| RESOURCE MATERIAL for the EINSTEIN CENTENARY (2015) |  |
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PITP/ST-JOHNS PUBLIC LECTURES, 2014 -2015 |
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Albert Einstein - Life & Work
Why this enormous regard for a person whose work is completely incomprehensible to all but a few physicists? One reason was his reputation as an irreverent iconoclast and a free spirit who was unafraid to make strong moral stands, and express inconvenient truths - which got him into trouble with both the Nazis and the FBI, as well as various religious organizations. Another was the clear evidence for the enormous impact of his ideas on science - he created relativity and the theory of gravitation single-handedly, between 1905-1915, was one of the main creators of quantum mechanics, and in the single year of 1905, when a completely unknown clerk in a patent office, wrote 4 papers on 4 different topics, each of which revolutionized a different field of science. Ironically, for many years he was held responsible, in the public eye, for the scientific developments that led to the atomic bomb, when this was completely untrue - nuclear fission depends entirely on quantum tunneling, nuclear physics, and strong repulsive Coulomb interactions, none of which Einstein had anything to do with. Einstein was born in March 1879 in Ulm, now part of Germany. He hated the "gymnasium" high school system, and all his life despised any kind of regimented learning or social organization. In 1901 he became a Swiss citizen, and in 1940 an American citizen - he subsequently held dual nationality until he died in 1955 in Princeton, New Jersey, USA. His university studies produced rather average marks, and he ended up working in a patent office in Bern in 1902, after 2 years searching for a teaching position. In 1905 he published, in the space of a few months, 4 papers which in turn (i) invented the photon (ii) proved the existence of atoms and founded part of modern statistical mechanics; (iii) invented special relativity, and (iv) produced "the most famous equation in Science", viz., the mass-energy relation E = mc2. |
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This work was noticed by Max Planck, then Germany's most influential theoretical physicist, and in a few years Einstein was receiving offers of positions in various German, Austrian, Swiss, and Dutch universities. This culminated in a special chair in Berlin in 1914 - by this time he was the most famous physicist in the world, having initiated or contributed to almost every major development in physics (and not a few in chemistry) that took place during this period. However the greatest was still to come. In Nov 1915 Einstein published his "General Theory of Relativity" in its final form - at one stroke completely transforming our ideas of spacetime and gravity, and suddenly extending the scope of physics to include the entire universe. It has taken astronomy a long time to catch up - Einstein's ideas were only taken seriously by a handful of physicists and mathematicians before the 1960's - but things have changed enormously since then. None of the key objects of modern astronomy - neutron stars, supernovae, quasars, bursters, black holes, dark matter and dark energy, all the way up to the Big Bang and the early universe - can be understood without Einstein's theory (for more on this, see BLACK HOLES and COSMOS). The key equation of General Relativity is shown in a photo here, taken in an abandoned railway graveyard in the Bolivian desert. In 1919 a British expedition observed a solar eclipse from 2 different positions in the tropics, in an attempt to decide between the Newtonian and Einsteinian theories of gravitation. The huge press given to the Royal Society meeting in London, where the results were announced, made Einstein a worldwide celebrity. This status steadily increased as his remarkable personality became better known to the public, as his views on topics ranging from civil liberties to religion became better known, and as he took a stand against the Nazis in Germany. By early 1933 it had become too dangerous to continue his life in Germany, and he eventually ended up in the USA in Nov 1933, where he spent the rest of his life. Einstein continued to make major contributions to physics after 1915, and indeed to gravitation theory right up to the 1940's. However the discovery of quantum mechanics in its final form in 1925 was very problematic for Einstein; in company with some of the original architects of Quantum Mechanics (notably Schrodinger and Dirac), he came to feel that the theory was fundamentally flawed. This led in 1935 to the publication of the famous "Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen" paradox, followed swiftly by Schrodinger's "Cat paradox"; the repercussions of these papers are still with us today (see QUANTUM). The world of today is a very different place from what it was in 1955, nearly 60 yrs ago, when Einstein died. And yet he is still lionized. This is partly for what he said about topics of interest to everyone (quotes from Einstein can be found everywhere, on almost every conceivable topic - over 90% of these quotes are fakes, often expressing views very different from the ones that Einstein actually held). It is also because his views and ideas on topics in science, philosophy, politics, and religion are to a great extent as relevant today as they were when he first formulated them. But most of all it is because his scientific work has stood the test of time, and his greatest work, the General Theory, stands alone with Newton's work as the pinnacle of what is possible in science. Here is a sampling of the views of some physicists on this: "probably the greatest scientific discovery ever made " (P.A.M. Dirac) "the greatest ever feat of human thinking about Nature " (M. Born) "The theory of relativity by Einstein... cannot but be regarded as a magnificent work of art. " (E Rutherford) "a superhumanly keen intuition...I have no idea how he guessed at the final result...I feel as though he had done it while swimming underwater, blindfolded, and with his hands tied behind his back! " (R.P. Feynman) For more on Einstein and his work, and for his philosophical and religious ideas, please check Einstein's Philosophy and wikipedia. |
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Albert Einstein is the most famous scientist in history. At the end of 1999, Time magazine elected him to be the "Person of the Century". In the same year 3 newspapers (The Times of London, Le Monde in Paris, and the Globe & Mail in Toronto) elected him to be the most important figure in the history of the last 1000 yrs, based on polls of readers - beating out Gandhi, Mandela, Shakespeare, Newton, etc... curiously, the editors of 2 of these newspapers were not happy with this result. Perhaps the tribute that summed up best the attitude of the world towards Einstein was published in the Washington Post on the day Einstein died in 1955, shown here - this was drawn by the celebrated cartoonist Herbert Block. 
