Einstein, Albert

1995/08/02 Azkune Mendia, Iñaki - Elhuyar Fundazioa | Kaltzada, Pili - Elhuyar Zientziaren Komunikazioa

• Biografiak

(1879-1955)

This Jewish physicist was born in Man in March 1879 in Ulm (Germany), but during his life he was also a Swiss and American citizen.

Despite being a Jew, he began to study at the Catholic Institute of Munich, where he went to live his family as a child. As a child he was not an intelligent pupil and began to speak very late.

In 1894 his father had to travel to Milan, but Albert stayed in Germany to finish high school. Alberto had good grades only in mathematics and, on the recommendation of his teacher, he left school. After a vacation in Italy, he went to the university of Switzerland. When he graduated he wanted to work as a teacher, but he did not have the opportunity to do so because he was Jewish and was not Swiss.

In 1901 he began his activity in a patent office in the city of Bern. Then he began to work on his own theoretical physics and in 1905 he published five Works in the German magazine Annalen der Physik, in which three important theoretical developments were expressed. Another way to determine the molecular dimensions, does the inertia of a body depend on its energy content? the titles of the works.

His first work was used as a memory of the thesis presented in 1905 at the University of Zurich. The second was "revolutionary," Einstein said. Based on the photoelectric effect and on the energy quantum works of Max Planck, he postulated what would later be called "photon". This article was the beginning of quantum mechanics.

In his third work he applied the calculation of probabilities in the Brownian movement established by the theory. The fourth article was the most important. In it he expresses with great precision the most important discovery of physics from the beginning of the century: "Special theory of relativity". Although Maxwell's electrodynamics and Galileo's relativity were apparently incompatible, he showed that these theories were perfectly compatible, without altering them at all and adapting the physical concepts of space and time. His fifth work was a consequence of the above. He expressed equivalence between mass and energy through the famous formula E = mc2.

Although these five works were not published or attended, they realized the value of the most prestigious physicists of the time, such as Planck, Minkowski or Lorenz. In the end Einstein got the post of professor at the University of Zurich, although the salary was very bad. His fame was growing and in 1913 he was offered work at the Kaiser Wilhelm Physics Institute in Berlin. He previously spent a season at the University of Prague (1911-1912). He was called to many congresses, such as Solvay, to work both the theory of relativity and quantum theory.

He tried to apply his theory of relativity to accelerated systems and published the conclusions of his research in 1915, in the so-called General Theory of Relativity. In the general theory, Einstein showed three effects that were far from what was predicted by Newton's theory.

Broglie and Heisenberg were based on a work published by Einstein in 1917 to develop quantum theory. However, Einstein did not fully accept the probabilistic interpretation of the quantum theory of the Copenhagen school. He reproached them for abandoning determinism.

Hitler, of Einstein Berlin, remained to power. He made many trips to foreign universities but was a professor at the "Institute for Avanced Study" of Princenton in New Jersey, in 1933, exiled from Germany, Paris, Belgium and finally in North America. There he tried to gather his death in a theory of synthesis the art electromagnetism and gravitation, although he did not achieve the goal.

On the other hand, Albert Einstein always worried about social problems. He spoke and wrote a lot about the state of Israel, Nazism, the Soviet Union, nuclear weapons, armies, etc. In 1939, out of fear of German Nazism, he asked President Roosvelt to develop an atomic reaction research program, he did not participate in the elaboration of the atomic bomb of Los Alamos. When in 1945 he made sure that an atomic weapon could be built, he wrote asking President Roosvelt not to do so. Since then he worked to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons until his death.

He died at Princenton on April 18, 1955. Shortly afterwards, they discovered a chemical element with 99 atomic numbers and called it "einstenium" in honor of the German physicist Judu-Swiss American.