The man known to history as Albert Einstein
was born on the 14th of March 1879 in the city of Ulm in the south of what was then
the German Empire. Ulm was a major urban centre of the Kingdom
of Wurttemberg, a major constituent part of the German state in the late nineteenth century. His father was Hermann Einstein, an Ashkenazi
Jew from Buchau in Wurttemberg. Hermann had been academically gifted and showed
a strong ability in the field of applied mathematics when studying in Stuttgart, the capital of
Wurttemberg, in his youth. However, the Einstein family were not wealthy
and he was forced to abandon his studies and went to work in the feather-bed shop run by
his cousins, Moses and Hermann Levi, in Ulm in the 1870s. Albert’s mother was Pauline Koch, a member
of a family of German Jews who had developed extensive connections as purveyors and merchants
in Wurttemberg. She married Hermann Einstein in 1876 and Albert
was their first child. A daughter, Maja or Maria Einstein, was born
two years later in 1881. Albert’s youth was dictated to a considerable
extent by his father’s business dealings. When he was still an infant Hermann Einstein,
following the business advice of his brother Jakob, decided to move the family to Munich,
the largest city in southern Germany lying some 170 kilometres to the east of Ulm. This occurred in 1880 as Jakob and Hermann
sought to establish Einstein and Co. as an electrical engineering company in Munich just
as the great age of electrification was about to begin sweeping the western world. There Albert was enrolled in a Catholic elementary
school, before being transferred to the Luitpold-Gymnasium in Munich in 1887. Albert remained there until 1894, but at that
stage the Einsteins were once again uprooted when Hermann and Jakob failed to secure a
contract to begin the electrification of Munich. Instead they headed for northern Italy, settling
first in Milan and then in Pavia. Albert briefly remained in Munich to continue
his studies, but after several months became disillusioned with the strict rote learning
on offer at the Gymnasium and convinced both his parents and the school authorities to
let him leave to join them in Italy. Albert continued his education in Italy from
1894 onwards. He was already showing distinct signs of a
precocious ability as a scientist and mathematician, although his father desired for him to take
a more keen interest in applied engineering and so follow him into the family business. In Munich in the summer of 1891 he had taught
himself algebra and the advanced geometry of the ancient Greek mathematician, Euclid. A family tutor by the name of Max Talmud,
who excelled himself in the fields of optometry and ophthalmology, was employed by the Einsteins
to teach young Albert advanced mathematics and scientific principles, but he soon found
his charge was becoming more knowledgeable than he himself was, when it came to subjects
such as calculus, algebra and geometry. Nor was he a prodigy who was solely interested
in scientific and mathematical topics. As he entered his teenage years he was also
reading widely of some of the most advanced philosophical writers of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, notably the German Enlightenment philosopher, Immanuel Kant. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, first published
in 1781 and offering one of the most analytical discussions of metaphysics, the study of the
nature of reality, is one of the densest philosophical tracts ever written, yet Albert seemed to
understand it clearly at age 14, something which bewildered his tutor. Young Einstein’s abilities did not go unnoticed
by his teachers, tutor and parents. Thus, shortly after he arrived in Pavia and
following his sixteenth birthday he was sent to take the entrance exams at the Swiss Federal
Polytechnic School in the city of Zurich, an advanced school of science, mathematics
and engineering. Although he scored high on the technical exams,
Albert was not admitted at this time, in part owing to his youth. The following year he passed the Swiss Matura,
an equivalency exam in the country for those who had not gone through the formal schooling
process within Switzerland, but wished to complete the secondary education curriculum
there. Earlier that year he had also renounced his
German citizenship to avoid being called up for the required military service expected
of all young men in the country. Thus it was that as a stateless individual
he finally entered the Polytechnic School in Zurich in the autumn of 1896 aged seventeen. There he would study physics and mathematics,
the two subjects which he had demonstrated a prodigious ability in since he was a child. He would remain there for four years, eventually
acquiring a diploma in 1900. Einstein’s years in Zurich were those in
which his research interests began to emerge in a fully formed state. He was becoming an eclectic scientist, one
who might broadly be categorised as a physicist, but whose area of expertise covered a wide
range of topics such as the discovery of an accurate way to measure the dimensions of
tiny molecules, a field of endeavour belonging to quantum mechanics, the broad science of
describing the physical properties of nature at the atomic and subatomic level. Additionally, he was concerned to measure
how light moves. At the time he was beginning to conduct complex
research into this subject in turn-of-the-century Zurich, the prevailing view amongst European
and North American scientists was that light travelled exclusively in wave-patterns. As would become clear in the years that followed
Einstein doubted this theory and believed a further layer of complexity existed within
the mechanism whereby light travelled. These and other aspects of advanced physics
were at the heart of Einstein’s research in his mid-twenties. They formed the core of his doctoral thesis
which he was studying for part time throughout the early 1900s and which he completed in
1905 in Zurich, entitled ‘A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions’. His research in the early 1900s was evidently
aided by Mileva Maric, a young Serbian mathematician and physicist who had begun attending the
Polytechnic School in Zurich around the same time that Einstein had first been granted
teaching hours there after finishing top of the class in 1899. Maric was one of only two female students
attending there at the time. She and Einstein were soon involved in a relationship
with each other and it is now assumed that she contributed to his research, though the
exact degree to which she did so is unclear. In any event her own research was interrupted
in the summer of 1901 when she fell pregnant. Maric and Einstein were not yet married by
then and this was a time when having a child out of wedlock was still considered a social
scandal. It appears that Mileva returned to her native
Serbia to have the child, who was called Lieserl in their correspondence after her birth. What happened to her thereafter is unclear. Some sources believe she died from scarlet
fever in 1903, but others suggest she was put up for adoption in Serbia. It seems more likely that she died as Maric
and Einstein had married in January 1903. They would go on to have two further children,
a boy, Hans Albert, born in the summer of 1904, and another son, Eduard, in 1910.
In may seem peculiar in retrospect, but Albert did not immediately find it easy to find a
teaching position upon completing his diploma in Zurich in 1900. He spent the next year and a half trying in
vain to acquire a junior level lecturing and research position in a Central European university,
but to no avail. In the meantime, he acquired Swiss citizenship
in 1901, finally acquiring statehood after half a decade of theoretically being without
a national affiliation. With Swiss citizenship in hand a family friend
and associate from the Polytechnic in Zurich, Max Grossman, enlisted the aid of his father
to get Einstein a post at the Swiss Patent Office in the capital Bern. Here Einstein worked as a patent assistant
examiner. What this effectively meant was that Albert
was tasked with assessing the merits of various inventions and devices which were brought
before the Patent Office by individuals who wanted to have their intellectual ownership
of their invention recognised, to ensure credit for the device was given to them and they
could benefit financially. Einstein worked there for the next several
years. Beyond serving to support his young family,
his work focused on many different devices involving electrical conduction and mechanics
and it has been posited that this impacted on Einstein’s own research during his formative
years. The manner in which Einstein burst forth from
almost complete obscurity within the developed world’s scientific community to become one
of Europe’s paramount physicists in the mid-1900s is one of the strangest stories
in the history of science. While he was completing his doctoral studies
and working in the Patent Office in Bern in the first half of the 1900s Einstein was working
on a series of papers for publication in the pages of Annalen der Physik, one of the world’s
leading academic journals for the study of physics, which had been published in Germany
from 1799 onwards. This eventually resulted in four separate
research papers which were all published in the journal in 1905. Individually they made major contributions
to various fields within the study of physics. Collectively they have been deemed to represent
a revolutionising of humanity’s conception of the molecular and atomic dimensions of
the natural world and the development of modern physics. Consequently 1905 is usually referred to by
biographers of Einstein and historians of western science as the annus mirabilis, or
‘miracle year’ of Einstein’s career. The first of Einstein’s four papers of 1905
was entitled ‘On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light’
and was published on the 9th of June. This explained what is known as the photoelectric
effect for the first time. The photoelectric effect is where electrons
are emitted when electromagnetic radiation, such as light, hits off a material or substance. The electrons which are emitted during such
a process are called photoelectrons. Up until 1905 when Einstein described this
photoelectric effect, the prevailing view amongst physicists was that light travelled
much like a wave in the ocean, but Einstein explained that the photoelectric effect meant
that light also travelled in what he termed to be a finite number of energy quanta, which
moved without dividing and which could only be absorbed or generated as entities. This not only explained much that was previously
unknown about the nature of light and electrons, but had fundamental implications for understanding
how light of a certain frequency could bring sufficient energy into play to liberate an
electron. This built on work conducted by physicists
such as Max Planck in previous years, but Einstein’s paper added extensive new details
on how energy and light interacted through the photoelectric effect. This had major implications for practical
applied physics and many years later this discovery would be directly cited when Einstein
was awarded the Noble Prize for Physics, although it was not until the mid-1920s that his findings
were fully accepted amongst physicists. Just six weeks after this first paper appeared,
Einstein’s second paper of 1905, entitled ‘On the Motion of Small Particles Suspended
in a Stationary Liquid, as Required by the Molecular Kinetic Theory of Heat’, was published
in Annalen der Physik on the 18th of July. Prior to Einstein’s paper there was no accurate
way of measuring the dimensions of molecules, but several scientists in the nineteenth century
such as John Dalton had noted that chemical substances tended to combine together or break
down in weighted proportions which suggested that they were all made from an as yet unidentified
physical molecule that was common to all things. These unitary molecules are known as atoms
today after a word which had been coined by Ancient Greek philosophers of the sixth century
BC who were themselves seeking to understand the nature of existence, two and a half millennia
before Einstein’s time. Einstein’s second 1905 paper showed how
these atoms could be measured more comprehensively by using what was termed Brownian Motion,
whereby particles, in this case pollen, were suspended in a water solution. Einstein’s paper, along with a corroborating
study produced by the French physicist, Jean Perrin, in 1908, demonstrated unequivocally
that atoms and molecules were real entities which were the building blocks of existence. Thus, this second paper of 1905 was a major
contribution to humanity’s acceptance of the existence of atoms and molecules and the
emergence of atomic theory as the basis of much of twentieth-century physics. Einstein’s third paper was published just
over two months later on the 26th of September 1905. This was entitled ‘On the Electrodynamics
of Moving Bodies’ and focused on the issue of special relativity. This sought to reconcile an equation which
the Scottish mathematician and scientist, James Clerk Maxwell, had devised in the early
1860s regarding electricity and magnetism. Maxwell’s equations led to difficulties
in how physicists should understand mechanics which occurred close to the speed of light. In response to this problem Einstein outlined
his ‘special theory of relativity’ or ‘special relativity’ in his 1905 paper. This stated that the speed of light is the
same for all observers regardless of the motion of the light source or the observer of the
light source. This opposed the idea postulated over two
centuries earlier by Isaac Newton which held that the speed of light is not fixed. Moreover, Einstein’s special theory of relativity
correctly assumed that when two objects are involved concerning light, there is no true
way of knowing which is in motion and which is not. Einstein had come to this realisation while
travelling in a streetcar in Bern in the early summer of 1905 and looking at the clock-tower
in the centre of the city. He realised that if his car suddenly started
travelling at the speed of light the clock-arms on the clock-tower would suddenly appear as
though they had stopped, but the clock inside the streetcar would continue to move around
as though nothing had happened because both Einstein and the clock in the streetcar were
travelling at the same velocity. Therefore the speed of movement was relative. If the streetcar had suddenly accelerated
to the speed of light it would not mean that the clock-tower had stopped, only that it
appeared to have done so relative to the speed which the streetcar was now travelling at. This was the special theory of relativity
at work. Einstein’s fourth and final paper of his
annus mirabilis was published on the 21st of November and was entitled ‘Does the Inertia
of a Body Depend Upon its Energy Context’. Few have heard of that title today, but a
great many are familiar with the equation which Einstein pioneered in the paper: E=mc2. In brief what this means is that the energy
of a body at rest, defined as E, is equal to its mass, or m, multiplied by the speed
of light, the c of the equation, squared. This equivalency equation showed that a massive
particle possesses an energy, or ‘rest energy’ which is distinct from the kinetic energy
of a particle. This would come to be known as the Mass-Energy
Equivalence and highlights how the ‘rest energy’ of a particle such as the nucleus
of an atom could be so massive as to result in an enormous amount of light and thermal
energy being released if the particle was disturbed sufficiently. As we will see, the practical application
of this equation was to have devastating consequences in later decades and Einstein later grew to
regret this aspect of his research. Einstein’s four papers published during
1905 did not simply constitute breakthroughs in the confined world of academic theoretical
physics. His research shaped the application of science
to the modern world in the decades that followed. For instance, when you walk up to an automatic
door today and it opens in front of you, this is because the sensors used in the doorway
react when the photons in the light beams they emit are obstructed, in this case by
a moving person. The sensor then tells the door to open. Einstein first explained how photons work. Solar-powered calculators and streetlights
that automatically turn on when it gets dark, amongst other innovations, also emerged from
his work on light. The ‘special theory of relativity’ helped
lead to the development of Global Positioning Systems, or GPS, over time. Thus, when you switch on Google Maps it is
effectively functioning based partly on research which Einstein published in his annus mirabilis
papers. And when a nuclear power plant creates massive
amounts of energy by harnessing the energy in the nucleus of an atom they are doing so
based on Einstein’s discoveries concerning energy and mass equivalence as contained in
the equation E=mc2. Einstein’s ground-breaking research findings
published in 1905 soon came to the attention of the European scientific community, though
at a time when people were still reliant on the circulation of hard copies of academic
journals and word of mouth for research to be disseminated it took a few years for the
import of his findings to become clear across Europe. As they did, they transformed his career. By 1908 he gained a teaching post at the University
of Bern and was able to leave his position at the Patent Office. The following year he was appointed to a new
chair of theoretical physics which had been created at the University of Zurich. He remained there for the next two years. During this time, he continued to refine some
of the points he had made in his 1905 papers, while also moving on to begin developing the
‘theory of general relativity’ as an offshoot of his work on special relativity. The theory of general relativity holds that
the observable gravitational attraction between two masses results from the warping of space
and time by those two masses. This research made major initial contributions
to the science of black holes and other mass objects within the universe. In 1911 Einstein left Switzerland, after over
fifteen years there to take up a new position which had been offered to him at the Charles
Ferdinand University in Prague, the oldest university in what is now Czechia, but which
was then a constituent part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In tandem he was offered Austrian citizenship. Although he spent just over a year there he
published upwards of a dozen papers on topics such as the mathematics of radiation, quantum
theory and gravitation. Before long a new offer pulled him back to
Switzerland. This was an invitation to teach at his old
alma mater, the Polytechnic School in Zurich. He was there by the summer of 1912 and would
spend the next year lecturing to classes who were increasingly familiar with the growing
fame of the German physicist, while also researching problems on gravitation and molecular heat. Much of this latter work was undertaken in
conjunction with Marcel Grossman, the Swiss colleague who had attended the Polytechnic
with Einstein in the late 1890s and whose family had aided him in acquiring his earlier
position at the Bern Patent Office.
In the spring of 1913, less than a year after taking up his position in Zurich, Einstein
was visited in Switzerland by Max Planck and Walther Nernst, two of the foremost scientists
of the age. Both worked in Berlin and had come to Zurich
to convince Einstein to return to the land of his birth to take up a position at the
University of Berlin. The post came with automatic membership of
the Prussian Academy of Sciences, as well as his appointment as director of the Kaiser
Wilhelm Institute for Physics. This would allow Einstein to concentrate on
his research and build a team of researchers around him. It was an offer he couldn’t refuse and was
made more attractive by the prospect of being close to his cousin, Elsa, who lived in Germany
and whom Einstein had begun corresponding with frequently since the spring of 1912. Thus, early in 1914 Albert made the move to
the German capital. His first wife, Mileva, agreed to move at
first with their two sons, but she was immediately unhappy in Berlin, and sensed Albert was growing
closer to his cousin and soon decided to return to Zurich with their children. They remained separated until 1919 when they
finally divorced, at which time Einstein married Elsa. By then both she and Albert were in their
forties and this second marriage of Einstein’s did not result in any further children, though
Albert became step-father to Elsa’s two daughters from her previous marriage. Einstein’s arrival in Berlin was immediately
interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War. For years tensions had been building between
the major European powers over issues as disparate as colonial rivalry in Africa, the vacuum
left by the collapse of Ottoman power in the Balkans and the naval race between Britain
and Germany. These all coalesced in the summer of 1914
into the outbreak of a pan-European war which soon became a worldwide conflict. When it erupted, and Germany’s invasion
of neutral Belgium as a means of striking quickly at north-eastern France drew widespread
international condemnation, a document entitled ‘Manifesto of the Ninety-Three’ and addressed
‘To the Civilized World’ was soon being circulated in Germany. The move was led by figures like Adolf van
Baeyer, the 1905 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and Paul Ehrlich, the 1908 recipient
of the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his pioneering work in chemotherapy, and was effectively
a letter from dozens of prominent German academics sounding their support for Germany’s war
effort. Einstein, who was a life-long pacifist, refused
to sign it and instead, with several other German academics drew up the ‘Manifesto
to the Europeans’. This expressed the idea that Europe’s sense
of common culture could be harnessed to bring the war to a swift end. Unfortunately, their hopes were not met and
the war was to drag on for four more years of interminable conflict, followed by years
more of revolution and civil war across much of the continent. Despite the ongoing war, Einstein was able
to commence new research in a concerted manner in Berlin from 1915 onwards as the initial
shock of the outbreak of the war lessened. However, it was not until 1917 that the Kaiser
Wilhelm Institute was finally established in Berlin with Einstein as its first director. Funding and administrative delays wrought
by the war effort had delayed its inception. He would serve as head of the Institute for
the next sixteen years. Meanwhile, in 1916 he was admitted as a member
of the German Physical Society, which had been established in 1845 and is the world’s
oldest major academic body of physicists. Foreign honours would also follow in the years
ahead, including membership of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1920 and admittance
as a foreign member in 1921 to the Royal Society, arguably the world’s most prestigious scientific
society and one which dated back to 1660 when it was founded in London.
Such honours aside, Einstein continued to break new ground in his research in the mid-1910s. For instance, in 1916 he hypothesised the
existence of gravitational waves, which are effectively ripples in the curvature of space
time. These could not be detected using the instrumentation
available in the early twentieth century, but in 2016, a century after Einstein predicted
their existence, they were finally confirmed by American scientists. He was also beginning to theorise the existence
of what we now know to be black holes, points in space where gravity is so strong that neither
light nor particles can effectively escape from them and which distort space and time. As with so much else, his work on black holes
was pioneering and paved the way for many of his successors to produce detailed accounts
of the building blocks of the universe later in the twentieth century. He could, however, be mistaken too. In 1917 he began working on what he termed
the ‘cosmological constant’, a theory which supposed the existence of a static universe. Many years later when the American astronomer
Edwin Hubble discovered the recession of nebulae in the universe, Einstein realised his earlier
theory of the ‘cosmological constant’ was incorrect and referred to it as his, quote,
“biggest blunder” throughout his career. His other great research project of the war
years, though, was far from a blunder. Einstein had been working on the concept of
relativity for over a decade and ‘special relativity’ was the subject of one of his
acclaimed papers of 1905. Yet it was not until the mid-1910s that he
began finalising his research on the subject of general relativity. The general theory of relativity outlined
the geometric theory of gravitation. This moved far beyond Newtonian ideas concerning
gravity to explain gravitational pull and the full complexity of geometric gravity as
it applies to the universe and not just individual planets. There is an ongoing debate as to who actually
arrived at the general theory of relativity first, as his contemporary, the German mathematician,
David Hilbert, essentially arrived at nearly identical conclusions as Einstein did in the
mid-1910s. As with Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell
Wallace, who both broadly developed the theory of natural selection at the same time in the
mid-nineteenth century, both Einstein and Hilbert were in communication with each other
and Einstein had visited the University of Gottingen where Hilbert was working in 1915
to present lectures on his own findings. What seems relatively clear is that Einstein
and Hilbert influenced each other sufficiently that they both arrived at the same conclusions
concerning general relativity within days of each other in the winter of 1915. In late 1918 Europe and the wider world began
to emerge from the grip of the First World War, although in some countries such as Russia,
Hungary, Turkey and Ireland the end of the war saw the commencement of bitter civil wars
which eclipsed anything that those countries had seen during the war itself. Yet with the resumption of some form of normal
life academic discourse resumed fully and research began to be disseminated widely again. Thus, Einstein and Hilbert’s work on the
general theory of relativity reached a wider audience within the community of Europe and
America’s physicists. As it did there was an increasing appreciation
of how ground-breaking their studies were. Then, in the summer of 1919, the theory was
confirmed as being accurate by Sir Arthur Eddington, an English astronomer and mathematician,
during a solar eclipse. This time the popular newspapers picked up
the story, proclaiming that Einstein’s theory had overthrown the model of the universe developed
by Isaac Newton nearly 250 years earlier. Given all of this, it is perhaps unsurprising
that in 1921 the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm decided to award Einstein the Nobel Prize
for Physics. They specifically cited his work in discovering
the photoelectric effect in his paper from 1905 in the award designation, but it could
just as easily have been awarded for a wide range of research findings over the previous
fifteen or so years. Receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1921 and the
opening up of the world during the boom time years of the 1920s after years of war and
social discord saw Einstein and Elsa, whom he had just recently married, decide to travel
internationally. In early April 1921 they sailed into New York
City where the couple were greeted by the Mayor, John Francis Hylan, and a delegation
of some of the most senior members of the city’s Jewish community. Weeks of lectures and receptions followed,
notably at Columbia University in New York and Princeton University in New Jersey. Later that month Einstein met President Warren
Harding in the White House. Afterwards they left for a Pacific voyage
to the Empire of Japan and then onwards to Singapore and India before reaching the Middle
East. There Einstein visited Palestine, which had
become subject to a British mandate following the end of the First World War and where the
Jewish Zionist movement was attempting to establish a new state for the world’s Jews
after centuries of being scattered around the globe. Afterwards he returned to Germany, but the
1921 to 1922 trip was the beginning of a pattern of significant trips to different parts of
the world. For instance, in 1925 he visited South America,
spending weeks in Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil, countries which were booming economically
and socially in the early twentieth century and where Einstein was revered within the
academic community. In the mid-1920s Einstein became involved
in a scientific debate which was widely reported on at the time. This was between himself and Niels Bohr, a
Danish physicist who had won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922, twelve months after Einstein
had been awarded the same honour. A dispute had been building between Einstein
and Bohr throughout the mid-1920s over their differing interpretations of quantum theory. Much of this centred on Bohr’s refusal to
believe that photons, which Einstein had first theorised the existence of in 1905, were real. He did not accept that they did exist until
1925 and even then their debates raged on over other elements of their respective views
on quantum mechanics. Debates were held in London and elsewhere
between 1922 and 1925, but culminated in a famous academic disputation in 1927 at the
Fifth Solvay Conference at the International Solvay Institutes of Physics and Chemistry
in Brussels. Here Bohr and Einstein continued their debate,
with both figures arguing points which eventually proved to be accurate. However, beyond the theoretical arguments
the Conference is noteworthy for the number of the world’s most accomplished physicists
it drew together. Seventeen of the twenty-nine attendees had
already or later received Nobel Prize awards, while Einstein and Bohr were joined by figures
including Marie Curie, Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrodinger. It points to the sheer level of brilliance
of the European scientific community in the interwar period. The late 1920s also saw Einstein re-conceptualising
his own theories of the universe. This was in response to the discovery by the
American astronomer, Edwin Hubble, of the recession of the nebulae, or what is now termed
Hubble’s Law. This states that galaxies are moving away
from Earth at speeds which are proportionate to the distance they are from the Milky Way. These speeds are always faster, meaning that
the further a cosmic body is from the Earth the faster it will move away from the Earth. These findings, which were made public in
1929, required Einstein to abandon his current theory of the universe at that time, which
was known as the cosmological constant, which supposed that the universe was largely static
in the way that it expanded, i.e. that the cosmos had been expanding since the Big Bang
at a relatively constant speed. Hubble’s discoveries forced Einstein to
re-evaluate his hypothesis, as it was now clear that the universe was expanding at an
ever greater speed.
Hubble’s discovery was also partly responsible for Einstein’s decision to embark on a new
journey to the United States in December 1930. He wanted to meet Hubble and thank him for
his research, which he duly did in 1931. However, the trip is generally more remembered
for Einstein’s visit to California where the ostensible purpose of the voyage was to
take up a two month visiting fellowship at the California Institute of Technology, better
known as Caltech today. During this sojourn Einstein ominously noted
that science had as much, and perhaps a greater, capacity to do harm than to do good within
human society, a reference no doubt to the increasing use of technology in warfare, an
issue the pacifist Einstein found abhorrent. This same aversion to the growing militarism
of the 1930s led Einstein to have an affinity with the novelist Upton Sinclair and the actor
Charlie Chaplin, both of whom he met in Los Angeles during his visit and who were both
publicly affirmed pacifists themselves. Einstein’s growing friendship with Chaplin
led him to attend the premier of his new film, City Lights, a silent film which was significant
in establishing the romantic comedy genre in American movies. When Albert and Elsa Einstein entered the
cinema with Chaplin, Einstein was cheered with the same regard a Hollywood icon could
obtain. It was also the beginnings of a long friendship
with Chaplin which saw the actor visit Einstein’s Berlin apartment shortly afterwards and Einstein
renewed their acquaintance when he himself returned again to America early in 1933. While Einstein had been holding his positions
in Germany and travelling widely in the 1920s and early 1930s, as his fame and accomplishments
increased, the political environment back in his native Germany was changing for the
worse. Germany had been mired in political chaos
in the aftermath of the First World War, but from 1923 onwards had entered into a period
of pronounced prosperity and instability. That was shattered late in 1929 when the stock
markets on Wall Street in New York City crashed and a massive economic depression set in across
the developed world. In Germany, as millions lost their jobs and
their economic security, a huge proportion of the population turned in national elections
to the rabidly anti-semitic National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or Nazis, under their
leader Adolf Hitler. In Reichstag elections in 1932 they became
the largest political party in Germany and in the first months of 1933 Hitler became
Chancellor of the country. Within weeks the party effectively turned
Germany into a one-party, fascist state. This was extremely ominous for the country’s
Jewish population, and individuals like Einstein. In the United States he decided not to return
to Germany and instead the Einsteins settled in America after a brief visit to Antwerp
in Belgium where Albert handed his German passport into the German embassy and renounced
his citizenship. In Berlin the Nazis had already searched his
apartment twice on account of his Jewish heritage and over the next year or so Jewish academics
such as himself were forced out of their positions across Germany. In the United States, following his decision
to seek permanent residence there in 1933, Einstein quickly acquired a position at the
Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton University in New Jersey. It was the institution which he would spend
the longest portion of his career at, and barring a directorship at Brandeis University
in Massachusetts in the mid-1940s, Einstein was primarily associated with Princeton for
the remainder of his life. In the mid-to-late 1930s Einstein undertook
some further notable work here on the East Coast of America. A particularly significant engagement resulted
from collaboration with Nathan Rosen, a Jewish American physicist. Together Einstein and Rosen produced a model
of what a wormhole might look like. Wormholes are theoretical structures which
might connect disparate points in space-time together. At the time that Einstein and Rosen produced
their theoretical ‘wormhole bridge’ they were a relatively novel concept, but they
have latterly come to form a fundamental aspect of theoretical writings on space travel. In due course they became a mainstay of science
fiction writing from the middle of the twentieth century onwards. While Einstein was teaching in the United
States in the 1930s developments were occurring back in his homeland of Germany which would
soon have global implications. Following their initial rise to power in 1933
the Nazis had made clear their intent to overturn the terms of the Treaty of Versailles which
had brought the First World War to an end. In the mid-1930s they began rearming Germany,
recruiting hundreds of thousands of soldiers into the military and building thousands of
tanks, fighter planes and bombers. Then, beginning in the spring of 1938, the
Nazis used diplomatic coercion to annex Austria into a Greater Germany and to seize territory
from its other neighbours such as Czechoslovakia and Lithuania. When Hitler then invaded Poland in September
1939 Britain and France determined that they could no longer appease the Nazis and declared
war on Germany. In the immediate term the government of President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt did not have public support for American involvement in what was
deemed within the US to be a European war which it should not involve itself in. However, when Germany’s ally the Empire
of Japan attacked the US Pacific Fleet at rest in Pearl Harbour in Hawaii in December
1941 the United States also entered the Second World War. More than any war in human history it was
one which would be shaped by scientific innovation. Despite his pacifism Einstein was soon involved
in correspondence with the US government concerning the growing conflict. Indeed this had commenced weeks before the
war erupted in Europe. Early in 1939 European physicists had discovered
nuclear fission using uranium. With this discovery the theoretical possibility
of developing a nuclear bomb of some kind moved ever closer. A number of European physicists, foremost
amongst which was the Hungarian Leo Szilard, realised exactly how possible it now was that
a dedicated research team could develop a nuclear warhead. This deeply worried many European scientists,
as many of the continent’s leading physicists worked in Germany and could be co-opted into
helping the Nazis develop a nuclear weapon, one which Hitler and his accomplices would
have little compunctions about using as a conventional weapon of war despite its absolutely
cataclysmic capacity for the loss of human life. Consequently, Szilard and two fellow Hungarian
physicists, Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner, composed a letter to the US government warning
of the risks of the Nazis developing a nuclear weapon before any other state. They sent this to America where Einstein appended
his signature to it before it was sent to the administration of President Roosevelt. What has become known as the Einstein-Szilard
Letter was influential in the months that followed in the US initiating its own programme
to develop a nuclear weapon. The Manhattan Project, the US government’s
programme to develop a nuclear weapon, was initiated on a piecemeal basis late in 1939,
just weeks after the receipt of the Einstein-Szilard Letter. This ran enormously against Einstein’s own
pacifist inclinations, though the possibility of the Nazis acquiring such a weapon before
the US had forced him into warning the government of the dangers of this occurring. This aside, he viewed war of any kind as a
disease which should be resisted by all of civil society in the modern world. Accordingly he did not play a role in the
Manhattan Project itself. Rather it was led by Robert Oppenheimer, an
American theoretical physicist. Though its activities were limited between
1939 and 1941, once the United States entered the war in December 1941 funding and resources
increased enormously, particularly so as it became increasingly apparent that the Nazis
were in fact trying to develop super-weapons such as a nuclear bomb at various installations
in Europe, notably in Norway where what is known as ‘heavy water’ was being produced,
a form of hydrogen with different nuclear properties which could conceivably be used
to manufacture a nuclear weapon. The research here, though, was slow and was
scuppered on numerous occasions by sabotage missions launched by British Special Forces
and Free Norwegian fighters. By that time the Manhattan Project was employing
upwards of 130,000 people in the United States and a nuclear reactor had been demonstrated
in Chicago as early as 1942. Eventually, in mid-July 1945 the world’s
first nuclear device was detonated in the desert of New Mexico. By the time the first nuclear weapon was detonated
the Second World War had already been over in Europe for several weeks. However, because of the agreed Allied policy
of leaving the conclusion of the war in the Pacific against the Empire of Japan until
after Nazi Germany had been defeated, the conflict was still raging there by the summer
of 1945. Accordingly the administration of President
Harry Truman quickly decided to use the new weapon against Japan in the belief that doing
so would ultimately save over a million lives if it forced Japan to surrender quickly. Thus, on the 6th of August 1945 the first
nuclear weapon used in warfare was dropped on the city of Hiroshima, killing upwards
of 75,000 people on the first day and a further 60,000 or so in the months that followed,
from radiation sickness. Three days later a second nuclear device of
a slightly different kind was dropped on the city of Nagasaki, killing upwards of 80,000
people across the initial destruction zone and as a result of the after effects. Japan did quickly surrender, but Einstein
was appalled by the ferocity of the attacks and the fallout from them. Shortly after the bombings he declared that,
“The time has come now, when man must give up war. It is no longer rational to solve international
problems by resorting to war.” He subsequently expressed his regret that
his research on the molecular structure of the world and the concept of mass energy and
equivalence, which he had first published in 1905, had contributed towards the development
of the nuclear weapons. The post-war years saw Einstein continue to
research and publish, though by then he was nearing his seventies and the pressures of
his public profile and some health concerns restricted how much he could accomplish. Nevertheless, at Princeton in the late 1940s
he developed what he referred to as his Unified Field Theory, findings which he published
in Scientific American in 1950 as ‘On the Generalized Theory of Gravitation’. This Unified Field Theory sought to develop
a single, unified theoretical framework which could be used to understand the fundamental
forces of nature and the universe. Efforts had been undertaken by many physicists
throughout the first half of the twentieth century to develop such a unified theory,
but none had met with acceptance across the academic community. Einstein’s theory attempted to incorporate
elements of his work on general relativity, electromagnetism and gravity and proposed
a single origin for the entire set of physical laws, one which could unify forces such as
gravitation, electromagnetic forces and even the curvature of space-time with which much
of Einstein’s work in the 1930s had been concerned. Ultimately his work and that of others in
developing such a unified theory were unsuccessful, but his research in this respect is nevertheless
regarded as being consequential in the further development of differential geometry, the
study of the geometry of smooth shapes and surfaces, particularly as they apply to space.
The years following the end of the Second World War in America also saw Einstein acquire
a form of celebrity within mainstream society which was largely unprecedented for a theoretical
physicist. In many ways this went back all the way to
the early 1920s and Einstein’s first arrival in New York City. His theory of relativity had just been confirmed
by other scientists, changing our fundamental understanding of the universe, while Einstein
was the recipient of the Nobel Prize. The New York Times had run a story in December
1919 proclaiming that Einstein had, quote, “destroyed space and time,” through his
research findings. Here was the most fundamental overhaul of
human thought since Charles Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection a half a century earlier,
but Einstein’s work was greeted with applause whereas Darwin’s had been viewed as sacrilegious. His associations with figures like Charlie
Chaplin in Hollywood and his increasingly iconic physical appearance all made him a
more identifiable figure in the years that followed. Most tellingly, by the 1940s it was becoming
apparent how Einstein’s revolutionary ideas were changing society and the world in practical
ways, not just from the perspective of theoretical physics. As all of this occurred he became a figure
as feted within American society as Stephen Hawking later would be in the second half
of the twentieth century, or figures like James Lovelock and Richard Dawkins in the
early twenty-first century. By the time his working life came to an end
Einstein’s written and published output was enormous. Though it may seem unusual to many, Einstein’s
primary academic output was in the shape of papers in academic journals, of which there
were nearly 300 over a span of 55 years, rather than books. This was and remains the primary means of
communicating research for academics working in the hard sciences. Such books as Einstein authored, of which
there were over a dozen, were generally reproductions of work he had already published as academic
papers, the idea being to tie together his existing work on general relativity and other
topics or to try to make the material more accessible to a general audience. Some of these were used as advanced undergraduate
and postgraduate textbooks for students of theoretical physics for years to come in universities. Additionally, translations were made into
multiple languages, ensuring that Einstein’s work was accessible in dozens of countries
by the middle of the twentieth century. Beyond this academic output, Einstein was
a voracious correspondent and at the Albert Einstein Archives at the Hebrew University
of Jerusalem there are over 3,500 pages of his private correspondence dating from 1912
to 1955. He also wrote widely on various political,
philosophical, religious and humanitarian issues, Unsurprisingly, collected editions
of Einstein’s work, correspondence and other writings, such as those published since the
late 1980s by the academic press of Princeton University, the university where Albert spent
nearly all of his career in the United States, have stretched into dozens of lengthy volumes.
The individual who produced this enormous body of work was, despite his brilliance and
celebrity, a resoundingly modest individual. He once proclaimed of himself, quote, “I
have no special talents, I am only passionately curious.” He never acquired the trappings of wealth
or fame and indeed visitors to his home in Berlin in the 1920s or America in the post-1933
period were generally struck by the modesty of the abode, where the most lavish adornment
was usually a piano so that Einstein could play the classical music he loved. His family life, it must be admitted, was
difficult. His two biological sons went to live with
their mother after she and Albert separated in 1914 and thereafter their relationship
was somewhat distant. Hans later immigrated to the United States
in 1938, where they reconnected, but Eduard remained in Europe and despite maintaining
a correspondence with his father never saw him again after Albert left for America in
the early 1930s. Eduard later developed psychiatric problems
and was institutionalised in Zurich. Albert’s marriage to Elsa was also strained
long before her death in New Jersey in 1936 and it has been widely speculated that Einstein
retreated into his scientific inquiries at times as a substitute for his own weaknesses
when it came to emotional relationships. Politically, he was humane, holding a lifelong
aversion to violence and war. He deeply admired Mahatma Gandhi and his non-violent
opposition to British rule in India and the two became correspondents. Over time his political views moved towards
a criticism of capitalism and advocacy of socialism, while he also wrote on numerous
occasions about the desire for a system of global government and an end to competition
between nation states. He held positive views of the United States,
deeming the country to be a meritocracy, but the FBI had developed a dossier on him before
he ever fully relocated to America from Europe and by the mid-1950s it ran to over 1,400
pages, a not wholly unusual development for a former German and an academic in post-war
America. An intrinsic part of Einstein’s character
was his Jewish heritage, though he himself was a professed agnostic and viewed the Bible
as a collection of “primitive legends”. His Jewish heritage also shaped his life from
the 1930s onwards as it saw him relocate to the United States in the face of the Nazi
threat. Einstein also became noted in his later years
for his support for Zionism and the state of Israel. He had visited Palestine back in the 1920s
when it was being governed as a British mandate in the aftermath of the First World War. At that time hundreds of thousands of Jews
were already living in or migrating to the region with the goal of reforming a Jewish
state after nearly 2,000 years of being dispersed around the world. In 1925 Einstein agreed to be listed amongst
the first Board of Governors of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem when it was established
that year. Then in the aftermath of the Second World
War hundreds of thousands of Europe’s Jews who had survived the Holocaust perpetrated
by the Nazis during the Second World War headed for the Holy Land. When the British mandate there expired in
March 1948 the Jewish people declared a new state of Israel for the Jewish people in the
Levant. In 1952 Einstein was offered the ceremonial
position of President of the country, though he declined on account of his age and inability
to leave the United States at that stage. Einstein remained supportive of the Zionist
movement until his death but one wonders what the pacifist in him would have made of the
Israeli state as it descended into interminable warfare with its Muslim neighbours from the
Suez Crisis of 1956 onwards.
By the time Israel entered into the Suez Crisis or the Second Arab-Israeli War against its
southern neighbour Egypt in 1956, Einstein had died. Shortly after the end of the Second World
War he had begun to suffer from an abdominal aortic aneurysm, an enlargement of the abdominal
aorta, the largest artery in the abdomen. It can become blocked, much like any other
part of the circulatory system owing to high blood pressure, high cholesterol and smoking. Einstein had the issue operated on successfully
in 1948 by reinforcing the aorta wall, but despite improving his lifestyle, including
adopting a vegetarian diet, the problem resurfaced again early in 1955 when the aorta ruptured,
causing internal bleeding. He was admitted to hospital on the 17th of
April, but refused emergency surgery to try to intervene to stop the bleeding, proclaiming
philosophically that it was best to meet death with dignity when one’s time had come. He died the following day on the 18th of April
1955 at 76 years of age. The surgeon who carried out his autopsy afterwards
removed Einstein’s brain for scientific study, though this was done without the permission
of his family. It was subsequently dissected and the remains
of it are today found in the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington D.C.,
while some sections were put on display in the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia in 2013. It has been suggested that the abnormal number
of glial cells in his brain might account for Einstein’s inordinate aptitude for mathematical
equations. His body was cremated shortly after his death
in New Jersey and his ashes were modestly scattered at an undisclosed location. Albert Einstein was one of the most influential
thinkers in the history of science. So significant were his findings in his research
over a span of half a century that his surname has become synonymous with elevated intelligence. Perhaps what is most unusual about this is
that it all sprang from relatively humble beginnings. In the 1890s he was effectively an international
nomad when he was still a teenager and young man, moving between his native Germany, Italy
and Switzerland as his parents tried to balance their financial and business situation with
their awareness of their son’s precocious abilities as a mathematician and physicist. His time at the Polytechnic School in Zurich
provided some stability, but Central Europe’s universities saw fit not to hire him when
he completed his initial studies there and instead he spent several years working in
the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. It was here, while evaluating inventions during
the day, and starting a young family, that he began working on some of the most significant
research in the field of physics ever undertaken. The result, in the annus mirabilis of 1905,
were four ground-breaking studies which revolutionised humanity’s understanding of the nature of
the universe, at once revealing the existence of photons and the nuclear and atomic building
blocks of existence. 1905 changed everything. In the years that followed Einstein was promoted
year on year to ever more significant academic positions, until he eventually reached the
peak of European academia in Berlin just as the First World War broke out. In the midst of that calamitous conflict he
developed the general theory of relativity. In 1921 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in
Physics for his work, though more accolades followed in the decades ahead. What is perhaps most notable about Einstein’s
career, however, from the 1920s onwards is the public profile he developed. Visits to the United States, South America,
across Europe and the Middle East allowed him to advocate on behalf of a number of causes. The most significant was his ringing of the
alarm bells about the threat posed by Nazi Germany from 1933 onwards. Indeed he immediately renounced his German
citizenship when Hitler seized power and moved to the United States. There he continued to note the dangers posed
by the possibility of the Nazis acquiring a nuclear weapon. However, it was a double-edged sword for Einstein
the pacifist, for the cost of seeing Nazi Germany defeated in the nuclear race was seeing
the US drop its own atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. In the aftermath of the war he used his position
to advocate on behalf of a state for the Jewish people in the Middle East following the Holocaust. When he died in 1955 he was the most acclaimed
scientist in the world, one who ultimately influenced the entire fields of physics, mathematics
and cosmology in the modern era. The history of the twentieth century might
well have been significantly different had it not been for Einstein. What do you think of Albert Einstein? Was he the most revolutionary intellectual
in modern history and what might explain his inordinate intellect? Please let us know in the comment section,
and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.
