Albert[1] 1

Albert Einstein

Biography Albert Einstein grew up in Munich, Germany, in the late 1880s. He was a clever child but very bored at school. He studied physics at the Polytechnic Institute in Zurich, Switzerland. After graduating, he worked at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern and to pass the time he wrote some very important scientific papers, including the ‘Law of the Photoelectric Effect’ – for which he was later awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics – and a paper containing his famous E = mc2 equation about the speed of light and energy that helped in the development of nuclear power.

When he published his General Theory of Relativity in 1915, he instantly became a celebrity. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Einstein was in the United States and it was impossible for him to return to Germany. He stayed in the USA and wrote to President Roosevelt to persuade him to build an atomic bomb before the Nazis did. After World War II (1939-1945), Einstein worked for human rights. He collapsed and died in 1955 in Princeton, USA. Today, Einstein is thought of as a genius and the father of modern physics.

The man who shaped the whole Twentieth Century.

Personality. What was he like? In 1921 he won the Nobel Prize in

Physics. Albert Einstein was a well-known

scientist . He was a humanitarian man with a great sense of humour, recognized in his own time as one of the most creative intellects in human history. A genius among geniuses”. He was also a philosopher because

he spoke widely about politics, ethics and social causes. Apart from his studies, he was

interested in classical music and he played the violin (he had 10 violins from 1920-1950) Albert Einstein was extremely

intelligent and quite absent-minded. In the last years of his life he was a vegetarian. “

Physical Description: What did he look like?

Einstein in his sixties

Einstein is still a young man, not very tall, with a wide long face, and a great mane of crimped, grey hair, rising high from a lofty brow. His nose is fleshy and prominent, his mouth small, his lips full. He has got plump cheeks , a rounded chin and a small cropped moustache.

Description of himself:”A pale face, long hair, a tiny beginning of a paunch. In addition, an awkward gait, and a cigar in the mouth.”

Historical, Cultural and Social Context

Einstein was born during the imperial era in Germany in 1879. He died 76 years later in Princeton, New Jersey exactly one decade after the defeat of Nazi Germany and the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan. He thus witnessed the two World Wars, the high point and demise of the old European order, and the rise of industrialization and new technologies such as telephones, automobiles, X-rays, and radioactivity. But Einstein himself inaugurated some of the most fundamental transformations of his age, including the rise of theoretical physics, the extension of Newtonian mechanics to the submicroscopic realm of atoms and nuclei, and the birth of relativity theory. Einstein was thus both a product and a shaper of the scientific and cultural context in which he lived and worked.

Einstein grew up during the years following the unification of Germany in 1871, a time of widespread growth in European industrial power, strong militaristic nationalism, and imperialist expansion.

Einstein grew up during the years following the unification of Germany in 1871, a time of widespread growth in European industrial power, strong militaristic nationalism, and imperialist expansion. Technological advances led to a renewed faith in material progress, especially with the replacement of the old steam- and mechanically powered world with the new modern "electropolis." The rise of electric power challenged the reigning nineteenth-century mechanical worldview, which holds that all matter obeys Newton's laws of motion and that all natural phenomena arise from the interactions of moving matter. New advances in electromagnetic theory by nineteenth-century scientists such as Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell could not be explained in terms of the old mechanical picture, and physicists in Einstein's day were confronted with the challenge of finding a complete mechanical account of electrodynamic theory that was consistent with the Newtonian paradigm.

Einstein grew up as a Jew in time of rising anti-Semitism. The reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair in France spread across Europe in the 1890s and inspired early Zionist thinkers such as Theodore Herzl to work towards the creation of a Jewish state. In 1911, the headquarters of the Zionist movement relocated to Berlin, where Einstein was teaching. Thus in spite of his own disavowal of traditional religious rituals and traditions, Einstein became involved in one of the greatest movements in Jewish history. Einstein lived just long enough to witness the creation of the Jewish state of Israel in 1948; he was even asked to be the president of the new nation in 1952, an offer he graciously declined.

Einstein's support of the Zionist movement was partially a response to the rampant anti-Semitism that spread across Germany with the rise of the National Socialist (Nazi) Party in January 1933.

Under the infamous Law for the Restoration of the Career Civil Service of April 1, 1933, the Nazis excluded Jews from all state posts, including universities and other research institutions. Physics was one of the disciplines most devastatingly affected by this new law, suffering a loss of at least 25% of its 1932-33 personnel. Yet even before the 1930s, many academicians were increasingly suspicious of the high rate of Jewish participation in medicine and the natural sciences. This anti-Semitic sentiment was combined with a more general suspicion of the materialism and commercialism associated with science as a field. Hitler held mathematics and the physical sciences in low regard in comparison to those disciplines that promoted Kultur, man's humanistic achievements in society. Einstein, as a Jew and as a physicist, was one of the first targets of Nazi propaganda.

In contrast, in America, science enjoyed enormous prestige in the 1920s and 1930s; thus when Einstein arrived on a tour of the country in 1922, he was hailed as a hero. The 1920s witnessed the rapid growth of the physics community in America, including a rise in the numbers of Jews in the sciences, since science was one of the few fields that offered American Jews the opportunity for professional status in the gentile world. The 1920s and 1930s were also years of mass popularization and politicization of science. Thus, the arrival of refugees from Europe (such as Einstein) in the years immediately preceding World Word II only served to strengthen what was already one of the strongest and most vigorous branches of the world physics community at the time.

Albert Einstein was a German physicist and mathematician. He is considered the most well-known and popular scientist of the twentieth century.

He made several discoveries, among which are:

 1º The Brownian motion:

This discovery made in 1905 explained the thermal motion of individual atoms forming a fluid.

2º The photoelectric effect:

This discovery made in 1905, is the appearance of an electric current in certain materials when they are illuminated by electromagnetic radiation.

 3º The Special Relativity:

This discovery made in 1905, solved the problems of another experiment in which it was shown that the electromagnetic waves are moving light in the absence of a medium. The speed of light is constant and the relative movement. “In this theory shows that the speed of light is constant and the time-dependent position and speed of the body”

 4º Equivalence mass-energy:

 This discovery was made in 1905. E= m x c2 this equation shows as a particle with mass has a typed of energy (rest energy) other than the kinetic energy and potential energy classic. The mass-energy relationship is used to explain how nuclear energy is produced; measuring the mass of atomic nuclei and diving by the atomic number can be calculated binding energy trapped in the atomic nuclei.

5º General Relativity:

  It is the theory of gravitation published by Albert Einstein between (1915-1916). The fundamental principle of this theory is the Equivalence Principle describing the acceleration and gravity as different aspects of the same reality. Einstein postulated that cannot distinguish experimentally between a uniformly accelerated body and a uniform gravitational field. Gravity is not a force or action at a distance, as it was in Newtonian gravity, but a consequence of the curvature of space-time.

  This theory provided the basis for the study of cosmology and allowed comprises essential characteristics of the universe.

(draft) Comic: Einstein at school

Comic: einstein at school

Einstein’s quotes

“Imagination is more important than knowledge”

“Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.“

"Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value“

"Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.“

"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.“

La imaginación es más importante que el conocimiento

La ciencia sin religión está coja; la religión sin ciencia está ciega

Intenta no convertirte en un hombre de éxito, sino más bien en un hombre de valía

Solo la vida vivida para otros es una vida que merece la pena

Cualquiera que nunca haya cometido errores, nunca ha intentado nada nuevo