difficult marriages and family life as well as his use of his international acclaim to fight from world peace has also been given a critical review in the book. This book also carries a bibliography of publications that can be used to properly analyze Einstein’s life and this is one of the fundamental reasons as to why it was selected to inform the research.

Frisch, Aaron. Albert Einstein. Minnesota: The Creative Company, 2005. Print.

In this book, the author also looks at the entire life of Albert Einstein. As far as his younger life was concerned, Aaron tries to dispel the myth that Einstein had learning difficulties.

The failures of his marriages and his inappopriate relation with his children have also been well described. Aaron also goes a step further to analyze the scientists life in peace activism while emphasizing the importance of the theoretical findings that Einstein made as far as the development of physics is concerned. The search word was Einstein and this book was listed among the most appropriate publications to guide any research into the life of the scientist

Lakin, Patricia. Albert Einstein: Genius of the Twentieth Century. North Carolina: Baker & Taylor, 2009. Print

This book was easy to find in the library especially by using the online catalogues. The search words were Albert Einstein, and this book was listed among the most appropriate volumes that fitted the description. In this publication, the author looks at younger life of the world renowned scientist and the challenges that he went through on his way to gaining international acclaim in science.

The author analyzes both the public and private lives of Einstein giving particular emphasis to his overshadowed family life. This book covers almost every aspect of the scientist’s life and this is the primary reason as to why it has been selected for the bibliography of this essay.

McPherson, Stephanie S. Albert Einstein. Minnesota:Lerner Publications, 2004. Print.

In identifying this book, a library was visited and the online catalogue utilized to list the most recent and relevant publication as far as the topic of research was concerned. The search words used were Albert Einstein and this publication showed up among the ideal choices. This book analyzes the life and times of Albert Einstein with particular focus on his lifetime achievements. The authors provide a timeline listing the particular periods around which the great scientist made certain discoveries.

The author also looks at the younger years of Einstein while dispelling the myth that he had learning difficulties. His short-lived marriages and his poor relation with his children has also been well highlighted. The strength of Albert Einstein’s scientific theories and his entry into world politics through advocating for peaceful resolution of conflicts have also been well addressed in the publication.

Towards the end of the book is a bibliography listing all the books and journals that have been consulted by this particular author hence making it an ideal starting point for any research into Einstein’s life.

Meachen, Dana R. Albert Einstein. Minneapolis: Compass Point Books, 2003. Print

Dana Meachen Rau writes about Albert Einstein’s life. The book is in light of the scientist’s private and public eventful life. The author elicits that Einstein, after graduation, missed an opportunity to be a teacher, as he had wished, and had to settle for a job as a government clerk.

In later pages, Rau looks at how Einstein continued studying and became a professor at various universities in Germany, Switzerland and in the United States of America, as well as how he came up with the quantum theory in physics and contributed greatly in the science field. One fact that have been presented in the book and which is very little known is that Einstein married and had three children with his first wife. He divorced after seventeen years and married his cousin.

They never had children. He had a stint in politics which did not last long. Einstein thought governments should use peaceful means to solve conflicts rather than always going to war. This publication is very relevant in the investigation of Einstein’s life as it clearly analyzes his life as a person and as a celebrity physicist.

Meltzer, Milton. Albert Einstein: A Biography. New York: Holiday House, 2007. Print

In this publication, the author defines Albert Einstein as a man who always questioned and provided answers. He notes the fact that aside from being a well-known physicist, Einstein also doubled up as a peace activist. The author studies the entire life of Einstein, from the time of his birth, all the way to his death while giving appropriate details pertaining to his private life.

This book contains numerous pictures of the scientist and this makes it an even more interesting piece of literature for the research. In looking for the book, a library was visited and the online catalogue utilized. The search word was Einstein and this publication showed up among the most recent and ideal publications.

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Einstein papers now online

Press release announcing the launching of the Digital Einstein Papers from Princeton Press.

Launching today, THE DIGITAL EINSTEIN PAPERS is a publicly available website of the collected and translated papers of Albert Einstein that allows readers to explore the writings of the world’s most famous scientist as never before.

Princeton, NJ – December 5, 2014 – Princeton University Press, in partnership with Tizra, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and California Institute of Technology, announces the launch of THE DIGITAL EINSTEIN PAPERS ( http://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu ). This unique, authoritative resource provides full public access to the translated and annotated writings of the most influential scientist of the twentieth century: Albert Einstein.

“Princeton University Press has a long history of publishing books by and about Albert Einstein, including the incredible work found in The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein ,” said Peter Dougherty, director of Princeton University Press. “We are delighted to make these texts openly available to a global audience of researchers, scientists, historians, and students keen to learn more about Albert Einstein. This project not only furthers the mission of the press to publish works that contribute to discussions that have the power to change our world, but also illustrates our commitment to pursuing excellence in all forms of publishing—print and digital.”

THE DIGITAL EINSTEIN PAPERS website presents the complete contents of The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein , and, upon its launch, the website— http://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu —will contain 5,000 documents covering the first forty-four years of Einstein’s life, up to and including the award of the Nobel Prize in Physics and his long voyage to the Far East. Additional material will be available on the website approximately eighteen months after the print publication of new volumes of The Collected Papers . Eventually, the website will provide access to all of Einstein’s writings and correspondence, accompanied by scholarly annotation and apparatus.

What sorts of gems will users discover in THE DIGITAL EINSTEIN PAPERS? According to Diana L. Kormos-Buchwald, director of the Einstein Papers Project, “This material has been carefully researched and annotated over the last twenty-five years and contains all of Einstein’s scientific and popular writings, drafts, lecture notes, and diaries, and his professional and personal correspondence up to his forty-fourth birthday—so users will discover major scientific articles on the general theory of relativity, gravitation, and quantum theory alongside his love letters to his first wife, correspondence with his children, and his intense exchanges with other notable scientists, philosophers, mathematicians, and political personalities of the early twentieth century.”

Buchwald also noted that THE DIGITAL EINSTEIN PAPERS will introduce current and future generations to important ideas and moments in history, saying, “It is exciting to think that thanks to the careful application of new technology, this work will now reach a much broader audience and stand as the authoritative digital source for Einstein’s written legacy.”

THE DIGITAL EINSTEIN PAPERS enables readers to experience the writings of Albert Einstein in unprecedented ways. Advance search technology improves discoverability by allowing users to perform keyword searches across volumes of Einstein’s writing and, with a single click, navigate between the original languages in which the texts were written and their English translations. Further exploration is encouraged by extensive explanatory footnotes, introductory essays, and links to the Einstein Archives Online, where there are thousands of high-quality digital images of Einstein’s writings.

The Tizra platform was selected for this project, according to Kenneth Reed, manager of digital production for Princeton University Press, because of its highly flexible, open, and intuitive content delivery approach, and its strong reputation for reliability. Equally important was creating a user-friendly reading experience.

“One of the reasons we chose Tizra is that we wanted to preserve the look and feel of the volumes,” said Reed. “You’ll see the pages as they appear in the print volumes, with added functionality such as linking between the documentary edition and translation, as well as linking to the Einstein Archives Online, and the ability to search across all the volumes in English and German.”

THE DIGITAL EINSTEIN PAPERS is an unprecedented scholarly collaboration that highlights what is possible when technology, important content, and a commitment to global scholarly communication are brought together. We hope you will join us in celebrating this achievement and invite you to explore Einstein’s writings with the links below. 

Work on THE DIGITAL EINSTEIN PAPERS was supported by the Harold W. McGraw, Jr. endowment, the California Institute of Technology, the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Arcadia Fund, U.K.

A Sampling of Documents Found in THE DIGITAL EINSTEIN PAPERS

Website: http://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu

“My Projects for the Future” — In this high school French essay, a seventeen-year-old Einstein describes his future plans, writing that “young people especially like to contemplate bold projects.”

Letter to Mileva Marić — The first volume of The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein revealed that the young Einstein had fathered an illegitimate daughter. In this letter to his sweetheart and future wife, Einstein, age twenty-two, expresses his happiness at the birth of his daughter Lieserl, and asks about her health and feeding.

Einstein’s first job offer — Einstein graduated from university in 1900, but had great difficulty finding academic employment. He received this notice of his appointment as a technical clerk at the Swiss Patent Office in June 1902 and would later describe his time there as happy and productive.

“On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” — Einstein’s 1905 paper on the special theory of relativity is a landmark in the development of modern physics.

“On a Heuristic Point of View Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light” — Einstein received the Nobel Prize in Physics for this paper on the hypothesis of energy quanta.

The telegram informing that Einstein he has won the Nobel Prize — Einstein was traveling in the Far East when he officially learned via telegram that he had been awarded the prize. However, he had long been expecting the prize, as evidenced by a clause regarding its disposition in a preliminary divorce agreement from Mileva in 1918.

“The Field Equations of Gravitation” — Einstein spent a decade developing the general theory of relativity and published this article in late 1915.

To his mother Pauline Einstein — Einstein writes to his ailing mother to share the happy news that his prediction of gravitational light bending was confirmed by a British eclipse expedition in 1919.

To Heinrich Zangger, on the mercurial nature of fame — Having been propelled to world fame, Einstein writes to his friend about the difficulties of being “worshipped today, scorned or even crucified tomorrow.”

To Max Planck, on receiving credible death threats — Einstein writes that he cannot attend the Scientist’s Convention in Berlin because he is “supposedly among the group of persons being targeted by nationalist assassins.”

Four Lectures on the Theory of Relativity, held at Princeton University in May 1921 — On his first trip to the United States, Einstein famously delivered these lectures on the theory of relativity.

About The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein

The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein is one of the most ambitious publishing ventures ever undertaken in the documentation of the history of science. Selected from among more than 40,000 documents contained in Einstein’s personal collection, and 15,000 Einstein and Einstein-related documents discovered by the editors since the beginning of the Einstein Project, The Collected Papers provides the first complete picture of a massive written legacy. When completed, the series will contain more than 14,000 documents as full text and will fill thirty volumes. The volumes are published by Princeton University Press , sponsored by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem , and supported by the California Institute of Technology .

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Historical Archives

An ideal of service to our fellow man.

Albert Einstein

Listen to Robert Krulwich Read Einstein's Essay

Albert Einstein published his general theory of relativity in 1916, profoundly affecting the study of physics and cosmology for years. He won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921 for his work on the photo-electric effect. Einstein taught for many years at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

This essay aired circa 1954.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the Mysterious — the knowledge of the existence of something unfathomable to us, the manifestation of the most profound reason coupled with the most brilliant beauty. I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, or who has a will of the kind we experience in ourselves. I am satisfied with the mystery of life's eternity and with the awareness of — and glimpse into — the marvelous construction of the existing world together with the steadfast determination to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in nature. This is the basics of cosmic religiosity, and it appears to me that the most important function of art and science is to awaken this feeling among the receptive and keep it alive.

I sense that it is not the State that has intrinsic value in the machinery of humankind, but rather the creative, feeling individual, the personality alone that creates the noble and sublime.

Man's ethical behavior should be effectively grounded on compassion, nurture and social bonds. What is moral is not the divine, but rather a purely human matter, albeit the most important of all human matters. In the course of history, the ideals pertaining to human beings' behavior towards each other and pertaining to the preferred organization of their communities have been espoused and taught by enlightened individuals. These ideals and convictions — results of historical experience, empathy and the need for beauty and harmony — have usually been willingly recognized by human beings, at least in theory.

The highest principles for our aspirations and judgments are given to us westerners in the Jewish-Christian religious tradition. It is a very high goal: free and responsible development of the individual, so that he may place his powers freely and gladly in the service of all mankind.

The pursuit of recognition for their own sake, an almost fanatical love of justice and the quest for personal independence form the traditional themes of the Jewish people, of which I am a member.

But if one holds these high principles clearly before one's eyes and compares them with the life and spirit of our times, then it is glaringly apparent that mankind finds itself at present in grave danger. I see the nature of the current crises in the juxtaposition of the individual to society. The individual feels more than ever dependent on society, but he feels this dependence not in the positive sense — cradled, connected as part of an organic. He sees it as a threat to his natural rights and even his economic existence. His position in society, then, is such that that which drives his ego is encouraged and developed, and that which would drive him toward other men (a weak impulse to begin with) is left to atrophy.

It is my belief that there is only one way to eliminate these evils, namely, the establishment of a planned economy coupled with an education geared towards social goals. Alongside the development of individual abilities, the education of the individual aspires to revive an ideal that is geared towards the service of our fellow man, and that needs to take the place of the glorification of power and outer success.

Translation by David Domine. Essay courtesy of the Albert Einstein Archives at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Related NPR Stories

1905: science's miracle year, celebrating the einstein centennial, from our listeners, author richard panek on einstein and freud, einstein, bohr and the nature of light, nasa set to test einstein's relativity theory.

The Year Of Albert Einstein

His discoveries in 1905 would forever change our understanding of the universe. Amid the centennial hoopla, the trick is to separate the man from the math

Richard Panek

Over four months, March through June 1905, Albert Einstein produced four papers that revolutionized science. One explained how to measure the size of molecules in a liquid, a second posited how to determine their movement, and a third described how light comes in packets called photons—the foundation of quantum physics and the idea that eventually won him the Nobel Prize. A fourth paper introduced special relativity, leading physicists to reconsider notions of space and time that had sufficed since the dawn of civilization. Then, a few months later, almost as an afterthought, Einstein pointed out in a fifth paper that matter and energy can be interchangeable at the atomic level specifically, that E=mc2, the scientific basis of nuclear energy and the most famous mathematical equation in history.

No wonder 2005 has been designated worldwide as a celebration of all things Einstein. International physics organizations have proclaimed this centenary as the World Year of Physics, and thousands of scientific and educational institutions have followed their lead. Images of Einstein have become even more common than usual, discussions of his impact a cultural drumbeat. “His name is synonymous with science,” says Brian Schwartz, a physicist at the City University of New York Graduate Center. “If you ask kids to show you what a scientist looks like, the first thing they’ll draw is wild white hair.”

In many ways, Einstein’s “miracle year” inaugurated the modern era, with its jumpy, discordant points of view and shocks to established truths. But the time, generally, was one of great cultural and social upheaval. Also in 1905, Sigmund Freud published his essay “Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious” and an account of one of his first psychoanalyses. Pablo Picasso switched from his Blue Period to his Rose Period. James Joyce completed his first book, Dubliners . Still, no one’s rethinking of universal assumptions was more profound than Einstein’s.

Largely for that reason, Einstein today is more myth than man, and the essence of that myth is that the workings of his mind are beyond the reach not only of most mortals but even of most physicists. As with many myths, there’s some truth to it. “I learned general relativity three times,” says Spencer Weart, director of the Center for History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics. “It’s that difficult, subtle, different.”

But there’s also a good deal of exaggeration to the myth. Right from the start, long before he was Einstein the Inscrutable, the most prescient of his fellow physicists understood what he’d accomplished and its larger significance. He’d reinvented physics, which is just another way of saying he’d reinvented the way we all—physicists and nonphysicists alike—conceive of our place in the cosmos.

Specifically, he’d reinvented relativity. In a 1632 treatise, Galileo Galilei set forth what would become the classic version of relativity. He invited you, his reader, to imagine yourself on a dock, observing a ship moving at a steady rate. If someone at the top of the ship’s mast were to drop a rock, where would it land? At the base of the mast? Or some small distance back, corresponding to the distance that the ship had covered while the rock was falling?

The intuitive answer is some small distance back. The correct answer is the base of the mast. From the point of view of the sailor who dropped the rock, the rock falls straight down. But for you on the dock, the rock would appear to fall at an angle. Both you and the sailor would have equal claim to being right—the motion of the rock is relative to whoever is observing it.

Einstein, however, had a question. It had bothered him for ten years, from the time he was a 16-year-old student in Aarau, Switzerland, until one fateful evening in May 1905. Walking home from work, Einstein fell into conversation with Michele Besso, a fellow physicist and his best friend at the patent office in Bern, Switzerland, where they were both clerks. Einstein’s question, in effect, added a complication to Galileo’s imagery: What if the object descending from the top of the mast wasn’t a rock but a beam of light?

His choice wasn’t arbitrary. Forty years earlier, the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell had demonstrated that the speed of light is constant. It’s the same whether you’re moving toward the source of light or away from it, or whether it’s moving toward or away from you. (What changes isn’t the speed of the light waves, but the number of waves that reach you in a certain length of time.) Suppose you go back to the dock and look at Galileo’s ship, only now the height of its mast is 186,282 miles, or the distance that light travels in a vacuum in one second. (It’s a tall ship.) If the person at the top of the mast sends a light signal straight down while the ship is moving, where will it land? For Einstein as well as Galileo, it lands at the base of the mast. From your point of view on the dock, the base of the mast will have moved out from under the top of the mast during the descent, as it did when the rock was falling. This means that the distance the light has traveled, from your point of view, has lengthened. It’s not 186,282 miles. It’s more.

That’s where Einstein begins to depart from Galileo. The speed of light is always 186,282 miles per second. Speed is simply distance divided by, or “per,” a length of time. In the case of a beam of light, the speed is always 186,282 miles per second, so if you change the distance that the beam of light travels, you also have to change the time.

You have to change the time.

“Thank you!” Einstein greeted Besso the morning after their momentous discussion. “I have completely solved the problem.”

According to Einstein’s calculations, time itself wasn’t constant, an absolute, an immutable part of the universe. Now it was a variable that depended on how you and whatever you’re observing are moving in relation to each other. “Every other physicist assumed that there was a universal world clock that kept time,” says Schwartz. “Einstein completely removed that idea.” From the point of view of the person on the dock, the time it took the light to reach the ship’s deck was longer than a second. That means the time on board the ship appeared to be passing more slowly than on the dock. The reverse, Einstein knew, would also have to be true. From the sailor’s point of view, the dock would be moving, and therefore a beam of light sent down from a tall post on land would appear to him to travel a bit farther than it would to you on the dock. To the sailor, the time onshore would appear to be passing more slowly. And there we have it: a new principle of relativity.

“Henceforth, space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows,” the German mathematician Hermann Minkowski declared in 1908. Other physicists had done calculations that showed a similar difference in measurement of time between two observers, but they always added some version of “but not really.” For them, a difference in time might be in the math, but it wasn’t in the world. Einstein, however, said there is no “really.” There is only what you on the dock can measure about time on board the moving ship and what the sailor can measure about time on board the moving ship. The difference between the two is in the math, and the math is the world. Einstein’s insight was that because these perceptions are all that we can ever know, they are also, in terms of taking the measure of the universe, all that matter.

This was pretty heady stuff for a 26-year-old clerk who only a couple of weeks earlier had submitted his doctoral thesis to the University of Zurich. Einstein would keep his day job at the patent office until 1909, but his obscurity was over, at least among physicists. Within a year of completing his relativity paper, his ideas were being debated by some of the most prominent scientists in Germany. In 1908 physicist Johann Jakob Laub traveled from Würzburg to Bern to study with Einstein, exclaiming that to find the great man still laboring in a patent office was one of history’s “bad jokes.” But Einstein wasn’t complaining. His “handsome” pay, as he wrote a friend, was sufficient to support a wife and 4-year-old son, Hans Albert, and his schedule left him “eight hours of fun in the day, and then there is also Sunday.” Even on the job, he found plenty of time to daydream.

During one such daydream, Einstein experienced what he would later call “the most fortunate thought of my life.”

He knew that his 1905 special relativity theory applied only to the relationship between a body at rest and a body moving at a constant velocity. What about bodies moving at changing velocities? In the fall of 1907, he saw a vision in his mind’s eye not unlike a beam of light descending from a mast: a man falling off a roof.

What’s the difference? Unlike the beam of light, which moves at a constant velocity, the falling man would be accelerating. But in another sense, he would also be at rest. Throughout the universe, every scrap of matter would be exerting its exquisitely predictable influence on the man, through gravity. This was Einstein’s key insight—that acceleration and gravitation are two ways of describing the same force. Just as someone on board Galileo’s ship would have as much right to think of the dock leaving the ship as the ship leaving the dock, so the man in free fall from the roof would have as much right to think of himself being at rest while the earth hurtles toward him. And there we have it: another principle of relativity, called general relativity.

“Einstein always took what everyone else thought to be two completely different scenarios of nature and saw them as equivalent,” says Gerald Holton of Harvard, a leading Einstein scholar. Space and time, energy and mass, and acceleration and gravitation: as Holton says, “Einstein was always confronting the question, Why should there be two different phenomena with two different theories to explain them when they look to me like one phenomenon?”

After his 1907 vision, however, another eight years would pass before Einstein worked out the equations to support it. Einstein told friends that when he finally figured out the math to demonstrate general relativity in 1915, something burst inside him. He could feel his heart beating erratically, and the palpitations didn’t stop for days. He later wrote a friend, “I was beyond myself with excitement.”

By then, Einstein was a professor at the University of Berlin, and the Great War was raging across the Continent. For word of Einstein’s achievement to reach the wider world of physicists, it was going to have to travel across enemy lines. Einstein carried his writings on general relativity to the Netherlands, and from there a physicist friend forwarded them across the North Sea to England, where they eventually reached Arthur Eddington, perhaps the only astronomer in the world with the political clout and scientific prominence sufficient to mobilize wartime resources and to put general relativity to the test.

Einstein had theorized that a solar eclipse offered a rare opportunity to observe gravity’s effect on light. As the daytime sky darkened, stars would become visible, and if indeed the sun’s gravity pulled on the passing light, then those stars near the edge of the sun would appear to be out of position by a degree his equations predicted precisely. Eddington rallied his nation’s scientific troops, and Great Britain’s Astronomer Royal, Sir Frank Dyson, petitioned his war-depleted government to send two expeditions to observe the total eclipse on May 29, 1919—one to Sobral, Brazil, the other to Príncipe, an island off the west coast of Africa.

In late September, Einstein got a telegram saying that the eclipse results matched his predictions. In October, he accepted the congratulations of the most prominent physicists on the Continent at a meeting in Amsterdam. Then he went home to Berlin. As far as he knew, he’d gotten his due.

“REVOLUTION IN SCIENCE,” the November 7  Times  of London trumpeted. “New Theory of the Universe. Newtonian Ideas Overthrown.” The preceding day, Dyson had read aloud the eclipse results at a rare joint session of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society. The Royal Society president and the discoverer of the electron, J. J. Thomson, called Einstein’s theory, in a quote that raced around the world, “one of the most momentous, if not the most momentous, pronouncements of human thought.”

Only then, 14 years after Einstein’s miracle year, did the range of Einstein’s accomplishments begin to become common knowledge. Because the public learned about special relativity and general relativity at the same time, says Weart, the cult of Einstein coalesced quickly. “And then came quantum theory, and people went back and said, ‘Oh, yeah, Einstein did that, too.’ ”

An accurate count of articles about Einstein around the world in 1919—that first year of fame—is probably impossible; an essay contest sponsored by  Scientific American  for the best explanation of relativity in layperson’s terms attracted entries from more than 20 countries. “I have been so swamped with questions, invitations, challenges,” Einstein wrote in a letter during this period, “that I dream that I am burning in Hell and that the postman is the Devil eternally roaring at me, throwing new bundles of letters at my head because I have not yet answered the old ones.”

And all this celebrity, British astronomer W.J.S. Lockyer remarked, was for discoveries that “do not personally concern ordinary human beings; only astronomers are affected.” The depth of the response could be due only to the historical moment—the aftermath of the Great War. “Here was something which captured the imagination,” wrote Leopold Infeld, a Polish physicist and future collaborator of Einstein’s: “human eyes looking from an earth covered with graves and blood to the heavens covered with the stars.”

To many, Einstein became a symbol of postwar rapprochement and a return to reason. As Eddington wrote to him less than a month after the eclipse announcement, “For scientific relations between England and Germany this is the best thing that could have happened.” Even today, that interpretation continues to resonate. “During that war when much of humanity devoted itself to senseless destruction,” Holton has said, Einstein “revealed the outlines of the grand construction of the universe. That must count as one of the most moral acts of that time.”

But some critics of relativity argued that Einstein was merely one more anarchist fueling the funeral pyres of civilization. A professor of celestial mechanics at Columbia University worried in the  New York Times  in November 1919 that the impulse to “throw aside the well-tested theories upon which have been built the entire structure of modern scientific and mechanical development” was of a piece with “the war, the strikes, the Bolshevist uprisings.”

Einstein’s own political leanings further complicated people’s responses to his work. Avisceral, lifelong anti-authoritarian, he had renounced his German citizenship at age 16 rather than subject himself to mandatory military service. Now, in the nascent WeimarRepublic, Einstein, a Jew, found himself portrayed as a villain by swastika-sporting German nationalists and as a hero by internationalists. “This world is a curious madhouse,” Einstein wrote a friend. “At present every coachman and every waiter argues about whether the relativity theory is correct. Aperson’s conviction on this point depends on the political party he belongs to.” The “arguments” soon descended into death threats, and Einstein briefly fled Germany for a speaking tour of Japan. After Hitler rose to power in 1933, Einstein abandoned Germany for good. He accepted an appointment to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he lived in a modest house on Mercer Street until his death from a ruptured abdominal aneurysm at age 76 in April 1955.

Throughout his public years, Einstein embodied contradictions. A pacifist, he would advocate the construction of the atomic bomb. He argued for a world without borders, and campaigned for the establishment of the state of Israel—so much so that in 1952 he was invited to be its president. He was a genius, puttering absent-mindedly around his house in Princeton, and he was a joker, sticking out his tongue for a photographer. But it wasn’t simply these contradictions that distinguished him. It was their scale. They were all larger than life, and so therefore, the thinking went, must he be, too.

But he wasn’t, as he well knew. His first marriage had ended in divorce, a second, to a cousin, in her death, nearly two decades before his. He fathered one illegitimate daughter, who is thought to have been given up for adoption and is lost to history, and two sons, Hans Albert and Eduard. One of them, Eduard, suffered from schizophrenia. Hans Albert taught engineering at UC Berkeley. Yet somehow Einstein  père  became a myth among men.

It was a fate Einstein hated. “I feel,” he wrote a friend in 1920, “like a graven image”—as if there were something blasphemous in how his idolaters even then were beginning to fashion him. And maybe there was. Once the Nazis were defeated, Einstein would become not all things to all people but one thing to all people: a saint.

The halo of white hair helped. In 1919, when the world first made Einstein’s acquaintance, his 40-year-old, slightly cocky visage only hinted at the caricature to come. But in time his hair flew, like a mind untethered, while the bags under his eyes deepened, as if from the burden of looking too hard and seeing too much. And as for those eyes—well, when Steven Spielberg was designing the title character of  E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial , and he wanted his alien ambassador of good will to have eyes that were moist like a wise old man’s yet twinkling with childlike wonder, he knew whose to use.

Long before the public beatified Einstein, his fellow physicists had begun to question his infallibility. When the Russian mathematician Aleksandr Friedmann in 1922 noted that, according to his calculations using Einstein’s equations, the universe could be expanding or contracting, Einstein wrote a brief rebuttal saying Friedmann’s math was mistaken. Ayear later Einstein acknowledged that the error had in fact been his, yet he remained unrepentant. Only after the American astronomer Edwin Hubble’s 1929 discovery that other galaxies are receding from our own—that the universe is indeed expanding—did Einstein relent. He’d committed his “greatest blunder,” he sighed.

Stubbornness would also dominate his attitude toward quantum mechanics, even though the field was partly an outgrowth of Einstein’s 1905 paper on photons. Einstein frequently and famously objected to the central tenet of quantum theory—that the subatomic world operates according to statistical probabilities rather than cause-and-effect certainties. “God does not play dice with the universe,” he often declared, and to the increasing exasperation of colleagues, he spent the last three decades of his life trying—without success—to find a grand unified theory that would banish such uncertainty.

“Einstein was single-minded, and you can see the good and the bad in that,” says Michael S. Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago and a director for mathematical and physical sciences at the National Science Foundation. “He was single-minded in reconciling general relativity with Newton’s theory of gravity, and he hit a home run. But he was also single-minded about finding a unified field theory, and from 1920 on, his career was that of a mere mortal.” Over the decades, experiments have repeatedly supported both the relativistic and the quantum interpretations of the cosmos. “Space is flexible,” Turner says. “Time warps. And God plays dice.”

In the half century since his death, astronomers have validated perhaps the most revolutionary prediction embedded within Einstein’s equations—the big bang theory of the creation of the universe, a conclusion that seems inevitable if one “runs the film” of Hubble’s expanding universe backward. And there have been other startling ramifications of relativity theory, such as black holes, which can be created by collapsed stars with masses so great that their gravitational force swallows everything in their vicinity, including light. As Weart says, quoting a maxim among physicists, “The general theory of relativity just dropped in 50 years ahead of its time.”

Scientists are still asking questions that Einstein made possible: What powered the big bang? What happens to space, time and matter at the edge of a black hole? What mysterious energy is causing the acceleration of the universe’s expansion? “This is really the golden age for Einstein’s theory, quite apart from the centenary,” says Clifford M. Will, a physicist at WashingtonUniversity in St. Louis and the author of  Was Einstein Right?

For his part, Einstein never quite knew what hit him. “I never understood why the theory of relativity with its concepts and problems so far removed from practical life should for so long have met with a lively, or indeed passionate, resonance among broad circles of the public,” he wrote in 1942, at age 63. “What could have produced this great and persistent psychological effect? I never yet heard a truly convincing answer to this question.”

Yet when Einstein attended the Hollywood première of  City Lights  in 1931, the movie’s star and director, Charlie Chaplin, offered him an explanation: “They cheer me because they all understand me, and they cheer you because no one understands you.” Maybe Einstein achieved his peculiar brand of immortality not in spite of his inscrutability but because of it. Social scientist Bernard H. Gustin has suggested that an Einstein assumes godlike status because he is “thought to come into contact with what is essential in the universe.” Holton recently elaborated on this comment: “I believe this is precisely why so many who knew little about Einstein’s scientific writing flocked to catch a glimpse of him, and to this day feel somehow uplifted by contemplating his iconic image.”

The halo has helped maintain the myth, keeping Einstein a presence on magazine covers and newspaper front pages, on posters and postcards, coffee mugs, baseball caps, T-shirts, refrigerator magnets and, based on a Google search, 23,600 Internet sites. But what we’re celebrating this year is more than a myth. In reinventing relativity, Einstein also reinvented nothing less than the way we see the universe. For thousands of years, astronomers and mathematicians had studied the motions of bodies in the night sky, then searched for equations to match them. Einstein did the reverse. He started with idle musings and scratches on paper and wound up pointing toward phenomena previously unimaginable and still unfathomable. “The general theory of relativity is one man’s idea of what the universe ought to be like,” says Einstein scholar Arthur I. Miller of UniversityCollege, London. “And that’s pretty much what it turned out to be.” It’s this legacy of Einstein’s that the World Year of Physics is commemorating, this lasting contribution to the modern era: the triumph of mind over matter.

THE LAST WORD ON ENERGY It may be the world’s most famous equation, but what does E=mc2 actually mean?

Shortly after completing his paper on special relativity, in 1905, Einstein realized his equations applied to more than space and time. From the point of view of an observer standing still relative to an object moving very fast—approaching the speed of light—the object would appear to be gaining mass. And the greater its velocity—in other words the more energy that had been spent in getting it moving—the greater its apparent mass. Specifically, the measure of its energy would be equal to the measure of its mass multiplied by the speed of light squared.

The equation didn’t help scientists engineer an atomic bomb, but it does explain why smashing atoms can release mushroom clouds’ worth of power. The speed of light, or c, is a big number: 186,282 miles per second. Multiply it by itself, and the result is, well, a really big number: 34,700,983,524. Now multiply that number by even an extraordinarily minute amount of mass, such as what one might find in the nucleus of an atom, and the result is still an extraordinarily tremendous number. And that number is E, energy.

Prompted by two nuclear physicists, Einstein wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt on August 2, 1939, that “extremely powerful bombs” of a new type were now “conceivable.” Historians tend to think the letter played a “strictly subsidiary role” in the decision of the Allied powers to pursue the nuclear option, says physics historian Spencer Weart. But the fact that Einstein and, indirectly, his equation played any role whatsoever has forever linked a lifelong pacifist and utopian with mankind’s ability to destroy itself.

Einstein later realized that his assessment that German scientists would be capable of building an atomic bomb—the opinion that drove him to write to FDR—was mistaken. “If I had known that these fears were groundless,” he wrote to a friend late in life, “I would not have taken part in opening that Pandora’s box.” But open it now was, never to close, as Einstein himself had acknowledged elliptically, almost poetically, back in August 1945, when he first heard the news about Hiroshima. “Oh, Weh”—using the German word for pain. “And that’s that.”

A NEW VIEW OF GRAVITY Einstein’s vision of a man falling from a roof marked the beginning of a great struggle

Once while Einstein was working on the equations for general relativity, which would take him eight years to complete, he went mountain-climbing with the French-Polish chemist Marie Curie. Seemingly oblivious to the crevasses as well as to her difficulty in understanding his German, Einstein spent much of the time talking about gravitation. “You understand,” Einstein said to her, suddenly gripping her arm, “what I need to know is exactly what happens in an elevator when it falls into emptiness.”

In Einstein’s imagination, the man suspended midway between roof and earth was now inside an elevator. In a certain set of circumstances, the passenger would have no way of knowing whether he was experiencing gravity or upward acceleration. If the elevator were standing on the surface of the earth, the man would feel gravity’s force there, which causes falling objects to accelerate at a rate of 32 feet per second squared. But if the elevator were accelerating through deep space at that same rate, he would experience precisely the same downward force.

Einstein imagined a beam of light piercing the elevator. If the elevator were rising relative to the source of light, the beam would enter at a certain height on one side of the elevator and appear to curve on its way to a lower height on the opposite wall. Einstein then imagined that the elevator were stationary on the surface of the earth. Since he postulated that the two circumstances are the same, Einstein concluded that the same effect would have to hold true for both. In other words, gravity must bend light.

He wouldn’t have the math to support this idea until 1915, and he wouldn’t have the proof until the eclipse expeditions of 1919. But by then he was so confident of his calculations that when a student asked what he would have done if he’d heard the eclipse observations hadn’t validated his math, Einstein told her, “Then I would have been sorry for the dear Lord. The theory  is  correct.”

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Albert Einstein was a famous physicist. His research spanned from quantum mechanics to theories about gravity and motion. After publishing some groundbreaking papers, Einstein toured the world and gave speeches about his discoveries. In 1921 he won the Nobel Prize for Physics for his discovery of the photoelectric effect .

Albert Einstein is best known for his equation E = mc 2 , which states that energy and mass (matter) are the same thing, just in different forms. He is also known for his discovery of the photoelectric effect , for which he won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921. Einstein developed a theory of special and general relativity, which helped to complicate and expand upon theories that had been put forth by Isaac Newton over 200 years prior. 

Albert Einstein had a massive influence on contemporary physics. His theory of relativity shifted contemporary understanding of space completely. Along with his equation E = mc 2 , it also foreshadowed the creation of the atomic bomb . Einstein’s understanding of light as something which can function both as a wave and as a stream of particles became the basis for what is known today as quantum mechanics .

Albert Einstein was raised in a secular Jewish family and had one sister, Maja, who was two years younger than him. In 1903 Einstein married Milena Maric, a Serbian physics student whom he had met at school in Zürich. They had three children: a daughter, named Lieserl, and two sons, named Hans and Eduard. After a period of unrest, Einstein and Maric divorced in 1919. Einstein, during his marriage, had begun an affair with his cousin Elsa Löwenthal. They were married in 1919, the same year he divorced Maric.

How did Albert Einstein die?

After suffering an abdominal aortic aneurysm rupture several days before, Albert Einstein died on April 18, 1955, at age 76.

In December 1926 Albert Einstein wrote to Max Born that “[t]he theory produces a good deal but hardly brings us closer to the secret of the Old One. I am at all events convinced that He does not play dice.” Einstein was reacting to Born’s probabilistic interpretation of quantum mechanics and expressing a deterministic view of the world. Learn more.

Albert Einstein (born March 14, 1879, Ulm , Württemberg, Germany—died April 18, 1955, Princeton , New Jersey , U.S.) was a German-born physicist who developed the special and general theories of relativity and won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921 for his explanation of the photoelectric effect . Einstein is generally considered the most influential physicist of the 20th century.

(Read Einstein’s 1926 Britannica essay on space-time.)

Einstein’s parents were secular , middle-class Jews. His father, Hermann Einstein, was originally a featherbed salesman and later ran an electrochemical factory with moderate success. His mother, the former Pauline Koch, ran the family household. He had one sister, Maria (who went by the name Maja), born two years after Albert.

Einstein would write that two “wonders” deeply affected his early years. The first was his encounter with a compass at age five. He was mystified that invisible forces could deflect the needle. This would lead to a lifelong fascination with invisible forces. The second wonder came at age 12 when he discovered a book of geometry , which he devoured , calling it his “sacred little geometry book.”

Einstein became deeply religious at age 12, even composing several songs in praise of God and chanting religious songs on the way to school. This began to change, however, after he read science books that contradicted his religious beliefs. This challenge to established authority left a deep and lasting impression. At the Luitpold Gymnasium , Einstein often felt out of place and victimized by a Prussian-style educational system that seemed to stifle originality and creativity. One teacher even told him that he would never amount to anything.

Yet another important influence on Einstein was a young medical student, Max Talmud (later Max Talmey), who often had dinner at the Einstein home. Talmud became an informal tutor, introducing Einstein to higher mathematics and philosophy . A pivotal turning point occurred when Einstein was 16 years old. Talmud had earlier introduced him to a children’s science series by Aaron Bernstein, Naturwissenschaftliche Volksbucher (1867–68; Popular Books on Physical Science ), in which the author imagined riding alongside electricity that was traveling inside a telegraph wire. Einstein then asked himself the question that would dominate his thinking for the next 10 years: What would a light beam look like if you could run alongside it? If light were a wave , then the light beam should appear stationary, like a frozen wave. Even as a child, though, he knew that stationary light waves had never been seen, so there was a paradox . Einstein also wrote his first “scientific paper” at that time (“The Investigation of the State of Aether in Magnetic Fields”).

Einstein’s education was disrupted by his father’s repeated failures at business. In 1894, after his company failed to get an important contract to electrify the city of Munich , Hermann Einstein moved to Milan to work with a relative. Einstein was left at a boardinghouse in Munich and expected to finish his education. Alone, miserable, and repelled by the looming prospect of military duty when he turned 16, Einstein ran away six months later and landed on the doorstep of his surprised parents. His parents realized the enormous problems that he faced as a school dropout and draft dodger with no employable skills. His prospects did not look promising.

Fortunately, Einstein could apply directly to the Eidgenössische Polytechnische Schule (“Swiss Federal Polytechnic School”; in 1911, following expansion in 1909 to full university status, it was renamed the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, or “Swiss Federal Institute of Technology”) in Zürich without the equivalent of a high school diploma if he passed its stiff entrance examinations. His marks showed that he excelled in mathematics and physics , but he failed at French , chemistry , and biology . Because of his exceptional math scores, he was allowed into the polytechnic on the condition that he first finish his formal schooling. He went to a special high school run by Jost Winteler in Aarau , Switzerland , and graduated in 1896. He also renounced his German citizenship at that time. (He was stateless until 1901, when he was granted Swiss citizenship.) He became lifelong friends with the Winteler family, with whom he had been boarding. (Winteler’s daughter, Marie, was Einstein’s first love; Einstein’s sister, Maja, would eventually marry Winteler’s son Paul; and his close friend Michele Besso would marry their eldest daughter, Anna.)

Einstein would recall that his years in Zürich were some of the happiest years of his life. He met many students who would become loyal friends, such as Marcel Grossmann, a mathematician, and Besso, with whom he enjoyed lengthy conversations about space and time. He also met his future wife, Mileva Maric, a fellow physics student from Serbia.

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Essay on Albert Einstein: The Father of Modern Physics

• Updated on  
• Nov 30, 2023

Science is a vast field in which thousands of scientists contributed to exploring and discovering new theories. One of the most renowned and influential scientists is Albert Einstein . He was a German theoretical physicist popularly known as the “ Father of Modern Physics ”. Albert Einstein was born on 14 March 1879 and devoted his life to studying physics. He is famous for the theory of relativity which explains the effect of speed on mass, time, and space. He included the speed of light in the formula of the theory of relativity. Stay tuned and read this article to get a sample essay on Albert Einstein and learn more about his life and contributions to the field of physics!

Table of Contents

• 1 Short Essay on Albert Einstein in 100 Words
• 2 Essay on Albert Einstein in 150 Words
• 3 Essay on Albert Einstein in 300 Words

Also Read: Greatest Scientist of All Times

Short Essay on Albert Einstein in 100 Words

Albert Einstein is the greatest scientist in the world. His theories are still studied in all the academic institutions. He laid the foundation of Modern physics through his famous discoveries. Albert Einstein was born on 14 March 1879 in Ulm. His family ran a shop there and his father Herman Einstein wanted him to run a business but he was strongly inclined and fascinated by the science.

His family shifted from Munich to Milan in 1890, where Einstein received Technical High School Education. At school, he used to have fights with the authority because of the teaching pattern. He believed that due to strict rules and teaching patterns, students could not think creatively and their growth could have been improved. Due to this behavior, he left the academic institutions without the completion of his degree many times. 

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Essay on Albert Einstein in 150 Words

Albert Einstein was an intelligent person. At the age of 12 he started learning Calculus on his own and in no less than 2 years he mastered the concepts of Integral and Differential Calculus. Post completion of his degree in engineering, he got a job in the Swiss Patent Office in 1902. He worked there as a patent clerk and devoted most of his time to theoretical physics. Along with work he also finished his Postdoctoral degree and became a professor at the University of Zurich . 

In 1905, Albert Einstein published 4 papers that had a revolutionary impact on the history of physics, that are Brownian motion, special relativity, photoelectric effect, and equivalence of mass and energy. The famous theory of relativity is referred to as the E=mc 2 equation.

His theory of relativity was used in making the atomic bomb that was dropped on Japan. However, Albert Einstein was against violence and war. He proposed a new theory of relativity which neglects the relativity rules formulated by Isaac Newton.

According to the new Einstein theory of relativity, light and time are not constant. He proposed that time travel can be done if we follow the speed of light. Although, no spacecraft has been designed to date which can travel with the speed of light.

Also Read: How to Become a Physicist in India?

Essay on Albert Einstein in 300 Words

Albert Einstein, the famous and most influential scientist of the 19th century revolutionized the understanding of space, time, energy, and mass. His equation of relativity E=mc 2 equation has a great impact on the development of nuclear science .

He was born in Ulm and devoted his entire life to studying and exploring science. During his childhood, he faced some difficulty in understanding languages and it is believed that he suffered from dyslexia.  

He developed a strong inclination toward science after his father gifted him a compass whose magnetic needle pointed toward the North.

When he was in college, he used to oppose the way of teaching and was suspended from the institute many times. He believed that strict rules and regulations restrict the thinking ability of the students which kills creativity.

In 1905, he completed his PhD degree from the University of Zurich. Initially, he worked as a Patent clerk in Bern Switzerland, and later became a professor.

He made several discoveries and published 4 papers in the journal Annalen der Physik. His papers marked a revolution in Modern Physics. In 1921, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for photoelectric effect. 

His most famous work is the Theory of Relativity. This theory explains about the connection between space and time and how gravity is caused by the curvature of spacetime. It has applications in the fields of particle physics, cosmology, and astronomy.

In 1515, Albert Einstein proposed the General theory of relativity which is a complete version of the theory of relativity he made some modifications, and this theory has its proof through the results obtained from many experiments. 

Brownian motion is also one of the discoveries made by Albert Einstein which tells about the random motion of particles in the fluid. 

Albert Einstein was one of the four signatories who were against World War II. He was against Nazis and opposed Hitler in Germany. Due to this, he had to emigrate to the United States in 1933. 

He died on 18 April 1955 in Princeton, New Jersey, and worked till his last time. His discoveries have a great impact on the world today. The theories he proposed is still taught in academic institution and he is remembered as the greatest scientist of all time. 

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Ans: Albert Einstein, the famous physicist who gave the famous theory of relativity, and the photoelectric effect won the Nobel Prize in 1921 for Physics. He was awarded the prize, especially for the photoelectric effect. Einstein had inspired the entire world to think creatively and follow the lead to discover something new.

Ans: Albert Einstein was a German theoretical physicist who was born on 14 March 1879 in Ulm, Germany . He proposed the famous theory of relativity and the theory of photoelectric effect. Einstein started working as a patent clerk and initially after completing PhD became a Professor at the University of Zurich. In 1921, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics. 

Ans: 10 facts about Albert Einstein: -Albert Einstein was born in 1879 in Germany but lived in Italy, Switzerland and Czechia. Later he moved to the US due to World War II . -He built a strong inclination towards science after receiving a compass as a gift from his father. -In his childhood, he faced difficulty with understanding languages.  -Albert Einstein suffered from dyslexia but overcame it and made some of the famous discoveries in science.  -At the age of 16, he wrote his first scholarly paper that explained magnetism. -He published 4 papers in 1905. -Einstein won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921. -In 1933, he shifted to the US, in Princeton, New Jersey because of the World War II condition. -Hitler was against Einstein, and the Nazis seized power in Germany. -Albert Einstein worked till his last breath and died at the age of 76 on 18 April 1955.

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Paragraph on Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein is regarded as one the famous scientists of the 20th century and the greatest physicists of all time. People usually spell the name of Einstein to compare the most intelligent children or adults. Every day millions of people take birth and die but very few among them are remembered by the people till generations. They are remembered because of their remarkable contributions or deeds. It states that everybody has their own ability. Scientists are believed to be the people who are really crazy and believe in doing extraordinary things. Albert Einstein was also among such crazy geniuses. He was really an outstanding personality and his way of working was totally different from the other scientists of the world.

Short and Long Paragraphs on Albert Einstein

The topic Albert Einstein is very important for school students and competitive exam aspirants. Students often get this topic in the exam to write an essay, paragraph, project, assignment, etc. They often find difficulty in writing essays on such topics. They could not understand how the essay, paragraph, assignment, etc had to be started. In the same context, I have provided some sets of long and short paragraphs on the topic of Albert Einstein. I hope that these paragraphs would be beneficial to all the students and readers in giving them an idea of writing essays, assignments, projects, etc on this topic.

Paragraph 1- 100 Words (Albert Einstein: A Genius Scientist)

Albert Einstein was a genius personality who had brought wonders in the field of Science and especially in Physics. He was the inventor of different important theories and equations in Physics. The invention of these important theories and equations in physics had brought a wobble in the world of Physics. It is because of his remarkable inventions and findings in science he had been stated as the greatest scientist of the 20th century. After his death, his brain has been preserved for conducting research and finding out the reason for his super intelligence. His entire life, beautiful quotes and sayings are the source of inspiration for the younger generations.

Paragraph 2- 120 Words (Albert Einstein’s Outstanding Contribution To Field Of Science)

The name Albert Einstein refers to a great physicist and a famous scientist of the 20th century. He was also stated as the most intelligent human being on the earth. It was his intelligence that helped in developing the theory of relativity, mass-energy equivalence, the law of photoelectric effect in the field of physics. He also had an outstanding contribution in relativity and quantum mechanics that are regarded as two important aspects of modern physics. He had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in the year 1921 for developing the ‘photoelectric effect’ .His principles and findings have become a milestone in the field of science. His discoveries have fostered the innovation of several modern technologies and tools. He had also been awarded several awards for his outstanding discoveries in the field of science.

Paragraph 3- 150 Words (His Love For Physics And Mathematics)

“Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value”. This is one of the famous inspirational quotes of the great and successful American scientist Albert Einstein. I think that you all would have heard of this great physicist and his discoveries in the field of science. His discovery of the theory of relativity has been a significant contribution to physics. He was not good in all subjects but was greatly interested in mathematics and physics. He was called a child genius because he was capable of solving hard problems of mathematics at a very small age. He had poor performance in subjects other than mathematics and physics; therefore he was disliked by his schools.

He had a different perspective towards nature and its phenomenon. His mind was full of curiosity and thus he was always interested in doing and knowing about new things. He had a child-like curiosity even after he grew older and this was the greatest reason behind the discoveries of his scientific theories.

Paragraph 4- 200 Words (Albert Einstein’s Curiosity For Nature)

We all would have heard about different scientists and discoveries in the world. The name Albert Einstein brings the image of an outstanding and genius personality in our mind. He was the mastermind behind the discovery of several important theories and equations in physics. He had published more than 300 research papers in his scientific career.

Inquisitive Towards Nature

Albert Einstein was different from the normal children from his childhood. He was not able to mix with other children and was not interested in playing with them. He preferred to live alone in a peaceful environment. He used to play only with his sister and used to play the game that gave some life lessons. He was a nature lover and always wanted to be close to nature. He loved seeing the activities happening in nature. He was also very curious to know the exact reason behind every phenomenon happening in nature.

Successful Scientist Even After Speaking Inability In Childhood

It is evident that Albert Einstein was a Nobel laureate famous scientist of the 20th century. Do you know that during his childhood this great scientist had the speaking inability? The parents of Albert Einstein were worried after his birth. It was because his head was bigger than the entire body. They thought that he was suffering from some kind of illness. Gradually, the structure of his head started improving. Later, he was not able to speak till the age of four years of age. He was facing a problem in understanding the language and therefore he could not speak till he became four years old. The same child with speaking inability grew up to become the scientist who brought miracles in the field of science.

Paragraph 5- 250 Words (An Account on Early Life of Albert Einstein)

Albert Einstein is regarded as a renowned mathematician and scientist in the world. He had a very creative mind and his creativity resulted in remarkable inventions in the field of science. His outstanding inventions in physics have totally changed the entire world. He was listed among the top hundred influential people of the 20th century. He was also given the title of “Person of the Century” by Time Magazine in the year 1999.

An Account On Early Life Of Albert Einstein

The great scientist Albert Einstein was born in a middle-class Jewish family in Germany on 14th of March in the year 1879. His father’s name was Hermann Einstein and he was a salesman and engineer. His mother’s name was Pauline Einstein and she was from a rich family background. Albert Einstein was the eldest among the two children of his parents. Hermann Einstein left Ulm city with his family in Germany in the year 1880 and settled in Munich city of Germany. He started a company of electrical equipment in Munich with his brother. Albert Einstein tied a knot to Mileva Maric in the year 1903 at the age of 24 years.

• Schooling And Education-  Albert Einstein never loved going to school. He started his education at the age of five years in Catholic Elementary School in Munich. Later when he attained the age of 8 years he left Catholic elementary school and joined Luitpold Gymnasium for completing his primary and secondary education. His father wanted him to pursue his career in Electrical engineering but Einstein was not interested in doing the same. It is because he did not have the desire to attend the classes anymore. According to him, curiosity and learning instinct is most important for every student and it is not achieved by the rote learning method followed in schools and colleges. He was not happy with classroom learning and felt as if he was taught forcefully.
• Secondary Education-  Albert Einstein, at the age of 16 years left his schooling and joined a diploma course at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. He appeared for an entrance test and passed only mathematics and physics. He was given admission to this college on the condition that he had to complete his schooling and thus in this way he completed his graduation in the year 1896. Finally, his scientific career initiated from the year 1900 resulted in fascinating discoveries and research papers in the field of science.

I have tried to provide every detail of this topic in short and long paragraphs stated above. I hope that you would have loved and enjoyed reading the same.

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FAQs: Frequently Asked Questions on Albert Einstein

Ans.  Albert Einstein gave the Theory of Relativity in 1905.

Ans.  Israel is the country in the world that had requested Albert Einstein to become its second president.

Ans.  E=mc2 was Albert Einstein’s most famous equation.

Ans.  Albert Einstein shifted to the USA in the year 1933.

Ans.  The great scientist Albert Einstein had the citizenship of Germany, Switzerland and the USA.

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The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 1

• Albert Einstein

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The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 1: The Early Years, 1879-1902

• John Stachel
• Robert Schulmann
• Collected Papers of Albert Einstein

• Volume 1, English Translation Supplement
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Volume 1 presents important new material on the young Einstein. Over half the documents made available here were discovered by the editors, including a significant group of over fifty letters that Einstein exchanged with Mileva Maric, his fellow student and future wife. These letters, together with other previously unpublished documents, provide an entirely new view of Einstein’s youth. The documents in the volume also foreshadow the emergence of his extraordinary creative power. In them is manifested his intense commitment to scientific work and his interest in certain themes that proved to be central to his thinking during the next decade. We can follow, for example, the beginnings of his preoccupation with the electrodynamics of moving bodies that was to lead to the development of this special theory of relativity. For the first time it can be seen how closely he followed such contemporary developments in physics as Planck’s work on radiation theory and Drude’s work on the electron theory of metals. In addition to all of Einstein’s known correspondence and other writings from this period, the volume includes the relevant portions of all third-party letters and other contemporary documents that provide additional information about his secondary schooling at the Aargau Cantonal School; his four years at the Swiss Federal Plytechnical School, or the ETH; and his search for a job after graduation. Included in the volume are those sections of an unpublished biography by Einstein’s sister, Maja Winteler-Einstein, which deal with his early years; his extensive notes on a physics course he took at the ETH; and previously unpublished photographs of the young Einstein and his teachers and friends. Documents in Volume 1 portray Einstein’s experiences during the two stressful years after his graduation from the ETH in Zurich. Denied a position as an Assistant at the ETH, he lived a hand-to-mouth existence while he looked for a post at other universities; then he attempted to find a secondary-school post, and finally sought a nonacademic job. Tension with his parents over his plans to marry Mileva Maric is evident throughout this period. With the help of a friend, he finally found work at the Swiss Patent Office, the haven where he would spend the next seven years. Freed from his financial worries, he entered on one of the most productive periods of his life, as the next volume, Writings (1901-1910), will document.

"The volume is attractive, the editing perceptive and informative without being intrusive; the translation, an entirely appropriate and insightful compromise between the literary and the literal."— International Journal of Theoretical Physics

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100 Words Essay On Albert Einstein In English

�A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.�

This quote was famously made by Albert Einstein, he was the greatest theoretical physicist known. At around his time, he was known to be highly influential. He is a great scientist who is known for developing the theory of relativity and making major contributions to quantum physics. In recognition of his immense work, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1922. 

He is the one who had said �Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is to not stop questioning.�

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