NOTE: Free essay sample provided on this page should be used for references or sample purposes only. The sample essay is available to anyone, so any direct quoting without mentioning the source will be considered plagiarism by schools, colleges and universities that use plagiarism detection software. To get a completely brand-new, plagiarism-free essay, please use our essay writing service.
One click instant price quote
Albert Einstein: Great Scientist, Curious Man In the study of a scientist's life, it is important to recognize several key elements. Scientific contributions are of utmost importance. Following mention of those, it is then possible to look at his or her life, family, and religion as well. However, for Albert Einstein, these elements must all be looked at collectively.
Einstein will no doubt go down in history as a great theoretical physicist. His work is compared in importance to that of scientists such as Galileo Galilei, Nicolas Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton. Some would even say that his contributions to science were greater. However, it is impossible to paint a complete picture of Einstein without examining his life, his religion, and his personality.
His science was his life, and his religion gave him insights as to how to approach science. By observing his innate curiosity, desire for simplicity and elegance, humble outlook, and desire to seek answers, we can see what elements reached the center of his being. Though Einstein was one of the greatest contributors to physical science of our times, he was by no means the most brilliant theorist or experimenter. Competent specialists within the field of physics could have better accomplished some of his mathematical deductions. In fact, he needed the assistance of a friend, mathematician Marcel Grossman, to wield the tools necessary to develop his general theory of relativity. Einstein shined brightest within a theoretical context, but, despite the fact that his relativistic theories were most revolutionary, the study of quantum mechanics made a larger impact on the way physics is studied today.
What, then, set Einstein apart? Curiosity was the key factor. As Einstein said, "I have no special gift - I am only passionately curious" (Hoffmann 7). His curiosity gave him the ability to immediately get to the center of a problem, search with vigor for a satisfactory solution, and then find a new question to address. Einstein's desire to find new questions and their answers surfaced in his youth. He was born on March 14, 1879, in the small town of Ulm, Germany.
His father, Hermann Einstein, was a practical and thoughtful man whose ambitions led him to set up an electrotechnical factory in Munich after Albert's birth. His mother, Pauline Einstein (nee Koch), looked after the family and was a very talented musician. The move to Munich occurred when Albert was a year old, and his sister Maja was born a year after that. Both children attended a Catholic elementary school. However, the Einstein family was Jewish, and Albert took his Jewish beliefs very seriously. He often observed the dietary practices more strictly than his father, and neither he nor his sister let go of those beliefs.
His belief in God was important to his science, since he often asked himself the question, "How much choice did God have in constructing the universe?" (Hawking 174). By contemplating whether or not God would have designed the universe a certain manner, Einstein could use his sharp intuition to develop simple and elegant ideas. At the age of 10, Einstein began attending school at the Luitpold Gymnasium. Although he was typically bright in school, his teachers did not think kindly of him, and the school's promotion of rote learning adversely affected his learning. In fact, one teacher, Albert's Greek teacher, told him "You will never amount to anything" (Hoffmann 20).
Because of Einstein's formal schooling difficulties, much of his early study was independent. At age twelve, he learned of the Pythagorean Theorem, developed a method of proving it, and began to study in depth a booklet on Euclidean geometry. A consequence of his scientific awakenings, though, was that he became extremely skeptical of religion, noting conflicts between religion and science. He did not abandon Judaism; he just became a skeptic of authority. He later recalled that "To punish me for my contempt for authority, Fate made me an authority myself" (Hoffmann 24).
This skepticism did nothing to improve the impressions he made on his teachers. At the age of fifteen, he decided to rejoin his parents, who had since left for Italy. After a year spent in Italy, he decided to continue his education by applying to the Zurich Polytechnic in Switzerland. However, he failed the entrance exams and instead entered a cantonal school in Aarau, Switzerland.
Heinrich Weber, a physics professor at the Polytechnic, also agreed to let Einstein attend his lectures there, providing further encouragement. At the Aarau school, Einstein found a much better atmosphere for learning. After completing his studies, he entered the Polytechnic, but found he was more preoccupied with independent excursions into science. Lectures were a bore to him, and he had to cram from a friend's notes to pass a few of them. By utter coincidence, this friend was Marcel Grossman, the man who would help shape the mathematical aspects of Einstein's general relativity theory.
Einstein graduated from the Polytechnic at the age of twenty-one. With his graduation, Einstein had to seek means to continue his research. Finding no teaching positions, he settled for positions tutoring and performing calculations. In the meantime, he wrote a research article on capillarity that was his first to be published.
The important journal Annalen der Physik published it, and though Einstein declared it worthless, it was his first of a series of many that would revolutionize physics. This paper was sent out to many professors to aid Einstein in getting a job, but it yielded no results. Though he remained content with life through his two other passions, music and the violin, he had to find other means. In 1901, his friend Grossman again came to his aid. He recommended Einstein for a position in the Bern Patent Office, where Einstein was to spend many years working efficiently to make time for his private research and calculations. He was hired at this office because the interviewers were impressed with his knowledge of Maxwell's electromagnetic theory, a rare mastery.
While waiting to start, he wrote a research paper on thermodynamics that was published in Annalen der Physik, but this was rejected as a Ph. D. thesis. Despite this, Einstein's steady job was all he really needed to continue his work, which continued to blossom. Einstein used tutoring as another source of income. An important phase of his life occurred when Maurice Solovine, a philosophy student, sought Einstein to learn more about a concrete subject such as physics.
An involved discussion ensued, and when a mathematician friend, Konrad Habicht, joined them, they named the group the "Olympia Academy. " This group would discuss topics in all disciplines, and was a source of inspiration and amusement for Einstein. Later, Solovine would be the man responsible for translating Einstein's books into French. This Academy provided Einstein with many fond memories for the rest of his days. In late 1902, Einstein's father died, a loss that he described as the deepest shock he ever experienced. Once again, Einstein turned to science. In that year, he completed another scientific paper that was published in Annalen der Physik.
Within the next two years, he published two more papers that also dealt with thermodynamics. This thermodynamic work aided him with his work in the Patent Office. He often had to examine models of perpetual motion machines, which are thermodynamically impossible. Meanwhile, he married Miles Music, a former classmate at the Zurich Polytechnic, in 1903. She bore him two sons: Hans Albert in 1904 and Eduard in 1910. Finally, in the year 1905, Einstein wrote four major papers that are among his most revolutionary.
These were to be exchanged with his Academy friend Habicht, who had lost touch with Einstein over the years. As Einstein promised, the impact of these papers on science was quite dramatic. Einstein's first paper was quite revolutionary. In it, he examined an ever-present conflict in physics involving light. Isaac Newton studied it and devised a corpuscular theory stating that light is made of particles. Introduction of electromagnetic concepts, however, led scientists to explore the possibility that radiated light behaves in a wavelike manner.
What Einstein realized was that since matter possesses atomicity and radiation doesn't, a clash occurs if they are treated collectively. He theorized that light should be thought of as consisting of particles. He found that the entropy of radiation is best described by the entropy of gas particles, and then he showed that the ratio of energy vs. frequency would equal Planck's constant. Next, he applied his particle ideas to the phenomenon of the photoelectric effect. He showed that the higher the energy of incident light, the faster electrons would be ejected from a metal.
This made no Maxwellian sense at all, but Einstein was able to derive extremely simple photoelectric formula...
Free research essays on topics related to: einstein's, einstein, albert einstein, isaac newton, patent office
Research essay sample on Isaac Newton Albert Einstein
