Written by: Riddhis Sharma - 26006, Grade IX
Posted on: 09 February, 2023
Albert Einstein, (March 14, 1879 in Ulm, Württemberg, Germany - April 18, 1955, Princeton, New Jersey, USA), German physicist who developed special relativity and general relativity and won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for his explanation of the photoelectric effect. Einstein is often considered the most influential physicist of the 20th century.
Initially, Einstein's 1905 paper was ignored by the physics community. This began to change after he got the attention of one physicist, Max Planck, perhaps the most influential physicist of his generation and the founder of quantum theory. Planck's admirable comments and experiments that gradually confirmed his theories soon led to Einstein's rapid rise in academia, where he was invited to speak at international conferences such as the Solvay Conference. He was offered many positions at increasingly prestigious institutions such as the University of Zurich, the University of Prague, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and finally the University of Berlin. While his fame spread, Einstein's marriage fell apart. He was constantly on the move, speaking at international conferences, and immersing himself in relativity. The couple frequently fought over their children and meager finances. Convinced that his marriage was destined, Einstein began having an affair with his cousin Elsa Lowenthal, whom he later married. (Elsa was a cousin on her mother's side, and a cousin on her father's side.) When he finally divorced Mileva in 1919, he decided that if he won the Nobel he agreed to give her some money. One of his deepest thoughts that haunted Einstein from 1905 to 1915 was a serious flaw in his own theory. He didn't mention gravity or acceleration. His friend Paul Ehrenfest was intrigued. As the disk rotates, the edges of the disk move faster than the center, so (according to special relativity) a meter stick placed on the disk should shrink. This meant that the geometry of the Euclidean plane had to fail against the disk. During the next decade, Einstein was busy formulating gravitational theories related to the curvature of spacetime. For Einstein, Newtonian gravity was actually a byproduct of a deeper reality. The curvature of the fabric of space and time. In November 1915, Einstein completed his general theory of relativity. In the summer of 1915, Einstein gave six two-hour lectures at the University of Göttingen, in which he thoroughly explained an incomplete version of general relativity. The mathematician David Hilbert, who had organized lectures at his university and had corresponded with Einstein, had completed these details, as if the theory were his own. In fact, only five days before Einstein submitted his paper on general relativity in November. They later resolved their disagreements and remained friends. Einstein wrote to Hilbert: “I have battled the resulting bitterness with complete success. In the midst of our unchanging friendship, I am thinking of you again, and I would like to ask you to do the same.” Today physicists call the action from which the equations are derived the Einstein-Hilbert action, but the theory itself is largely attributed to Einstein. Einstein believed that general relativity was mathematically beautiful and correct because it accurately predicted the perihelion precession of Mercury's orbit around the Sun. His theory also predicted a measurable deflection of light around the Sun. As a result, he even offered to fund an expedition to measure the deflection of starlight during eclipses.
