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Happy Birthday, Einstein!

Posted on 2006-03-14 at 07:27

Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879 – April 18, 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist widely regarded as the greatest scientist of the 20th century. He was the author of the general theory of relativity and made important contributions to the special theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, and cosmology. He was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize for Physics for his explanation of the photoelectric effect in 1905 (his "miracle year") and "for his services to Theoretical Physics."

After British solar eclipse expeditions in 1919 confirmed that light rays from distant stars were deflected by the gravity of the sun in the exact amount he predicted in his general theory of relativity, Einstein became world-famous, an unusual achievement for a scientist. In his later years, his fame exceeded that of any other scientist in history. In popular culture, his name has become synonymous with great intelligence and genius.

In November 1915, Einstein presented a series of lectures before the Prussian Academy of Sciences in which he described his theory of gravity, known as general relativity. The final lecture climaxed with his introduction of an equation that replaced Newton's law of gravity, the Field Equation.9 This theory considered all observers to be equivalent, not only those moving at a uniform speed. In general relativity, gravity is no longer a force (as it is in Newton's law of gravity) but is a consequence of the curvature of space-time.

The theory provided the foundation for the study of cosmology and gave scientists the tools for understanding many features of the universe that were discovered well after Einstein's death. A truly revolutionary theory, general relativity has so far passed every test posed to it and has become a powerful tool used in the analysis of many subjects in physics.

Initially, scientists were skeptical because the theory was derived by mathematical reasoning and rational analysis, not by experiment or observation. But in 1919, predictions made using the theory were confirmed by Arthur Eddington's measurements (during a solar eclipse), of how much the light emanating from a star was bent by the Sun's gravity when it passed close to the Sun, an effect called gravitational lensing. The observations were carried out on May 29, 1919, at two locations, one in Sobral, Ceará, Brazil, and another in the island of Principe, in the west coast of Africa. On November 7, The Times reported the confirmation, cementing Einstein's fame.

Many scientists were still unconvinced for various reasons ranging from disagreement with Einstein's interpretation of the experiments, to not being able to tolerate the absence of an absolute frame of reference. In Einstein's view, many of them simply could not understand the mathematics involved[citation needed]. Einstein's public fame which followed the 1919 article created resentment among these scientists some of which lasted well into the 1930s.

In the early 1920s Einstein was the lead figure in a famous weekly physics colloquium at the University of Berlin. On March 30, 1921, Einstein went to New York to give a lecture on his new Theory of Relativity, the same year he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Though he is now most famous for his work on relativity, it was for his earlier work on the photoelectric effect that he was given the Prize, as his work on general relativity was still disputed. The Nobel committee decided that citing his less-contested theory in the Prize would gain more acceptance from the scientific community.

Sir Edmund Whittaker(1953) stated that David Hilbert published the theory of general relativity nearly simultaneously with Einstein.

Einstein's postulation that light can be described not only as a wave with no kinetic energy, but also as massless discrete packets of energy called quanta with measurable kinetic energy (now known as photons) was a landmark break with the classical physics. In 1909 Einstein presented his first paper on the quantification of light to a gathering of physicists and told them that they must find some way to understand waves and particles together.

In the mid-1920s, as the original quantum theory was replaced with a new theory of quantum mechanics, Einstein balked at the Copenhagen interpretation of the new equations either because it settled for a probabilistic, non-visualizable account of physical behaviour, or because it described matter as being in necessarily contradictory states. Einstein agreed that the theory was the best available[citation needed], but he looked for a more "complete" explanation, i.e., more deterministic. He could not abandon the belief that physics described the laws that govern "real things", the belief which had led to his successes with atoms, photons, and gravity.

In a 1926 letter to Max Born, Einstein made a remark that is now famous:

To this, Bohr, who sparred with Einstein on quantum theory, retorted, "Stop telling God what He must do!" The Bohr-Einstein debates on foundational aspects of quantum mechanics happened during the Solvay conferences.

Einstein was not rejecting probabilistic theories per se. Einstein himself was a great statistician, using statistical analysis in his works on Brownian motion and photoelectricity and in papers published before the miraculous year 1905; Einstein had even discovered Gibbs ensembles. He believed, however, that at the core reality behaved deterministically. Many physicists argue that experimental evidence contradicting this belief was found much later with the discovery of Bell's Theorem and Bell's inequality. Nonetheless, there is still space for lively discussions about the interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Einstein's writings on religion are frequently associated with pantheism, an areligious spirituality that regards the natural world as definitionally equivalent to God. Although he was raised Jewish, he was not a believer in the religious aspect of Judaism, though he still considered himself an ethnic Jew. From a letter written in English, dated March 24, 1954, Einstein wrote, "It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."

He also said (in an essay reprinted in Living Philosophies, vol. 13, 1931): "A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds—it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity; in this sense, and this [sense] alone, I am a deeply religious man."

The following is a response made to Rabbi Herbert Goldstein of the International Synagogue in New York which read:

Einstein was an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association beginning in 1934, and was an admirer of Ethical Culture.

As with the article on Pi, this was taken from the Wikipedia article on the subject. The text of this entry falls under the GNU Free Documentation License.

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