Albert Einstein
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Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879 - April 18, 1955) was a physicist and a scientist. He received the Nobel Prize in 1921 for Physics.
Einstein is famous for his theories about light, matter, gravity, space, and time, which helps scientists to understand these things much better than they had before. His theories are called the theory of special relativity and the theory of general relativity. His most famous equation is E = mc2. It means that energy and mass are different forms of the same thing, and that the amount of energy in a piece of mass is the same as the amount of the mass multiplied by the speed of light times itself (a very big number).
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[change] His life
Einstein was born at Ulm in Württemberg, Germany on March 14, 1879. His family was Jewish but was not very religious. Albert went to a Roman Catholic school. He was not a good student, and many people thought him to be not very smart. Albert also didn't talk until he was about three, which is very unusual. When ALbert was around four, his father gave him a magnetic compass. He was very interested in trying to understand how an invisible force could make the needle move and became interested in studying science and mathematics. This compass inspired him to explore the world.
When he became older, he went to a school in Switzerland. After he graduated, he got a job in the patent office there. While he was working there, he wrote the papers that made him famous as a great scientist.Einstein had two heavily-disabled children with his first wife Mileva. Liesel suffered from Down syndrom and was brought to her Serbian grandparents. She has been never heard of again. Eduard Einstein was diagnosed with a severe mental illness spending decades in hospitals. Einstein's brain was found severely unusual for a genius. Geniuses' brains are around 1500 to 1600 cm³. There is an indirect connection between brain size and the size of the neopallium especially important for the brain's higher functions. However ,Einstein's brain weight was under-average and showed further signs of degeneration (e.g.Sylvian fissure).
In 1917, Einstein became very sick with an illness that almost killed him. His cousin Elsa Lowenthal then nursed him back to health. After this, Einstein divorced Mileva, and married Elsa on June 2, 1919.
Just before the start of World War I, he moved back to Germany, and became director of a school there. He lived in Berlin until the Nazi government came to power. The Nazis hated people who were Jewish or who came from Jewish families. They accused Einstein of helping to create "Jewish physics," and German physicists tried to prove that his theories were wrong. Einstein moved to the United States to Princeton, New Jersey after feeling the heat of Nazi Germany and in 1940 he became a United States citizen.
During World War II, Einstein was one of the scientists who wrote to the current U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt, to say that the United States should invent an atomic bomb before the Nazi government could invent one first.
Einstein died on April 18, 1955 of heart disease.
[change] Beliefs
Many scientists only care about their work, but Einstein also spoke and wrote often about politics and world peace. He liked the ideas of socialism and of having only one government for the whole world. He also worked for Zionism, the effort to try to create the new country of Israel.
Einstein's family was Jewish, but Einstein never practiced this religion seriously. He liked the ideas of the Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza and also thought that Buddhism was a good religion.
Even though Einstein thought of many ideas that helped scientists understand the world much better, he disagreed with many scientific theories that were developed later in his life. Many scientific theories discuss things that we cannot know for certain, but only as probabilities. Einstein didn't like these kinds of theories; he thought that it should be possible to understand anything, if we had the correct theory. He once said, "I do not believe that God plays dice with the Universe."
Because Einstein helped science so much, his name is now used for several different things. A unit used in photochemistry was named for him. It is equal to Avogadro's number multiplied by the energy of one photon of light. The chemical element Einsteinium is named after the scientist as well. In slang, we sometimes call a very smart person an "Einstein."
One of his inspiring sayings is "There are two ways to live your life, one is as though nothing is a miracle, the other is as though everything is a miracle."
There is still a strong criticism of Einstein. Ronald William Clark says that Einstein hated Germany and the Germans since his youth. G.O.Mueller wrote a whole encyclopedia refuting Einstein's relativity. G.O.Mueller , Aristotle, Kant, Leibniz say space and time are categories of perception, not distortable "things" , and not joined together.The speed of light could be higher. Paul Dirac and others thought that constants can change over time, too (e.g. gravitation).G.O.Mueller lists about 4000 Einstein-critical works since 1905, rallying worldwide for rethinking relativity.
[change] Einstein Quotes
Albert Einstein said many famous quotes. Some of these are:
1. "Imagination is more important than knowledge."
2. "Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen."
3. "If A equals success, then the formula is _ A = _ X + _ Y + _ Z. _ X is work. _ Y is play. _ Z is keep your mouth shut."
4. "The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax."
5. "Teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift and not as a hard duty."
6. "Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing."
7. "An empty stomach is not a good political adviser."
8. "I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious."
9. "Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school."
10. "Dear mother! Today a joyful notice. H. A. Lorentz has telegraphed me that the English expeditions have really proven the deflection of light at the sun."
11. "It is harder to crack a prejudice than an atom."
12. "It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer."
13. "Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value."
14. "The world is a dangerous place. Not because of those who do terrible things. But because of those who let them do it."
15. "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."
16. "The only real valuable thing is intuition."
17. "A person starts to live when he can live outside himself."
18. "Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character."
19. "I never think of the future. It comes soon enough."
20. "The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility."
21. "Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing."
22. "Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."
23. "Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction."
24. "Gravitation can not be held responsible for people falling in love"
25. "Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts."
26. "The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking."
27. "I have no particular talent. I am merely inquisitive."
28. "It's not that I'm so smart , it's just that I stay with problems longer ."
29. "If I had my life to live over again, I'd be a plumber."
30. "The devil has put a penalty on all things we enjoy in life. Either we suffer in health or we suffer in soul or we get fat."
31. "The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives."
32. "A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy."
33. "The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there's no risk of accident for someone who's dead."
34. "Without deep reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people ."
35. "A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of others ."
36. "Only a life lived for others is a life worth while ."
37. "Two things inspire me to awe -- the starry heavens above and the moral universe within ."
38. "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
39. "Gravitation can not be held responsible for people falling in love"
40. "Joy in looking and comprehending is nature's most beautiful gift."
41. "Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing."
42. "Strange is our Situation Here Upon Earth"
43. "Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts."
44. "Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."
45. "I never think of the future. It comes soon enough."
46. "Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character."
47. "Perfections of mean and confusion of goals seem -in my opinion- to characterize our age. "
[change] Other websites
- G.O.Mueller[1]
