FREE ESSAY ON EINSTEIN

EINSTEIN

Einstein was born in Ulm on March 14, 1879, and spent his youth in Munich, where his
family owned a small shop that manufactured electric machinery. He didn't talk until the
age of three, but even as a youth he showed a brilliant curiosity about nature and an
ability to understand difficult mathematical concepts. At the age of 12 he taught himself
Euclidean geometry.
He hated the dull regimentation and unimaginative spirit of school in Munich. When
continual business failure led the family to leave Germany for Milan, Italy, Einstein,
who was then 15 years old, used the opportunity to withdraw from the school. He spent a
year with his parents in Milan, and when it became clear that he would have to make his
own way in the world, he finished secondary school in Arrau, Switzerland, and entered the
Swiss National Polytechnic in Zurich. Einstein didn't enjoy the manner of teaching there.
He often cut classes and used the time to study physics on his own or to play his beloved
violin. He passed his exams and graduated in 1900 by studying the notes of a classmate.
His professors didn't think highly of him and wouldn't recommend him for a university
position. For two years Einstein worked as a tutor and substitute teacher. In 1902 he
attained a position as an 'examiner' in the Swiss patent office in Bern. In 1903 he
married Mileva Mari?, who had been his classmate at the 'polytechnic'. They had two sons
but eventually divorced. Einstein later remarried.
Einstein, whose prime concern was to understand the nature of electromagnetic radiation,
consequently urged the development of a theory that would be a fusion of the wave and
particle models for light. Again, very few physicists understood or were sympathetic to
these ideas.
The difficulty that others had with Einstein's work was not because it was too
mathematically complex or technically obscure; the problem resulted, rather, from
Einstein's beliefs about the nature of good theories and the relationship between
experiment and theory. Although he maintained that the only source of knowledge is
experience, he also believed that scientific theories are the free creations of a finely
tuned physical intuition and that the premises on which theories are based cannot be
connected logically to experiment. A good theory, therefore, is one in which a least
number of speculations is necessary to account for the physical evidence. This lack of
speculation, a feature of all Einstein's work, was what made his work so difficult for
colleagues to understand, let alone tolerate.
Einstein did have important supporters, however. His chief early patron was the German
physicist Max Planck. Einstein remained at the patent office for four years after his
star began to rise within the physics community. He then moved rapidly upward in the
German-speaking academic world; his first academic appointment was in 1909 at the
University of Zurich. In 1911 he moved to the German-speaking university at Prague, and
in 1912 he returned to the Swiss National Polytechnic in Zurich. Finally, in 1913, he was
appointed director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin.
Bibliography
can't find