Born in 1879 in Ulm, Germany, Albert Einstein was two years old when his parents moved to Munich, where his father opened a business in electrical supplies. As a boy, Einstein was slow to learn to talk and in early childhood was considered backward. But by the time he was fourteen years old, he had recovered from a slow start to the extent that he taught himself advanced calculus and geometry from textbooks. By then he knew want he wanted to be when he grew up. He wanted to be a physicist and devote himself to research.
The Einsteins, however, could not afford to pay the advanced education that young Albert needed. The family business declined, and they were forced to leave Munich to live in Milan, Italy, where they had relatives. As for Albert, the family did manage to send him to a technical school in Aarau, Switzerland, and later to the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.
In 1901, when Einstein was twenty-two years old, he began teaching, and in 1902 he went to work as a patent office examiner in Bern. Now able to pay his own expenses, he continued his schooling at the University of Zurich, where he received a doctor’s degree in 1905. This was the period when he began the research which resulted in the creation of his famous Theory of Relativity.
To most people it is not easy to explain why Einstein’s theory eventually shook the whole scientific and intellectual world. But because of it, scientists never again regarded the world as they had before. Basically, the theory proposed, among other things, that the maximum speed possible in the universe is that of light; that mass appears to increase with speed; that the rate of a clock moving in space will decrease as its speed increase; and that energy and mass are equal and interchangeable. This latter claim, based on the formula E=mc2 (energy equals mass times the square of the speed of light) was later proved by atomic fission, on which the atomic bomb is based. Later in life, when Einstein was asked to explain his law of relativity to a group of young students, he said, “When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, you think it’s only a minute. But when you sit on a hot stove for a minute, you think it’s two hours. That is relativity.”
Einstein had an effect on science and history that only a few men have ever achieved. An American university president commented in 1929 that “Einstein has created a new outlook, a new view of the universe. It may be some generations before the average mind grasp the identity of time and space, and so on – but even ordinary men understand now that the universe is something vaster then ever thought before.”
By 1914 Einstein had gained world fame. He accepted the offer to become a professor at the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin. He had few duties, little teaching, and unlimited opportunities for study. It was an ideal position, but soon this peace and quiet were broken by the First World War.下载本文
