The world famous scientist Albert Einstein was born on 14-March-1879 in the German city of Ulm in ordinary surroundings. As his head seemed much too large, his mother felt he was an unusual fellow.
As a child, Einstein did not talk much. He had very few friends and they called him ‘brother boring’. Mechanical toys were his favorite. Everyone around him had a low opinion of him. His headmaster said he would never succeed at anything. And his mother promoted him to learn violin.
At school, he was good at most of the subjects. However, he had problems with the school’s strict disciplining system. He clashed with his teachers and left the school for good.
From Munich, he went to that part of Switzerland where German was spoken. There he enjoyed so much freedom.
Since he was gifted in Mathematics and Physics he joined a university in Zurich. There he met his future wife, Mileva Maric. Like Einstein she was also someone who did not like the philistines (people who liked language and art subjects). They fell in love and wrote letters to each other.
Before settling as a technical assistant in 1902 in the patent office, he worked as a teaching assistant and gave private lessons. While assessing other people’s inventions, he secretly started working on his ideas on theoretical physics.
In 1905 he formulated his famous theory of Special Relativity. In this theory he introduced his famous equation E=mc2. This theory tells about the relationship between mass and energy. It also talks about how time changes with respect to speed and place.
Although his mother opposed to his marrying Mileva Maric, he married her anyway. She was three years older than him. The couple had a son. But a few years later their marriage faltered (became weak) and the couple got divorced in 1919. The same year he married his cousin Elsa.
Ten years after his first theory of relativity, he published another paper in 1915. This was called the General Theory of Relativity. The 1919 Solar Eclipse brought proof for this theory and the newspapers proclaimed his work as ‘a scientific revolution’. In 1921 he received the coveted Nobel Prize and was showered with honors and invitations from all over the world.
During the World War II (1939-1945) there was fear among the American Scientists that the Nazis in Germany would make atomic bombs. Einstein understood the dangers that his equation and the discovery of atomic fission would create. So he wrote a letter to the then US president Franklin D Roosevelt warning him about the dangers of an atomic bomb explosion. In any case, the Americans developed the atomic bomb and dropped them on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.
After the incident Einstein was deeply shaken by the destruction caused by the atomic bomb. He then wrote a letter to the United Nations appealing to stop the building up of arms. He also started working towards maintaining global peace and democracy.
At the time of Einstein’s death he was celebrated both as a visionary and a world citizen as much as a scientific genius.
-Anjoe-
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