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Albert

Einstein

(1879-1955)

lbert Einstein's charac- primary school. In fact, Einstein's dynamics that had been explored
ter was of a noble sim- parents were not particularly devout by the Austrian Ludwig Boltzmann
plicity, full of benevo- Jews. However, as his life advanced and the American Willard Gibbs.
A lence, modesty, integrity his Jewish origins were to play an But Einstein's early papers already
and humour, with an indefinable increasingly important role. went well beyond these two scienti-
aura of greatness that no diffidence fic giants.
could hide. For the general public When the Munich factory ceased to
Einstein, with his moustache and prosper, his family moved to Italy. Isaac Newton in the seventeenth
halo of white hair, became the su- The teenage Einstein did not fol- century had thought that light was a
preme symbol of science. His equa- low his parents but completed his stream of corpuscles. A century la-
tions anticipated nuclear energy, studies in the Swiss cities of Aarau ter the Englishman Thomas Young,
spaceflight, radar, lasers and atomic and Zurich. In 1901 he became and supported by the French physicist
clocks. He was the focus of wide- -- throughout the remainder of Augustin Fresnel, showed evidence
spread adoration—with the notable his life -- remained a Swiss citi- for a wave theory of light. Later,
exception of the nazis. zen. After searching in vain for an Michael Faraday and James Clerk
academic position, he finally found Maxwell suggested that light travel-
It is ironic that it was only after his employment in 1902 at the Swiss led in waves at 300,000 kilometres
major works were completed, after Patent Office. During his studies per second. In 1888 the German
the First World War, that the gene- Einstein had mastered what is known physicist Heinrich Hertz showed de-
ral public learned that something as Maxwell's Theory of Electro- finitively that different frequencies
momentous had occurred in the magnetism, and it was this rare of electromagnetism carry X-rays,
world of science. In classical phy- knowledge that secured him the ultraviolet, light, infrared, heat and
sics everything has a cause, but temporary post of Technical Expert, radio in the form of waves.
Einstein's special and general theo- Third Class, in Berne. It was in this
ries of relativity introduced the no- unlikely place that his scientific Meanwhile, the German physicist
tion of probability into atomic theo- genius would flourish. Wilhelm Wien had been trying to
ry showing that quantum mechanics account for how much energy be-
were different from anything in our In 1903 Einstein married his former longed to each frequency at diffe-
experience. Even though he showed student colleague Mileva Maric. rent levels of heat. His "black-body"
that the ephemeral nature of quan- The following year he was promo- formula seemed to work for the
tum mechanics had to be taken se- ted from a probationary to a per- higher frequencies but failed at the
riously, Einstein refused to accept manent post, and was joined at the lower ones. In 1900, this led Max
that there is in fact no underlying Patent Office by his good friend Planck in Berlin in an act of despair
reality to the world: "God does not Michel Besso on whom he tried out to the extraordinary conclusion that
play dice", he said -- but he was his ideas. Thus we approach the mi- these microscopic oscillations did
wrong, as anti-matter, nuclear phy- raculous year of 1905. not change energy smoothly across
sics and sub-atomic particles show. frequencies, but jumped from one
By this time, Einstein was in the frequency to another in discrete
Einstein was born on 24 March habit of contributing papers to the amounts that he called quanta. This
1879 in the town of Ulm in Germa- Swiss scientific journal Anna len discovery was to shake physics to
ny. When he was still an infant his der Physik. It seems likely that his its foundations because it showed
family moved to Munich, where his work in the patent office concer- for the first time that physical phe-
father had set up a small electronics ned proposals for perpetual-motion nomena cannot be explained accor-
factory. Although his family were machines (a physical impossibility!) ding to conventional ideas. But at
of Jewish origin, Einstein and his since his earliest contributions the time only one person seemed to
sister attended a Roman Catholic concerned the laws of thermo- take the idea seriously. On 17 March

30 Sciences