Einstein: A Life of Genius (The True Story of Albert Einstein) Read online

  In 1896, Albert took his final exams at the Swiss Cantonal School, and obtained top scores in four subjects, including physics, descriptive geometry, and geometry, and finished near the top of his class in all other subjects.

  Einstein’s College Career

  Although Albert was still six months shy of his eighteenth birthday, he was nonetheless admitted to the Polytechnic in Zürich, with the intent to attain a teaching diploma in mathematics and physics. He entered the College of Sciences, and Einstein’s class consisted of five students, including one woman, Mileva Maric. The entire student body of the Polytechnic was well over 1,000 pupils, divided into the institution’s various colleges. The size of the class studying for teaching diplomas in mathematics and physics was about average for the time.

  “The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think,” Einstein later said. Einstein’s own performance in college indicated that he came to this conclusion early in his life. He enjoyed the typical life of a college student around the turn of the 20th century, frequenting coffee shops and beer halls with friends and fellow students. His rebellious streak remained apparent, as he frequently cut class if a course or a teacher displeased him. He studied what and when he pleased. He also cribbed class notes from his good friend, Marcel Grossmann. Using Grossmann’s notes to study for the October 1898 exams, Albert received the highest grade in the class. The accommodating Grossmann finished second.

  Albert’s romance with Marie Winteler failed rapidly after he entered college, and he became more interested in Mileva Maric, although he still sent his dirty laundry to Marie to be washed. Mileva, more than three years older than Albert, was considered by him to be his intellectual equal. Mileva remained at the Polytechnic for only one year before transferring to Heidelberg for one semester, after which she returned, and with Einstein’s help made up for the lost time in her studies. At some point during the year 1899, Albert and Mileva decided to be married.

  The Rebellious Student Re-emerges

  Albert also began to exhibit a cockiness towards his professors bordering on disrespect, frequently addressing them as “Mister” rather than “Professor.” One professor, Heinrich Weber, told Einstein “You are brilliant, but you have a serious problem; nobody can tell you anything.” Regardless, Einstein took top grades in all of Weber’s courses.

  Another professor with whom Einstein experienced conflict was physics professor Jean Pernet, who told Einstein, “Physics is too difficult for you,” and gave Einstein a failing grade in his lab course, the only class Einstein ever failed.

  In the summer preceding his final exams, Einstein sent a letter to Mileva, in which he announced that he was convinced that current theories regarding the electrodynamics of moving bodies did not conform to reality, and that he would one day present it correctly. In his final exams at Polytechnic, Einstein did well and he was awarded his degree, which included a teaching diploma. Einstein intended to become an assistant to one of his professors and work towards his PhD, however his previous rudeness to many of his professors came back to haunt him, as none of them accepted his assistance.

  Looking for Work and Getting Married

  Although Einstein had a teaching diploma from a prestigious university, he was unable to find a teaching position, and spent nearly two years in fruitless search. His reputation for a rebellious attitude did not help him. His friend Marcel Grossmann again came to his rescue, and asked his father to help Einstein gain employment in the Swiss city of Bern. Through Grossmann, Einstein secured a job with the Swiss patent office, which Einstein later described as “not demanding,” allowing Einstein to dedicate his time to his own scientific interests. It was time that he put to good use. The years in which Einstein was employed by the patent office – unattached to any university – became the most productive of his career.

  In January of 1903, Albert and Mileva were married, and in May 1904, their son, Hans Albert, was born. By that time, it appeared that Albert was destined to a career as a bureaucrat, working in a well-paying government job evaluating patent applications. His desire to return to academia was stymied by the need to support a family and the absence of academic support in the form of attachment to a university. Seldom were academic papers presented for peer review from those outside of academic circles. This was just one of the obstacles presented to Einstein, as he prepared for the publication of several papers presenting his newly-formed theories.

  Chapter 2: 1905 – The Year of Miracles

  The first decade of the 20th century was a time of astounding invention and innovation. The electrification of urban areas moved forward rapidly. Horseless vehicles appeared more frequently on city streets. The telephone became standard equipment in offices. A pair of American brothers demonstrated a practical flying machine. The great empires— Russia, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Great Britain— competed for power, driving innovation forward.

  During this decade of radical change, Albert Einstein worked at the Patent Office in Bern, Switzerland. His job consisted of evaluating patent applications to determine whether they infringed on existing patents, and whether the idea being patented was workable. For the first time in his life he welcomed the regimentation required of him. He divided his days into eight hours of work, eight hours of “play,” and eight hours of rest and, as he said, “there is always Sunday.” In his spare time he worked on his PhD dissertation.

  Prior to accepting the job at the Patent Office in 1902, Einstein had offered tutoring in both mathematics and physics. This led to a formation of a group of friends who continued to meet — usually in Einstein’s apartment, but occasionally in cafés or coffee shops — to discuss philosophy and physics. This group, which Einstein dubbed the Olympia Academy, had a significant impact on Einstein’s work. Einstein served as the informal chairman. Maurice Solovine, a student of philosophy, and Conrad Habicht, a mathematician, were core members of this group, which also included Einstein’s close friends Marcel Grossmann, Michele Besso, and Einstein’s wife Mileva Maric.

  The Problems within the World of Physics

  By the turn of the 20th century, physics was divided into two main branches: electromagnetism, in which the theory presented by James Clerk Maxwell in 1873 explained the nature of light and magnetism, and mechanics, which rested on the laws presented by Sir Isaac Newton in the mid-17th century. In some ways, Maxwell’s theories and Newton’s laws contradicted each other.

  The existing laws of physics were unable to explain many observations of heat radiation from objects. As an object is heated, its color changes, glowing from red to orange to yellow and on into the ultraviolet spectrum, which the human eye cannot see. In fact, physicists had by then observed that hot objects release less ultraviolet light, creating an anomaly, which they called the ultraviolet catastrophe. Maxwell theorized that the light emitted from a hot object moved in the form of a wave. A wave needs a body through which it can move, such as sound waves’ movement through the air. The vacuum in space would prohibit waves from moving through it; how, then, does light from the sun move through space to Earth? Physicists in the 19th century solved this problem by describing the existence of a substance which they called ether, which filled the universe and provided the body through which waves can move.

  According to Isaac Newton, the laws of physics are the same whether a body is at rest or in motion at a constant speed. Newton’s mechanics state that motion can only be described relatively to an object. This conflicted with Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism, because in his theory, motion would be measured against the fixed standard of the ether.

  Thus, in 1900, there were two major problems in the world of physics unexplained by either Newtonian mechanics or Maxwell’s electromagnetism. The first was that light had to consist of something more than a wave to explain the ultraviolet catastrophe. The second was that Newtonian mechanics and Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory were incompatible with each other. Einstein and other
physicists had been aware of these theories’ incompatibility with one another for many years. Einstein frequently referred to physics as being a poorly built house, ready to collapse.

  Einstein Rebuilds the House of Physics

  On March 17th, 1905, Einstein wrote a paper titled “On a heuristic point of view concerning the production and transformation of light.” This paper established the foundation for quantum theory when it posited the concept that light contained particles of energy called photons. On April 30th, he completed a second paper titled “A new determination of molecular dimensions,” his PhD dissertation, which helped to establish the existence of molecules, and which was accepted by the University of Zürich that July. A third paper, completed on May 11th, was titled, “On the motion of small particles suspended in a stationary liquid.” This paper explained the motion of molecules in water— called Brownian motion— and further established the reality of molecules.

  One night in May of 1905, Einstein held a conversation with Michele Besso, who also worked at the patent office, during which they discussed Galileo’s 1632 treatise on relativity. Galileo had described an observer on a dock watching a ship moving away at a constant rate of speed. Galileo wondered what the observer on the dock would see if someone were to drop a rock from the top of the ship’s mast. Where would the rock land? Would it strike the deck at the base of the mast, or would it strike further back to correspond with the distance the ship had moved while the rock was falling? According to Galileo, the correct answer was that the rock would land at the base of the mast from the perspective of the person who had dropped it. For the person on the dock, it would appear to have landed some distance from the mast. Thus, either answer is correct, as the viewed landing point would be relative to the position of the observer.

  Einstein’s question to Besso that evening was thus: if the falling object was a beam of light rather than a rock, would the answer be different? Just as Galileo had proven with experimentation that gravity is a constant force of acceleration, Maxwell had proven more than four decades earlier that the speed of light is a universal constant.

  Einstein believed that, from the perspective of the top of the mast, the light would strike the deck at the base of the mast. But the speed of the light is not the only factor to be considered; the distance the light has to travel, measured in time, has also changed from the perspective of the observer on the dock, who is farther away from the base of the mast.

  The following morning, Einstein greeted Besso at the patent office by saying, “Thank you. I have completely solved the problem.”

  The Theory of Special Relativity

  Einstein had calculated that time is not a constant, but was rather a variable based on the observed and the observer’s movement in relation to one another. This theory of relativity discarded the previously accepted assumption that time was measured by a universal clock. Space and time were no longer separate entities, but one — the Space-Time Continuum.

  On June 30th, Einstein wrote a paper entitled “On the electrodynamics of moving bodies.” He followed this with his final paper of 1905 on September 27th, entitled, “Does an object’s inertia depend on its energy content?” These two papers, subsequent to his conversation with Besso, revealed to the world Einstein’s theory of relativity, with the second paper containing the most famous of Einstein’s equations: E=mc2.

  Einstein was aware that these papers would be considered a significant achievement. In May 1905, in a letter to a friend, he wrote, “I promise you four papers… The first of which I might send you soon, since I will be receiving the free reprints. The paper deals with the radiation and the energy properties of light and is very revolutionary…”

  The Impact of Einstein’s Papers of 1905

  The first paper laid the foundation for quantum theory, and was the work for which Einstein won the Nobel Prize in physics years later. Physicist Max Planck had earlier explained the ultraviolet catastrophe by bundling light into quanta of energy, which he called lumps. Einstein’s first paper went further, and established Planck’s quanta as a property of all electromagnetic radiation, including x-rays, ultraviolet rays, radio, and infrared light. Planck had thought that light was sometimes lumpy, as in the ultraviolet catastrophe. Einstein established that light is always lumpy, and consisted of bundles known as photons that cannot be split or divided. This work was the basis for quantum theory, which would later explain light as both a wave and a particle. Einstein’s first paper generated tremendous interest within the physics community, but was not persuasive until it took hold amongst physicists in the 1920s.

  In his fourth paper of 1905, and the first in which he discusses relativity, Einstein eliminated the theory of ether permeating the universe. He modified the theory of electromagnetism so that it depended only on relative motion, which eliminated the need for the ether. Since it is not solely a wave, but a combination of waves and particles, light does not need a substance to move through. Einstein established the idea of relative motion to light. Anywhere in the universe, at rest or in motion, the speed of light remains constant. Thus, Einstein resolved the problems inherent in electromagnetic theory and reconciled it to Newton’s mechanics.

  In his final paper of 1905, in only three pages, Einstein established that energy has mass. To Einstein, mass is a form of energy, and energy is a form of mass. This paper, with the equation that is still famous, was proven with the development of the atomic bomb, and the conversion of uranium into energy within a nuclear reactor. It also provided a means to understand the way the sun generates energy.

  The first, fourth, and fifth of Einstein’s 1905 papers were revolutionary, and changed physics and the understanding of mechanics and electromagnetism for all time. They also formed the basis for quantum theory, which would expand beginning around 1920. The other two papers Einstein produced in 1905 were not revolutionary, in that they did not change physics or produce major changes in how the world is viewed, yet they provided important contributions to scientific thought.

  The Lesser Papers

  Einstein became intrigued as he considered that sugar dissolving in water caused the water to be thicker. Einstein looked at the sugar molecules as swimming in the liquid. He began measuring the difference in the thickness of the liquid (viscosity) by increasing or decreasing the amount of sugar. This allowed him to put these numbers into his theory and determine the size of the sugar molecules. This led to the development of equations which would allow him to determine the mass of any atom. He documented his findings in his dissertation, and when this paper was sent to the University of Zürich, it was accepted quickly, and Einstein was awarded his PhD, becoming Doctor Albert Einstein.

  The second of these papers was on Brownian Motion. Einstein believed that smoke particles would behave in a manner similar to the way the sugar molecules dissolved in liquid. Einstein’s aim in this paper, he later said, “was to find facts that would guarantee as far as possible the existence of atoms of definite finite size.”

  These two “lesser papers,” while not revolutionary, retained practical applications to the dissolution of solids in liquids. When mixing flour, baking powder, sugar, and salt into milk for pancake batter, the principles of these papers are being applied. The same is true when combining the ingredients for tar, concrete, or any other time when solids must be mixed with liquids, changing the basic properties of all to create a new material. They also apply to the motions of products in the atmosphere, such as exhaust from an automobile, the smoke rising from a barbecue grill, or the release of volatile organic compounds into the air as paint dries.

  Although 1905 is now viewed as Einstein’s year of miracles, it did not bring him immediate fame outside of the world of physics, nor complete acceptance within it. It was not until fifteen years later that the ideas published in his first paper, establishing bundles of light called photons, was fully appreciated and expanded upon by others working within quantum theory. Einstein was no longer obscure in the world of physics, a
nd the award of his doctorate further established his credibility, but he still needed to keep his day job.

  Einstein Builds Upon His Growing Reputation

  Even as prominent European physicists and scientists debated Einstein’s findings, he continued to dutifully fulfill his obligations at the patent office, though his work was less than taxing mentally. Einstein realized that his published theory of relativity, the subject of so much discussion and debate among scientific circles, applied only to the relationship between an object moving at a constant speed and an object at rest. He pondered the relationship between objects moving at variable velocities. In 1907, while working at the patent office, he had a vision. He later said that this vision was “The happiest thought of my life.”

  A New Definition of Gravity

  Einstein described this vision as seeing someone fall from the roof of his house and realizing that, during the fall, that person would not feel their own weight. Einstein realized that the person falling does not observe the pull of gravity, because for that person there is no gravity. The falling person is not accelerating, the earth is accelerating to meet him. Einstein thus theorized that gravity is equivalent to accelerated motion. Einstein called this the principle of equivalence: “Gravity is equivalent to accelerated motion. It is not possible to distinguish a constant acceleration from the effects of gravity.”