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 there have been many other great scientists, 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"[1].
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 over time 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 steady-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 his Cosmological Constant, "It was the biggest blunder of my life."
An interesting end-note on this term: Principle investigators from Princeton University first published findings in 1998 apparently revealing an accelerating expansion for the universe[2]. Because this initially seemed like it might be a sort of 'anti-gravity' effect (similar in concept to Einstein's original notion), it briefly became quite popular for scientists to dub the phenomenon the 'Cosmological Constant' as well.
Subsequent observations and further analysis have confirmed that not only were the initial WMAP findings correct, but they have also revealed that the effect arises rather from a much deeper and more fundamental characteristic of the fabric of space-time itself. For more information, see: Dark Energy.
Criticisms
Probably the biggest criticisms of Einstein for Creationists are that he seemed to hold to the political and philosophical notions of Marxism, and that he also apparently supported the formation of a World Government[3], though he held dual U.S. and Swiss citizenships.
And, although many seem to believe (see: Urban Legend) that Einstein directly helped the U.S. Government devise the first Atomic Bomb (probably because of E=MC^2), he in fact had nothing whatsoever to do with the project. He did, however, warn President Roosevelt in 1939 via a letter[4] that the possibility of developing a Nuclear-fission bomb was on the near horizon, that the Nazi German government was apparently working to develop one, and that the United States should promptly make arrangements to further it's recent discoveries and research in this area--as well as to procure reliable sources of Uranium, of which the U.S. was relatively short.
Einstein's work on special relativity did not cite its sources, and misled many people into thinking that he invented the theory.
Einstein spent much of his later career fruitlessly looking for variants of Hermann Weyl's unified field theory of electromagnetism and gravity.
Eddington's 1919 observation was actually inconclusive, and the public acclaim for Einstein was undeserved. (Better observations were done later.)
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]