14/03/2018
Today is the birthday of Albert Einstein, the most impactful physicist of the 20th century. He was born in 1879 in Ulm, Germany. Einstein’s career famously began at a patent office in Bern, Switzerland, where he had time to ponder big questions in physics after reviewing patent applications. In what’s become known as Einstein’s “miracle year” of 1905, he described the atomic underpinnings of Brownian motion, introduced special relativity and the equation E = mc2, and applied quantum theory to explain the photoelectric effect. It was the latter discovery, not his work on relativity, that earned him his one and only Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921. In 1915 Einstein presented his general theory of relativity, which reformulated gravity as the result of mass–energy bending the four-dimensional fabric of space and time. He became a worldwide celebrity when observations of a solar eclipse by Arthur Eddington and others confirmed general relativity. The theory Einstein considered his masterpiece also led to his prediction of gravitational waves (1916) and his proposal for the structure of the universe (1917), which included the introduction of the cosmological constant. Einstein’s later years were spent examining quantum mechanics and trying to merge it with general relativity to formulate a unified field theory. His most cited paper, which he coauthored with Nathan Rosen and Boris Podolsky in 1935, describes the counterintuitive behavior of particles that share a strange connection, one that Erwin Schrödinger would soon name quantum entanglement. Einstein died of an aneurysm in 1955.
