Albert Einstein was a renowned physicist who developed the Theory of General Relativity and won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921. He viewed space, time, matter, and energy as interconnected and published four papers in 1905 that became the foundation for modern physics. Einstein faced skepticism and campaigns to discredit his theories due to his Jewish ancestry. He left Germany for the United States in 1933 and worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton until his death in 1955.
Albert Einstein is widely considered to be the most famous and accomplished scientist of the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2015 for his work on the photoelectric effect and achieved worldwide fame for his Theory of General Relativity, which he published in 1921. In 1915 he was named Person of the Century by TIME magazine .
Einstein is best known for his general theory of relativity, an improved model of reality that succeeded the less accurate Newtonian model. He described the fundamental connections between space and time, matter and energy. He viewed space and time as manifestations of the same underlying thing, as well as matter and energy. Because his theories were so complicated and controversial, it sometimes took a decade or more before they were accepted by the scientific community. Furthermore, due to his Jewish ancestry, his time in Germany during the rise of German nationalism made him the target of campaigns to discredit his theories.
The future physicist was born in 1879 in Ulm, now part of Germany. He attended school in Munich until 1895, when, at the age of 16, he dropped out of secondary school a year early. Albert Einstein applied to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, but failed the liberal arts portion of the entrance exam. This led him to return to high school in Aarau, Switzerland, where he graduated in 1896. After completing high school, he applied again to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and was accepted. He graduated in 1900 and in 1902 went to work for a Swiss patent office.
Albert Einstein continued to pursue physics throughout his work at the patent office, receiving his doctorate in 1905. That same year, he published 4 papers which later served as the foundation for much of modern physics. The topics he addressed were Brownian motion, the photoelectric effect and special relativity. The theory that sparked the most discussion in the following decades was his special theory of relativity, which explained why the speed of light appears constant to any observer, despite their speed.
From 1906 onwards, he became increasingly involved in academia, working at the universities of Zurich and Berlin, where in 1914 he became director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics. In 1915 he described his famous theory of general relativity, which was viewed with skepticism until it was confirmed experimentally in 1919.
In 1933, Adolf Hitler came to power and Albert Einstein was forced to leave Germany for the United States, where he went to work at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton; and in 1940 he became a US citizen. He remained at Princeton until his death in 1955, working on a theory of physics that unified gravity with the other forces of nature. He never succeeded. Today, physicists’ best bet for realizing Einstein’s dream, according to many scientists, lies in the still largely hypothetical superstring theory.
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