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 contributions to 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^{[Citation Needed]} 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 services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect".

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 theory of General Relativity.

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

Famous works

Einstein's best-known scientific work is his 1905 papers on Special Relativity. The theory of relativity had already been published by Hendrik Lorentz and Henri Poincaré. Einstein's contribution was to give a description of the Lorentz-Poincare theory without reference to the luminiferous aether, and to clarify some of the physical consequences of the theory.

Einstein then wrote a series of papers applying relativity to gravity, resulting in General Relativity. Much of the actual mathematics of general relativity was worked out by Marcel Grossman, David Hilbert, and others. Einstein's main contribution was to give an alternate derivation of the field equations, and to apply them to explaining the precession of Mercury's orbit.

Beliefs

Einstein's revised his work on General Relativity to include a 'fudge-factor' which he termed the Cosmological Constant. He was trying to account for the apparent state-state nature of the universe.

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 the universe was indeed expanding, as predicted by certain solutions of GR's field equations in the absence of a cosmological constant. Einstein recanted his original philosophy, and accepted as true the notion of a changing universe having a definite beginning.

He later said of the Cosmological Constant, "It was the biggest blunder of my life." A cosmological constant of the opposite sign is now commonly accepted among cosmologists as a way of explaining the accelerating expansion of the universe.

References

"The Nobel Prize in Physics 1921"[1]

"On The Electrodynamics Of Moving Bodies"[2]

"Does The Inertia Of A Body Depend Upon Its Energy-Content?"[3]