Short biography on the "Einstein Family"

"The difference between Stupidity and Genius is that Genius has its limits".

-Albert Einstein

Short biography on the "Einstein Family"

Albert Einstein was, and still is, consider the most brilliant mind of the 20th century. Albert Einstein was born in Germany on March 14, 1879. He was a Theoretical Physicist, Genius, Thinker, Creator and a Noble Prize winner. He was married to Maric Einstein in January 1903 and had 3 children named Lieserl Einstein, Hans Albert Einstein and Eduard Einstein. Albert and Maric Einstein were divorced on February 14, 1919, after being apart for 5 years.

Albert Einstein married Elsa Löwenthal on June 2, 1919, and it's said they had an ongoing relationship since 1912. Elsa Einstein was later diagnosed with heart and kidney problems in 1935. Elsa would later die in December 1936 from her health problems. Einstein would follow her in death 19 years later, on April 18, 1955 at age 76. Einstein died of heart failure at 12:55 a.m. in Princeton, New Jersey. Thomas Harvey would perform the autopsy at Princeton Hospital.

Albert Einstein’s Top 17 Major Achievements

1.) Albert Einstein demonstrated in 1905, that space and time are not absolute, but instead, that the speed of light is absolute. By making just a simple replacement in a fundamental assumption he quickly, easily and beautifully derived the transformation equations that Lorentz had painfully derived earlier. Because the replacement was so fundamental, it meant a complete reinterpretation of all of physics up to that point.

2.) He also figured out the equivalence of mass and energy, the famous formula E=mc^2, in 1905.

3.) Albert Einstein, after Max Planck's timid suggestion, argued that light should be seriously considered as a collection of particles by everyone, challenging the “Wave Theory of Light”. His particle argument that explained the photoelectric effect won him a Nobel Prize in 1921 and this accomplishment opened a whole new world of study known as Quantum Physics. It is amusing to note that Einstein received a Nobel prize for a work of his that is much less famously associated with him than Relativity, because the Nobel prize is meant to reward "correctness, not fame". It is ironic that Einstein's argument in the photoelectric effect is less watertight than Relativity (Nature's way of laughing in the face of the Nobel committee) because a wave theory of light with quantum electrons would have explained the photoelectric effect too. Nonetheless, to be clear, light is quantised.

4.) His research concerning the “Brownian Motion of Particles” would create an equation by twisting both the ideas of “Kinetic Theory” and “Classical Hydrodynamics” together. His equation would demonstrate that the mean free path of such particles as a function of time.

5.) He also showed how you could calculate “Avogadro’s Number” and the size of molecules.

6.) He was the founder of quantum mechanics, because he was the first to urge everyone to take the subject seriously, and also produced a whole lot of important results with almost no experimental input other than the stuff he knew from college. Some of these results are so amazing that they deserve a special mention later.

7.) In 1915, Albert Einstein would publish his paper on “General Relativity”, which took over where “Special Relativity” failed to do. The publication of his second paper “General Relativity” would end up starting a rising controversy.

8.) He would later demonstrate that his “General Relativity” could model the behavior of the universe itself, and Albert had his paper published in 1917. General Relativity created some of the weirdest and most important results in modern Astronomy.

9.) Modelling the evolution of the universe itself is cosmology. Creating this new field of science, along with others like de Sitter, Friedmann and so on, an understanding of the universe was finally possible to be explored.

10.) He transformed our understanding of nature on every scale, from the smallest to the cosmos as a whole, between 1905 and 1925.

11.) Working with semi-classical reasoning, Einstein predicted the existence of lasers, with extremely little mathematics, that turned out to be exactly correct even after quantum effects are included.

12.) As another example of his stunning ability to revolutionize fields of physics, Einstein derived an understanding of the thermal characteristics of ALL solids, with a bit of mathematics, and because the mathematics was difficult, just one excited quantum state. Like a true master, he worked out the extremely difficult part of making a new way of calculating something, and then left the simple improvement of the model to other people, leading to an entire string of discoveries for other people to get. Also, this exercise proved that unlike the rumors, Einstein was really good with applied mathematics.

13.) Albert Einstein received a short paper in 1924 from a Indian Physicist named Satyendra Nath Bose, requesting Einstein’s help with publication. The paper Satyendra proposed to Einstein would describe light as a gas of photons. Einstein later proposed that you could use the same statistics and it could be applied to atoms. The “Bose-Einstein Statistics” now describes the construction of indistinguishable particles known as bosons.

14.) Bose-Einstein statistics, under low temperature conditions, would mathematically lose particles. Einstein quickly showed that those "lost" particles were actually just acting as one gigantic particle, the Bose-Einstein Condensate, which is what superfluid Helium is.

15.) General Relativity solved the anomalous precision of Mercury's orbit. Einstein's derivation was mathematically sophisticated, such that in one approximation step, he worked out the value he was looking for.

16.) Seized upon the beauty that was Kaluza-Klein theory (adding extra dimensions, curled up, to General Relativity predicts physical phenomena. The first of which is that classical Electromagnetism gets turned into gravity), Einstein worked out that these extra dimensions are unstable and was rumored to have derived all the way to Yang-Mills equations (that govern the nucleus). This is the very well-known vision of the Grand Unified Theory, although Einstein both championed and killed it, because the proof of instability was very crucial.

17.) To challenge physics to improve upon quantum mechanics, he designed the EPR paradox.

Although Einstein had many successes, the scientific community does not worship him as a deity. As a founder of quantum mechanics, it was a shame that he was completely wrong in the debate with Niels Bohr about the "God playing dice" issue. The EPR paradox that was meant to challenge quantum physics ended up being an experimental evidence that classical theories will never be able to explain our universe. The latter half of his life, spent upon the Grand Unified Theories of the General Relativity form, was a drastic waste because the rest of the world was busy making all kinds of incredible quantum mechanics discoveries that he would have been very much welcome to help.

_M R S S Shourie