The Mastermind that was Ahead of his Time
The most renowned scientist in the world as of the year 2020, Albert Einstein, born March 14, 1879, Ulm, Württemberg, Germany and died April 18, 1955, Princeton, New jersey, U.S., was a German physicist who constructed the general theory of relativity and won the Nobel prize for Physics in 1921 for his explanation of the photoelectric effect. Einstein is generally considered the most influential and well known scientist of the modern world and his theories created decades ago would have altered the course of physics for genrations to come and even until today and still counting.
Einstein’s parents were middle-class Jews. His father, Hermann Einstein, was originally a featherbed salesman and later ran an electrochemical factory with moderate success. His mother, the former Pauline Koch, ran the family household. He had one sister, Maria, born two years after Albert. Einstein would write that two “wonders” deeply affected his early years. The first was his encounter with a compass at age five. He was mystified that invisible forces could deflect the needle. This would lead to a lifelong fascination with invisible forces. The second wonder came at age 12 when he discovered a book of geometry, which he devoured, calling it his “sacred little geometry book.”
After several hardships in his early years of being an adult, he eventually managed to settle down as an office worker with a small but steady income for the first time. Einstein felt confident enough to marry Maric, his love at the time, which he did on January 6, 1903. Their children, Hans Albert and Eduard, were born in Bern in 1904 and 1910, respectively. In hindsight, Einstein’s job at the patent office was a blessing. He would quickly finish analyzing patent applications, leaving him time to ponder about the paradox that had come to him since he was 16: What would happen if you raced alongside a light beam? While at the polytechnic school he had studied Maxwell’s Equations, a very renowned set of physics studied by many at the time, which describe the nature of light, and discovered a fact unknown to James Clerk Maxwell himself, specifically that the speed of light remains the same no matter how fast one moves. This violates Newton’s law of motion, which was another equally well known theory at the time, because there is no absolute velocity in Isaac Newton’s theory. This dilemna led Einstein to produce the principle of relativity: “the speed of light is a constant in any inertial frame.”
Soon enough, in 1905, which would be later recognized his his golden year, he would publish 4 paper about his theories and how the Maxwell Equations oppose the Law of Motion by Newton. Unfortunately, the world of physics back then were reluctant to change and disregarded his claims, but the attention from one physicist at the time, Max Planck, catapulted Albert into fame. Max planck was the most influencial physicist at the time and was the founder of quantum theory. He had seen the possibility of Albert’s claims and very quickly, Albert had started to tour the world explaining his discoveries to thousands and thousands. On his route to Japan he had been informed that he had won a Nobel Prize but for his discoveries oh photoelectric effect and no relativity and he instead shocked the crows during his acceptance speech by talking about relativity instead of the photoelectric effect.
Soon, the first worl war arrived and this disrupted Albert’s experiment greatly as his theory of relativity had been taken advantage of by the Nazis and deemed “Jewish”physics. The Nazis went as far as to hire many other Nobel Prize winning physicists to debunk his theory but when asked what Albert thought of this, he said that his theory would not be debunked by the words of a hundred physicist but only by a fact. As time progressed his time in Germany became more and more dangerous as prize were soon placed on his head for being Jewish and against the Nazi party. As a final resort, he fled to Amarica and later became an permanent resident in the country.
In the final years of his life, he would continue to develop a theory of complete unification of all physics alone as the breakthroughs that quantum physics had made at the time were astounding and most physicists were focused of that. He tried several times to debunk quantum mechanics but to no avail and eventually decided to encorporate them to his own studies. When he died on April 18th, 1955, at the age of 76, due to a brain aneurysm, his theory, which had been three decades old, would have still been unfinished and his last words would not have been recorded as the nurse tending to him at the time did not speak German.
In some sense, Einstein may have been too far ahead of his time as he was the sole person in the world witht he realization that the two biggest theories at the time, the Maxwell’s Equations and the Law of Motion by Isaac Newton were contradicting. A completely unified theory had not even been in consideration and was still a total mystery in Einstein’s lifetime and yet he decided to attempt at one. Nevertheless, despite his small quantities of followers back then, Einstein’s work today continue to win Nobel Prizes for succeeding physicists. In 1993 a Nobel Prize was awarded to the discoverers of gravitation waves, predicted by Einstein. In 1995 a Nobel Prize was awarded to the discoverers of Bose-Einstein condensates. Known black holes now number in the thousands. New generations of space satellites have continued to verify the cosmology of Einstein. And many leading physicists are trying to finish Einstein’s ultimate dream of a “theory of everything.”
Scientology 