Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) was a German born Nobel Prize winning physicist famous for several great works of theoretical physics. He is perhaps best known for his theories of Special Relativity and General Relativity, but his accomplishments include many other important works, such as the Photoelectric Effect, Brownian Motion, Bose-Einstein Statistics, his critiques of quantum mechanics via the EPR-Paradox, and later in life, his work in search of a Unified Field Theory.

Biography

His Notoriety

While most science historians would claim that Isaac Newton was arguably the greatest scientist in history, Albert Einstein is surely the most widely recognized scientist in the modern world--no captions are needed on his photographs, and practically every adult in the world immediately recognizes him.

He received the Nobel Prize in 1921 for his paper on the Photoelectric Effect not, surprisingly, for either of his papers on Relativity--which were to set the collective world of physics 'on it's ear'.

Neither was it for his paper on inertial energy, containing the now-famous E=MC^2 equation, also arguably the one math equation known about by practically every adult in the developed world.

Einstein's meteoric rise to world fame came after the publication of Sir Arthur Eddington's observations on the bending of starlight passing nearby the Sun, which were taken during the total solar eclipse of May 29, 1919, and which were proclaimed to be the first observational proofs of Einstein's space-time theorems of General Relativity.

Effectively overnight, Einstein became famous the world over, and his name has now become synonymous in Western Culture with genius.

--Knowthetruth 02:45, 7 March 2007 (EST)

Beliefs

His Humility

Einstein's initial philosophy of Cosmology led him to revise his work on General Relativity to include a 'fudge-factor' which he termed the Cosmological Constant, and which allowed the Steady-State Universe model--which Einstein originally accepted--to be accounted for.

Edwin Hubble, of whom NASA's famous Hubble Space Telescope is named in honor, later convinced him otherwise. At one point he had Einstein actually making direct observations alongside him, and Hubble's findings showed conclusively that Einstein's original formulas were correct--namely that the universe was indeed expanding just as General Relativity predicts. Einstein recanted his original philosophy, and accepted as true the notion of a changing universe having a definite beginning.

He later said of his original space-time theorem's ill-conceived kludge, "It was the biggest blunder of my life.”

--Knowthetruth 03:07, 7 March 2007 (EST)