140 Facts About Einstein

Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist, widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest and most influential physicists of all time.

Einstein is best known for developing the theory of relativity, but he made important contributions to the development of the theory of quantum mechanics.

Einstein's work is known for its influence on the philosophy of science.

Einstein 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", a pivotal step in the development of quantum theory.

Einstein thought that the laws of classical mechanics could no longer be reconciled with those of the electromagnetic field, which led him to develop his special theory of relativity.

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Einstein then extended the theory to gravitational fields; he published a paper on general relativity in 1916, introducing his theory of gravitation.

Einstein continued to deal with problems of statistical mechanics and quantum theory, which led to his explanations of particle theory and the motion of molecules.

Einstein investigated the thermal properties of light and the quantum theory of radiation, which laid the foundation of the photon theory of light.

Einstein was born in the German Empire, but moved to Switzerland in 1895, forsaking his German citizenship the following year.

In 1914, Einstein moved to Berlin in order to join the Prussian Academy of Sciences and the Humboldt University of Berlin.

In 1917, Einstein became director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics; he became a German citizen again, this time Prussian.

In 1933, while Einstein was visiting the United States, Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany.

Einstein supported the Allies but generally denounced the idea of nuclear weapons.

Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, in the Kingdom of Wurttemberg in the German Empire, on 14 March 1879 into a family of secular Ashkenazi Jews.

Einstein's parents were Hermann Einstein, a salesman and engineer, and Pauline Koch.

In search of business, the Einstein family moved to Italy, first to Milan and a few months later to Pavia.

Einstein's father intended for him to pursue electrical engineering, but Einstein clashed with the authorities and resented the school's regimen and teaching method.

Einstein later wrote that the spirit of learning and creative thought was lost in strict rote learning.

Einstein excelled at math and physics from a young age, reaching a mathematical level years ahead of his peers.

The 12-year-old Einstein taught himself algebra and Euclidean geometry over a single summer.

Einstein independently discovered his own original proof of the Pythagorean theorem aged 12.

Einstein started teaching himself calculus at 12, and as a 14-year-old he says he had "mastered integral and differential calculus".

In 1895, at the age of 16, Einstein took the entrance examinations for the Swiss Federal polytechnic school in Zurich .

Einstein failed to reach the required standard in the general part of the examination, but obtained exceptional grades in physics and mathematics.

In January 1896, with his father's approval, Einstein renounced his citizenship in the German Kingdom of Wurttemberg to avoid military service.

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Einstein's was the only woman among the six students in the mathematics and physics section of the teaching diploma course.

Einstein wrote in his letters to Maric that he preferred studying alongside her.

In 1900, Einstein passed the exams in Maths and Physics and was awarded a Federal teaching diploma.

Early correspondence between Einstein and Maric was discovered and published in 1987 which revealed that the couple had a daughter named "Lieserl", born in early 1902 in Novi Sad where Maric was staying with her parents.

In May 1904, their son Hans Albert Einstein was born in Bern, Switzerland.

In letters revealed in 2015, Einstein wrote to his early love Marie Winteler about his marriage and his strong feelings for her.

Einstein married Lowenthal in 1919, after having had a relationship with her since 1912.

In 1923, Einstein fell in love with a secretary named Betty Neumann, the niece of a close friend, Hans Muhsam.

Later, after the death of his second wife Elsa, Einstein was briefly in a relationship with Margarita Konenkova.

Einstein's mother cared for him and he was committed to asylums for several periods, finally, after her death, being committed permanently to Burgholzli, the Psychiatric University Hospital in Zurich.

Einstein acquired Swiss citizenship in February 1901, but was not conscripted for medical reasons.

Einstein evaluated patent applications for a variety of devices including a gravel sorter and an electromechanical typewriter.

On 30 April 1905 Einstein completed his dissertation, A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions with Alfred Kleiner, serving as pro-forma advisor.

Einstein's thesis was accepted in July 1905, and Einstein was awarded a PhD on 15 January 1906.

Einstein became a full professor at the German Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague in April 1911, accepting Austrian citizenship in the Austro-Hungarian Empire to do so.

Einstein studied continuum mechanics, the molecular theory of heat, and the problem of gravitation, on which he worked with mathematician and friend Marcel Grossmann.

Einstein assumed his position with the academy, and Berlin University, after moving into his Dahlem apartment on 1 April 1914.

In 1916, Einstein was elected president of the German Physical Society .

In 1911, Einstein used his 1907 Equivalence principle to calculate the deflection of light from another star by the Sun's gravity.

In 1913, Einstein improved upon those calculations by using Riemannian space-time to represent the gravity field.

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Einstein was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1921.

Einstein received the Copley Medal from the Royal Society in 1925.

Einstein visited New York City for the first time on 2 April 1921, where he received an official welcome by Mayor John Francis Hylan, followed by three weeks of lectures and receptions.

Einstein went on to deliver several lectures at Columbia University and Princeton University, and in Washington, he accompanied representatives of the National Academy of Sciences on a visit to the White House.

Einstein published an essay, "My First Impression of the U S A ", in July 1921, in which he tried briefly to describe some characteristics of Americans, much as had Alexis de Tocqueville, who published his own impressions in Democracy in America .

In Einstein's talk to the audience, he expressed happiness that the Jewish people were beginning to be recognized as a force in the world.

Einstein visited Spain for two weeks in 1923, where he briefly met Santiago Ramon y Cajal and received a diploma from King Alfonso XIII naming him a member of the Spanish Academy of Sciences.

From 1922 to 1932, Einstein was a member of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations in Geneva, a body created to promote international exchange between scientists, researchers, teachers, artists, and intellectuals.

Einstein's visit was initiated by Jorge Duclout and Mauricio Nirenstein with the support of several Argentine scholars, including Julio Rey Pastor, Jakob Laub, and Leopoldo Lugones.

In December 1930, Einstein visited America for the second time, originally intended as a two-month working visit as a research fellow at the California Institute of Technology.

Einstein next traveled to California, where he met Caltech president and Nobel laureate Robert A Millikan.

Einstein's friendship with Millikan was "awkward", as Millikan "had a penchant for patriotic militarism", where Einstein was a pronounced pacifist.

Walter Isaacson, Einstein's biographer, described this as "one of the most memorable scenes in the new era of celebrity".

In February 1933, while on a visit to the United States, Einstein knew he could not return to Germany with the rise to power of the Nazis under Germany's new chancellor, Adolf Hitler.

Einstein was now without a permanent home, unsure where he would live and work, and equally worried about the fate of countless other scientists still in Germany.

Einstein rented a house in De Haan, Belgium, where he lived for a few months.

Locker-Lampson took Einstein to meet Winston Churchill at his home, and later, Austen Chamberlain and former Prime Minister Lloyd George.

Einstein asked them to help bring Jewish scientists out of Germany.

Einstein later contacted leaders of other nations, including Turkey's Prime Minister, Ismet Inonu, to whom he wrote in September 1933 requesting placement of unemployed German-Jewish scientists.

On 3 October 1933, Einstein delivered a speech on the importance of academic freedom before a packed audience at the Royal Albert Hall in London, with The Times reporting he was wildly cheered throughout.

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Einstein had offers from several European universities, including Christ Church, Oxford, where he stayed for three short periods between May 1931 and June 1933 and was offered a five-year research fellowship, but in 1935, he arrived at the decision to remain permanently in the United States and apply for citizenship.

Einstein was one of the four first selected at the new Institute, where he soon developed a close friendship with Godel.

Einstein was asked to lend his support by writing a letter, with Szilard, to President Roosevelt, recommending the US pay attention and engage in its own nuclear weapons research.

Einstein recognized the "right of individuals to say and think what they pleased" without social barriers.

Einstein joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Princeton, where he campaigned for the civil rights of African Americans.

Einstein considered racism America's "worst disease", seeing it as "handed down from one generation to the next".

When Einstein offered to be a character witness for Du Bois, the judge decided to drop the case.

In 1946, Einstein visited Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, a historically black college, where he was awarded an honorary degree.

Einstein has said, "Being a Jew myself, perhaps I can understand and empathize with how black people feel as victims of discrimination".

Einstein was a figurehead leader in helping establish the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which opened in 1925 and was among its first Board of Governors.

Einstein felt that the waves of arriving Jews of the Aliyah could live alongside existing Arabs in Palestine.

Einstein declined, and wrote in his response that he was "deeply moved", and "at once saddened and ashamed" that he could not accept it.

Einstein developed an appreciation for music at an early age.

Einstein's mother played the piano reasonably well and wanted her son to learn the violin, not only to instill in him a love of music but to help him assimilate into German culture.

Einstein is sometimes erroneously credited as the editor of the 1937 edition of the Kochel catalog of Mozart's work; that edition was prepared by Alfred Einstein, who may have been a distant relation.

In 1918, Einstein was one of the founding members of the German Democratic Party, a liberal party.

Einstein strongly advocated the idea of a democratic global government that would check the power of nation-states in the framework of a world federation.

Einstein was deeply impressed by Mahatma Gandhi, with whom he exchanged written letters.

Einstein described Gandhi as "a role model for the generations to come".

Einstein spoke of his spiritual outlook in a wide array of original writings and interviews.

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Einstein said he had sympathy for the impersonal pantheistic God of Baruch Spinoza's philosophy.

Einstein did not believe in a personal god who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings, a view which he described as naive.

Einstein clarified that "I am not an atheist", preferring to call himself an agnostic, or a "deeply religious nonbeliever".

Einstein was primarily affiliated with non-religious humanist and Ethical Culture groups in both the UK and US.

Einstein served on the advisory board of the First Humanist Society of New York, and was an honorary associate of the Rationalist Association, which publishes New Humanist in Britain.

Einstein had been sympathetic toward vegetarianism for a long time.

Einstein became a vegetarian himself only during the last part of his life.

On 17 April 1955, Einstein experienced internal bleeding caused by the rupture of an abdominal aortic aneurysm, which had previously been reinforced surgically by Rudolph Nissen in 1948.

Einstein took the draft of a speech he was preparing for a television appearance commemorating the state of Israel's seventh anniversary with him to the hospital, but he did not live to complete it.

Einstein's remains were cremated in Trenton, New Jersey, and his ashes were scattered at an undisclosed location.

Einstein bequeathed his personal archives, library, and intellectual assets to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel.

Einstein published more than 300 scientific papers and 150 non-scientific ones.

Annus Mirabilis papers are four articles pertaining to the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, the special theory of relativity, and E = mc that Einstein published in the Annalen der Physik scientific journal in 1905.

Einstein returned to the problem of thermodynamic fluctuations, giving a treatment of the density variations in a fluid at its critical point.

Einstein relates this to Rayleigh scattering, which is what happens when the fluctuation size is much smaller than the wavelength, and which explains why the sky is blue.

Einstein quantitatively derived critical opalescence from a treatment of density fluctuations, and demonstrated how both the effect and Rayleigh scattering originate from the atomistic constitution of matter.

Einstein originally framed special relativity in terms of kinematics .

Einstein adopted Minkowski's formalism in his 1915 general theory of relativity.

In 1911, Einstein published another article "On the Influence of Gravitation on the Propagation of Light" expanding on the 1907 article, in which he estimated the amount of deflection of light by massive bodies.

In 1916, Einstein predicted gravitational waves, ripples in the curvature of spacetime which propagate as waves, traveling outward from the source, transporting energy as gravitational radiation.

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Einstein's prediction was confirmed on 11 February 2016, when researchers at LIGO published the first observation of gravitational waves, detected on Earth on 14 September 2015, nearly one hundred years after the prediction.

Einstein formulated an argument that led him to conclude that a general relativistic field theory is impossible.

Einstein gave up looking for fully generally covariant tensor equations and searched for equations that would be invariant under general linear transformations only.

In 1917, Einstein applied the general theory of relativity to the structure of the universe as a whole.

Einstein discovered that the general field equations predicted a universe that was dynamic, either contracting or expanding.

In each of these models, Einstein discarded the cosmological constant, claiming that it was "in any case theoretically unsatisfactory".

Einstein argued that this is true for a fundamental reason: the gravitational field could be made to vanish by a choice of coordinates.

Einstein maintained that the non-covariant energy momentum pseudotensor was, in fact, the best description of the energy momentum distribution in a gravitational field.

In 1935, Einstein collaborated with Nathan Rosen to produce a model of a wormhole, often called Einstein–Rosen bridges.

Einstein concluded that each wave of frequency f is associated with a collection of photons with energy hf each, where h is Planck's constant.

In 1907, Einstein proposed a model of matter where each atom in a lattice structure is an independent harmonic oscillator.

Einstein was aware that getting the frequency of the actual oscillations would be difficult, but he nevertheless proposed this theory because it was a particularly clear demonstration that quantum mechanics could solve the specific heat problem in classical mechanics.

Einstein contributed to these developments by linking them with the 1898 arguments Wilhelm Wien had made.

Einstein noted in 1911 that the same adiabatic principle shows that the quantity which is quantized in any mechanical motion must be an adiabatic invariant.

In 1924, Einstein received a description of a statistical model from Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose, based on a counting method that assumed that light could be understood as a gas of indistinguishable particles.

Einstein noted that Bose's statistics applied to some atoms as well as to the proposed light particles, and submitted his translation of Bose's paper to the Zeitschrift fur Physik.

Einstein published his own articles describing the model and its implications, among them the Bose–Einstein condensate phenomenon that some particulates should appear at very low temperatures.

Bose–Einstein statistics are now used to describe the behaviors of any assembly of bosons.

In "Uber die Entwicklung unserer Anschauungen uber das Wesen und die Konstitution der Strahlung", on the quantization of light, and in an earlier 1909 paper, Einstein showed that Max Planck's energy quanta must have well-defined momenta and act in some respects as independent, point-like particles.

Einstein saw this wave–particle duality in radiation as concrete evidence for his conviction that physics needed a new, unified foundation.

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In 1917, at the height of his work on relativity, Einstein published an article in Physikalische Zeitschrift that proposed the possibility of stimulated emission, the physical process that makes possible the maser and the laser.

Einstein discovered Louis de Broglie's work and supported his ideas, which were received skeptically at first.

Einstein played a major role in developing quantum theory, beginning with his 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect.

Einstein was skeptical that the randomness of quantum mechanics was fundamental rather than the result of determinism, stating that God "is not playing at dice".

Bohr–Einstein debates were a series of public disputes about quantum mechanics between Einstein and Niels Bohr, who were two of its founders.

In 1935, Einstein returned to quantum mechanics, in particular to the question of its completeness, in a collaboration with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen that laid out what would become known as the EPR paradox.

Einstein suggested to Erwin Schrodinger that he might be able to reproduce the statistics of a Bose–Einstein gas by considering a box.

Schrodinger urged Einstein to add his name as co-author, although Einstein declined the invitation.

Margot Einstein permitted the personal letters to be made available to the public, but requested that it not be done until twenty years after her death .

Einstein became one of the most famous scientific celebrities, beginning with the confirmation of his theory of general relativity in 1919.

Einstein finally figured out a way to handle the incessant inquiries.

Einstein has been the subject of or inspiration for many novels, films, plays, and works of music.

Einstein is a favorite model for depictions of absent-minded professors; his expressive face and distinctive hairstyle have been widely copied and exaggerated.

Time magazine's Frederic Golden wrote that Einstein was "a cartoonist's dream come true".

Einstein received numerous awards and honors, and in 1922, he was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect".