The Life and Great Moments of Albert Einstein
The Life and Great Moments of Albert EinsteinMost people will never be labeled “profound” or “influential” because of the things they do during the course of their lives. In any given time period, only a handful of men and women will be remembered with such admiration and respect. It is my opinion that within the last one hundred years, one man, Albert Einstein, has fit this description to the letter. This review of Einstein’s life and work will help readers to understand better Einstein’s prolific scientific and social contributions to mankind and to the modern world. He will always be remembered as that great scientist with the crazy hair.
Born in Ulm, Germany in 1879, Einstein grew up to be a rebel with a cause. Never backing down and never giving up, he broke down barriers and challenged others to do the same, making him one of the most important people of the 20th century. Einstein had a sister named Maja, and they were both raised by their parents, Hermann and Pauline Einstein. “German by nationality, Jewish by origin, dissenting in spirit, Einstein reacted ambivalently against these three birthday gifts. He threw his German nationality overboard at the age of fifteen but twenty years later, after becoming Swiss, settled in Berlin, where he remained throughout the first world war” (Clark 8).
Albert Einstein was brilliant. In fact, he gained worldwide fame and the Nobel Prize with scientific theories that reshaped traditional Newtonian principles and changed our way of looking at the universe. His theories on relativity explained a number of natural phenomena that traditional Physics had no way of accurately predicting or understanding. Subsequently the great theory of relativity brought Einstein much fame, for this was one of his greatest achievements. Comparable to the special theory, it was fixed on a thought experiment: “Imagine being in an enclosed lab accelerating through space. The effects you’d feel would be no different from the experience of gravity. Gravity, he figured, is a warping of space-time” (Golden 64).
In the same way as Einstein’s earlier work led the way to understanding the smallest subatomic forces, the general theory opened up doors for the consideration of the largest of all things, from the formative Big Bang of the universe to its mysterious black holes (Isaacson 48). For example, in the galaxy of M87, which lies fifty million light-years away (really, really, really far away!) from our own galaxy. The stars revolve around the core, as the Earth does around the sun. Scientists studying M87 in the 1970’s noticed something very odd: the stars orbit the core at about 250 million miles per second. In order for such speeds to be possible, the core of M87 had to be approximately 5 billion times heavier than the sun, and from what the scientists could tell, there was no way something that large could fit. The scientists wouldn’t have been able...
To view the complete essay, you be registered.