Einstein Unveils the Secrets of Physics
Albert Einstein did not receive great press at first for his most famous work--probably the most well-known, if not widely understood, scientific postulate of the 20th century--the theory of relativity.
Indeed, his 1921 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded not for his seminal work, but for his 1905 efforts on the photoelectric effect. The Los Angeles Times article from 1949, heralding Einstein’s “latest discovery,” was actually describing just an addition to the earlier work that ought to have been front-page news.
Einstein’s greatest theory was alternately misunderstood and castigated, but even during Einstein’s lifetime, it was revered enough that many considered him the world’s greatest living scientist.
Any photo transmission--whether a movie beamed to television sets or an exact duplicate of a document made by fax or copier--was born of Einstein’s musings. Precision clocks, radios, computers and nuclear weapons, among other innovations, can similarly be traced back to Einstein’s work on the speed of light and his famous equation on mass and energy.
Like Galileo and Newton before him, Einstein transcended science. He studied music, passionately argued the important political issues of the day and fought for his social beliefs.
He might have been called a philosopher or poet, since he saw his mission as explaining the physical realm, not performing lab tests.
Seldom if ever has a scientist won such public adoration. His visage, with its amused smile and shock of unkempt hair, is familiar enough to be a pop image; his name has become synonymous with genius (as in “I’m no Einstein.”)
Einstein’s legend is all the more powerful for his familiar failings. The German born in 1879 to a secular Jewish engineer father and musician mother did not speak until he was 3. At the age of 9, he still was not fluent--a surprising phase for a man who would become known for his powers of speech, offering such pithy thoughts as, “God is subtle but he is not malicious.”
He cut class, was dismissed from high school and miserably failed his college entrance exams. Even after getting into the university, Einstein failed to impress his professors, who would not recommend him for teaching jobs. The man who would be the most renowned scientist of his age instead worked in 1901 as a Swiss patent clerk.
Years later, he would deny the existence of black holes--a concept now widely accepted.
Einstein was genuinely humble, arguing that any scientific achievement is actually the group effort of a thinker and his contemporaries, who aid and contribute to the intellectual debate.
In his hours away from the patent office, Einstein expanded on Galileo’s principle of relativity, postulating that the speed of light is constant while time and distance are not.
That led Einstein to an equation now so ubiquitous it is found on T-shirts and bathroom walls: E=MC 2 The notion that a body’s energy is equal to its mass times the speed of light squared meant that matter and energy are interchangeable--and explains the source of stars’ power, as well as the theory behind the atom bomb.
Einstein led students not into laboratory tests but through thought experiments, illustrated by a few equations and punctuated by hypothetical scenarios.
His readers were asked to envision clocks, mirrors, beams of light and two people, one on a train and the other sitting on the embankment.
Many people worried that relativity called into question all absolutes, including the moral and spiritual. But Einstein held firm on what effect relativity would have on religion.
“None,” Einstein told the Archbishop of Canterbury. “Relativity is a purely scientific matter and has nothing to do with religion.”
Einstein held strong moral convictions.
He advocated respect for individual rights, peace and socialism. But Germany’s vicious anti-Semitism convinced Einstein of the need for a Jewish homeland. He was teaching at Caltech when the Nazis came to power in 1933. Vilified at home, Einstein accepted a permanent teaching position at Princeton University in 1933.
The physicist raised money for a Jewish university in Jerusalem and lent his credibility to the fledgling state of Israel, even as he vociferously protested that country’s unequal treatment of Arab residents.
Einstein was a pacifist who nonetheless urged Franklin Roosevelt to develop nuclear weapons as a deterrent to Germany, which he believed was working on such a weapon. His letters to the president helped bring about the Manhattan Project.
But after the bombing of Hiroshima, Einstein pleaded for a world government that would prevent future use of the bomb, in hopes that his pacifism would be as much a legacy as his science.
