Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein (14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was one of the most famous scientists of the 20th century.
He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921. His theories of special and general relativity are of huge importance to many branches of physics and astronomy. They have been verified by many experiments and observations.
Einstein is famous for his theories about light, matter, gravity, space, and time. His most famous equation is E = mc2. It means that energy and mass are different forms of the same thing.
Einstein published more than 300 scientific papers and over 150 non-scientific works. He received honorary doctorate degrees in science, medicine and philosophy from many European and American universities.
On the eve of World War II, he helped alert President Franklin D. Roosevelt that Germany might be developing an atomic weapon, and recommended that the U.S. begin nuclear research. That research, begun by a newly established Manhattan Project, resulted in the U.S. becoming the first and only country to possess nuclear weapons during the war. He taught physics at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey, until his death in 1955.
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 did not 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. A group in Germany called G.O. Mueller wrote a whole encyclopaedia refuting Einstein's relativity. G.O. Mueller, Aristotle, Kant, and 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.
