Albert Einstein (1879–1955) was born in Germany. Nothing in his early development suggested genius; even at the age of 9 he did not speak clearly, and his parents feared that he might be handicapped. When asked what profession Einstein should follow, his school principal replied, “It doesn’t matter; he’ll never make a success of anything.” When he was 10, Einstein entered the Luitpold Gymnasium (high school), which was typical of German schools of that time in being harshly disciplinarian. There he developed a deep suspicion of authority and a skepticism that encouraged him to question and doubt—valuable qualities in a No. In 1905, while a patent clerk in Switzerland, Einstein published a paper explaining the photoelectric effect via the quantum theory. For this revolutionary thinking, he received a Nobel Prize in 1921. Highly regarded by this time, he worked in Germany until 1933, when Hitler’s persecution of the Jews forced him to come to the United States. He worked at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey, until his death in 1955. Einstein was undoubtedly the greatest physicist of our age. Even if someone else had derived the theory of relativity, his other work would have ensured his ranking as the second greatest physicist of his time. Our concepts of space and time were radically changed by ideas he first proposed when he was 26 years old. From then until the end of his life, he attempted unsuccessfully to find a single unifying theory that would explain all physical events
Posted on: Tue, 18 Mar 2014 19:59:35 +0000
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