Theoretical physicist, b. 14 March 1879 (Ulm, Germany), d. 18 April 1955 (Princeton, USA)
Albert Einstein was only six weeks old when his father moved from Ulm, Germany, to Munich to establish a small engineering factory. Albert passed high school without much interest but decided at the age of 12 to dedicate his time to probe the depths of the unkown "huge world." He eventually entered the Federal Polytechnic Academy in Zürich, Switzerland and graduated in 1900.
Einstein took out Swiss citizenship and found employment as examiner in the Swiss patent office. At the same time he dedicated himself to private study of physical problems, which resulted in 1905 in the publication of five papers in the Annalen der Physik (Annals of Physics):
The last three works revolutionized physics in a way not seen for centuries and layed the foundation for Einstein's fame as a genius.
In "On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light" Einstein postulated that light is not only wavelike but also composed of small quanta of matter (photons) and used this property to explain the photoelectric effect (that certain solids, when hit by light, emit electricoty).
His work "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" contained a fuller development of the special theory of relativity that Einstein had developed in an essay at the age of 16. It postulated that if the speed of light is an absolute constant regardless of the frame of reference, then both time and movement must be relative to the observer.
The paper "Does the Inertia of a Body Depend upon its Energy Content?", in essence a mathematical footnote to the fourth paper, postulated the equivalence of mass and energy through Einstein's famous equation E = mc2 (Energy E of a body is equal to its mass m, multiplied with the square of the speed of light, c.)
As a result of these publications Einstein was offered a position at the German University in Prague and in 1912 a professorship at the Polytechnic in Zürich. In 1914 he accepted a position with the Prussian Akademie der Wissenschaften (Academy of Sciences) in Berlin, which meant that he now could concentrate exclusively on research. In 1916 he published Die Grundlagen der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie ("The Foundations of the General Theory of Relativity") and stated that gravity is not a force, as Newton had postulated, but a curved field in the space-time continuum created by the presence of mass. He suggested an experiment to prove or disprove his idea by measuring the deflection of light emitted from a star as it passes a large mass, such as the sun. The experiment was performed by an expedition of the Royal Society of London to observe a total solar eclipse in 1919, and Einstein's predictions were shown to be correct. Einstein received the Nobel price for physics in 1921.
Einstein continued to work in Berlin until Hitler's rise to power in 1933. He then renounced his German citizenship and settled in Princeton, USA. His life was overshadowed by world events, and he never achieved his greatness of vision in science again. For many years he opposed the findings of Niels Bohr's nuclear quantum mechanics, for which he himself had prepared the way.
Einstein's personal greatness - and tragic - was his dedication to a better world. He renounced nationalism early in his life and was a dedicated pacifist. His voice was among the very few who spoke out against World War I, when he said: "We are dealing with an epidemic delusion which, having caused infinte suffering, will one day vanish and become a monstrous and incomprehensible source of wonderment to later generations." In 1931, seeing the threat of another world war, he established the Einstein War Resisters' International Fund.
Einstein was deeply opposed to the rising anti-semitism in Germany. His desire to fight this development led him to support Zionism; in 1921 he toured the USA in support of the Palestine Foundation Fund, and in the following years he visited Jewish settlements in Palestine.
In 1939 Niels Bohr visited Einstein in Princeton and convinced him that the USA had to make efforts to develop a nuclear bomb before Germany would have one. Einstein, who had already broken with his pacifist past (he had called on Europe to arm itself against Germany), was persuaded by two Hungarians, the physicist Leo Szilard and the mathematician Paul Wigner, to put his name under a letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt urging "watchfulness and, if necessary, quick action." He thus contributed to the beginning of the USA's nuclear bomb programme. Like many of his colleagues, he tried to contain it when the results became clear for everyone to see in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but with little effect.
As he said of himself, he had "a passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility." He tried to console himself about his impotence to change the course of world affairs by saying: "Politics is for the moment. An equation is for eternity." But everyone who met him during the last years of his life could see that these words only served to hide his sorrow over the state of the world.
Michelmore, P. (1995) Albert Einstein. Encyclopaedia Britannica 15th ed.