The Genius Albert Einstein
Biography
by Alan Pritt
Albert Einstein Biography
Albert Einstein was born on the 14th March 1879 in Ulm, in Württemberg, Germany. His parents were concerned because he took a long time to speak, and had a habit of saying phrases under his breath before he would say them out loud.But this by no means showed a lack of intelligence. He frequently came top of his class in maths and Latin. He also became an accomplished violinist; having taken lessons from the age of six to thirteen. He also liked to improvise on the piano.
Although he was a Jew his parents didn’t really bring him up as one. It was not until the age of eleven that he began to learn about his religion. He never became a religious man, but he was very spiritual. He created an understanding of the world through a combination of science and religion, stating that he pursued physics in order to understand God’s thoughts.
Where he was good at maths, he struggled with sport, and with making friends. This was likely due to his dislike of the militaristic school discipline, which he saw as stifling. Furthermore, Albert Einstein child activities were games that required persistence and tenacity; which other children couldn’t join in with. One of his favourite games, for example, was building a house of cards.
He found better company with elders. His Uncle Jakob would pose mathematical problems for him and upon solving them, the young Albert Einstein would show a deep happiness. From the age of ten to fifteen he was visited by a medical student called Max Talmud. Max would spend hours with the young Einstein discussing science and philosophy.
He also experienced a great wonder when he first saw the magical power of a compass that would always find its way back to north. Perhaps most unusual though was the wonder he found in a book on Euclidean plane geometry that he received when he was twelve years old. He studied the book intensely and taught him self the subject that was not usually taught until university.
Einstein’s continued to find it difficult to fit into school, and he became depressed. When his family moved to Italy to start a business venture, leaving him to complete his studies alone, this depression deepened.
But he had another concern.
When, at a young age, he had seen a military parade, he became scared. He didn’t like the way the soldiers were marching with no apparent independent will. He made his parents promise him that he wouldn’t ever become a soldier. Germany had compulsory conscription, however, and he was fast approaching the age that he would be called up. At the age of sixteen, upon gaining a note from his doctor who stated he had a nervous disorder, and gaining leave from the school he hated, he headed for Italy to join his family.
His family were surprised to see him, and somewhat upset that he hadn’t completed his studies. He also told them that he was going to renounce his German citizenship to avoid conscription.
He pursued self study in Italy, in preparation for the entry examination for the ETH in Zürich. He was sixteen and a half when he took it, which was a year and a half younger than it is normally taken; and so, unsurprisingly, he failed. However, it was recognised that he did very well in maths and science and so it was decided that he should pursue the Matura (a high school diploma that would gain him entry into the ETH). He went to the cantonal school in Arrau in Switzerland, to do so. He boarded with the Winteler family who treated him like family and he enjoyed school for the first time.
In one maths class in this school he began daydreaming. He asked himself: ‘What would the world look like if you were sitting on the end of light beam?’ This question would not leave him, and it was to lead to some of his greatest discoveries.
In 1895 he renounced his citizenship to Germany he made himself stateless. He also passed his exams in Arrau and gained entry at last to the ETH. While giving himself time for the occasional trip to the theatre or a concert, he put his head down worked independently and tenaciously just like he had done as a child. But while his work was of more serious pursuits than making cards, he found it difficult to follow his lecturer’s tuition and the course structure. He liked, instead, to experiment in the areas that he found interesting. He was not a favourable student, therefore, with his tutor.
This was perhaps the reason why, after qualifying as a Fachlehrer, he was not offered an assistantship like the other 3 who qualified. Still, in December 1900 he completed his first scientific paper and submitted it to the Annalen der Physik.
On 21st Feb 1901 he was granted a Swiss citizenship and was stateless no longer. However, he was still jobless. He tried gaining assistantships at several universities, but didn’t receive any offers. Finally on 19th May 1901 he was offered a temporary job as a substitute teacher for two months at a high school in Winterthur. He derived much pleasure from this and spent his free time on his further independent study. This was followed by another temporary position at a private school in Schaffhausen, where he spent the first two months writing his doctoral dissertation on a topic in the kinetic theory of gases; for some reason this was rejected, however.
After Schaffhausen he went to Bern, where he began work in the patent office. He took this job very seriously and worked hard. He even submitted a few patents of his own including one for a noiseless fridge. This would have worked, but it was superseded by easier methods. Yet, even with the amount of work in the patent office, he still found time to continue his private studies. In fact, it was his time at the patent office that was to produce some of his most groundbreaking work.
It was also during this time that he married Meleva Moric, a fellow student at the ETH. His parents strongly opposed, but on his deathbed in 1902 his father gave his consent. They married on 6th January 1903, and bore a son the following year.
1905 was to be the year that Einstein published many of his works, including the piece which would eventually gain him the Nobel Prize. Since he had published in the Annalen der Physik previously, he had no difficulty getting published again. However, he would have had difficulty publishing it today because it contained no references.
Unlike quantum theory, the general theory of relativity was not rapidly developed by the rest of the scientific community. The work was groundbreaking and placed new understanding on how gravity worked, but his work proved difficult to work with. The results of the theory only really showed up over under extreme densities, vast spaces or incredibly high precision measurements. Today, however, his equations are required for making accurate measurements with the Global Positioning System. And black holes cannot be understood at all without Einstein’s equations because of their incredible mass.
These series of works eventually earned him the kudos he deserved, and by time he left the patent office he was recognised as a leading scientific thinker. He took jobs in various universities, as lecturer, professor and even chair at the ETH. He also got to lecture to the top physicists that he admired so much, and lectured all over Europe.
But his growing fame meant that he didn’t have time for his marriage, and so they separated and finally divorced in 1919. But Einstein had found solace in his cousin, Elsa Löwenthal, and they married the same year.
In 1919 he also achieved more popular fame when he made predictions about a solar eclipse. When British eclipse expeditions confirmed his predictions, Einstein received great tribute in the press.
Such fame may well have saved his life, for graver days were to come.
At the beginning of the following year, in 1920, his mother moved in with him. She was dying and spent her last days living in his study. She died in March of 1920.
But death of a much wider scale was on the horizon. The rise in anti-Semitism meant that Germany was becoming an increasingly difficult place to be around for a Jew like Einstein. Philipp Lenard, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics and an early and enthusiastic Nazi, tried to discredit Einstein’s work saying that he had plagiarised it. Then, in the early 1930s, Einstein left Berlin just in time to miss a raid on his house and the public burning of his writings on relativity.
He resided in Belgium for a while but it was considered that it was unsafe for him there because of the close proximity to Germany; there was always the fear of kidnap or assassination now that he had become an important Jewish figure. He was, therefore, protected by hired security.
In September of 1932 he left Belgium, staying in England for a couple of months before boarding the ocean liner Westmoreland, in October, for the ten day journey to the US and Princeton, New Jersey. It was here that he joined the staff of the new Institute for Advanced Study.
Einstein was to live the rest of his life here. He spent many years working on unified theories in physics, but the biggest events involved politics and the war effort. In 1944, for example, he helped raise money for the war by hand writing his 1905 paper on special relativity and putting it up for auction. It raised six million dollars, and the manuscript today is held in the Library of Congress.
As much as possible Einstein tried to stay out of the politics of war, thinking it best to retreat to his studies, but his important status meant that he was not to be completely divorced of it. Fears of the advancement in the development of the atomic bomb in Germany, meant that he be asked to use his influence to warn the allies of this potential disaster. Belgium was the most important source of uranium at that point, and since Einstein knew the Queen, he was asked to offer her a warning.
Einstein also signed a letter to US president Franklin D. Roosevelt, explaining the threat and advising they too research the bomb. Following this letter, an advisory committee was set up, but Einstein had nothing to do with it after this. The project may even have died. However, research predicted that the potential of the bomb was much greater than first predicted, and so the British government sponsored a research program on the subject. This prompted work to begin on the development of a bomb by America; it was codenamed the ‘Manhattan Project’. The advisory committee (prompted by Einstein) made the setting of this up, much easier.
One more event was to take place in Einstein’s life. Since the rise of Nazism, Einstein had been a strong supporter of Zionism and so following the death of the first president of Israel in 1952, the Israeli government offered him the presidency. While grateful, he refused the offer.
In 1955, his health got the better of him, and on the 13th April 1955 his aneurysm burst. He asked that his life was not prolonged, and at 1:15am on Sunday 18th April he died. Beside his bed lay some unfinished calculations from his unified field theory.
What can we learn from Albert Einstein?
Einstein never took an IQ test, but estimates have been made as between 160 and 180. These are based on studying his writings and what people say about him. In truth we do not know what his IQ was and these figures are purely speculative.There are many things that the Albert Einstein biography can tell us about intelligence. Firstly, it reveals his vivid imagination. It was as he was daydreaming in that maths class, that he first wondered what it would be like to ride on a light beam. Such imaginings played a major part in his life, and he would sit for hours in his chair creating visual metaphors in his head. He called these ‘thought experiments’ and it was thess, rather than an extensive knowledge of physics, that helped him make his greatest discoveries.
It is worth bearing in mind, that these ‘thought experiments’ were far from the idle daydreaming that everyone encounters, but they were constantly stretching his brain. Even once worked out, the conclusions he makes are difficult to understand. Therefore if we take the time to understand his work, we will necessarily be stretching our brains as well.
He also had an intense focus and persistence. Albert Einstein child games (such as building houses of cards) were a precursor to his intense focus on his work. He worked long and hard because, like those childhood games, he enjoyed them. Work, for him, was play.
Such has the interest been in his genius abilities, that his brain has been preserved and examined by scientists trying to understand how his brain worked. In a series of books on geniuses, Robert Dilts takes a different approach to understanding his mind by dissecting his notes and correspondents. His book, Strategies of Genius, uses NLP (a psychological toolset) to understand some of the mechanics behind his thinking, with the motivation that they could be applied to the thinking of less gifted individuals.
Some of the things that Einstein did can be learnt by anybody who has the will to apply themselves. This, of course, is what this site is all about..
Albert Einstein Biography Time Line
1879 – On 14th March at 11:30am, Albert Einstein is born to Hermann Einstein (a featherbed salesman) and his wife Pauline in Ulm, Germany.
1881 – Einstein’s sister Maria (Maja) is born
1884 – Around this time, Albert receives a sense of wonder when he sees a compass for the first time.
1888 – Einstein enters the Luitpold Gymnasium School in Munich
1894 – The Einsteins move from Munich to Pavia, Italy. Albert is left behind.
1895 – For various reasons follows his family to Italy there a term later. His parents are shocked to see him he didn’t tell them he was leaving Germany. He studies on his own, but not enough to pass the entry exam to the ETH, so towards the end of 1895 he begins high school in Aarau in Switzerland.
1896 – He graduates from high school and enrols at the ETH (the Federal Polytechnic) in Zurich.
1898 – He falls in with a fellow student, the Hungarian Mileva Maric.
1900 – Albert graduates from the ETH.
1901 – Having failed to receive an assistantship at the ETH, he takes work as a temporary tutor in a private school.
1902 – Einstein begins work as a patent examiner in Bern
1903 – Albert and Mileva marry in January
1904 – Albert and Mileva have their first son, Hans Albert.
1905 – Einstein writes a paper that changes very foundations of physics.
1908 – He takes his first teaching position at Bern.
1910 – His second son, Eduard, is born.
1911 – Einstein moves to Prague teach.
1912 – He moves back again to Zurich to teach at the ETH.
1914 – Einstein moves to Berlin and separates from Mileva.
1916 – Einstein publishes his paper on general relativity and gravitation.
1919 – Albert marries his cousin, Elsa, on the 29th May. A solar eclipse proves his General Theory of Relativity works.
1932 – The Nazi uprising his beginning to take effect and so Einstein leaves Germany, never to return.
1933 – Albert and Elsa make the trip to the United States. They settle in Princeton, New Jersey where he works at the Institute for Advanced Study.
1936 – Elsa dies after a brief illness
1939 – Einstein signs a letter to President Rossevelt, warning him of the danger of an atomic bomb.
1940 – Receives US citizenship
1951 – His sister, Maja, dies.
1955 – On the 18th April Einstein dies in the Princeton Hospital.
