WELCOME TO SIMPLY EINSTEIN

His very name means "genius" to billions of people. Albert Einstein was one of the most
significant scientists in history, reshaping the scientific community's view of the universe
and persuading it to abandon its slavish loyalty to Isaac Newton's ideas, which he treasured
but not enough to ignore their flaws. He's one of the few scientists instantly recognizable to
the world, and so deep was his impact that he made such abstract (and frankly weird)
concepts as relativity and mass-energy equivalence into household terms, familiar even to
laymen who don't understand the science behind them.

ABOUT ALBERT EINSTEIN

Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879 - April 18, 1955) was born in Ulm, Germany, to a Jewish
family. His birthday happens to fall on "Pi Day" (3-14) and is informally celebrated by some
mathematicians (it's traditionally the day the Massachusetts Institute of Technology sends
out acceptance letters to prospective students). More than fifty years after his death, the
significance of his contributions to science is still unfolding. One of the most important
scientists in history, he's also one of the most important individuals of the modern age --
a man whose work on the obscure and abstract managed to lead in his own lifetime to the
twentieth century's most famous invention, the atomic bomb.

Popular legend claims Einstein was a poor math student, which isn't quite true. He was a
late bloomer, and had poor language skills at a young age, something that is often true of
highly introspective individuals. But he taught himself calculus and geometry with the aid of
a school pamphlet and a copy of Euclid he received as part of a stack of books from a family
friend who was studying medicine. As a student, he disliked the gymnasiums -- German
secondary schools -- and after leaving school at 16, he failed the entrance exam for the
Federal Polytechnic Institute. This may be the source of the "bad student" myth; failing the
entrance exam on the first try wasn't that unusual, and he passed it the following year, at
which point he also renounced his German citizenship and moved to Switzerland to pursue
mathematics.

Though pure mathematicians usually peak early in life, doing their most brilliant and
groundbreaking work at an early age, as a physicist Einstein's early work only hinted at his
aspirations. His first published paper dealt with capillarity -- the ability of an object to draw
a substance upwards despite the pull of gravity, such as plants taking water from the soil
and the use of drinking straws. Despite the quality of the work, he was unable to find a
teaching position, and took a job at the patent office in Bern, where he investigated
electromagnetic patent applications while pursuing his scientific studies in his off hours.

Several years into this job, in 1905 -- his "Extraordinary Year" (or Annus Mirabilis) -- he
published four papers which have since reshaped modern physics. Any one of these papers
by itself would have been a scientific rainmaker, and together they read like a greatest hits
of twentieth century physics. The famous E=mc2 equation appeared in "Does the Inertia of
a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?" His paper on Brownian motion supported the
existence of atoms, which at the time was still a contested theory. His photoelectric effect
paper would influence the entire field of quantum mechanics -- which Einstein himself was
uncomfortable with -- and accordingly earned him a Nobel prize. Most famously, "On the
Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" proposed Einstein's theory of special relativity. Special
relativity contradicted the widely accepted physics of Isaac Newton, in order to reconcile
certain observed facts about bodies in motion.

To understand the impact special relativity had, consider the beliefs it did away with. In
Einstein's time, the dominant view of the universe, developed in the previous two
generations, was that of "luminiferous aether." This aether filled space, beyond the
atmosphere of the earth and other planets, and was the medium through which light
traveled. Because light was known to travel in waves, scientists couldn't conceive of it doing
so without some medium to travel through -- it was like imagining the waves of the ocean
without water. Aether was constantly redefined in order to keep from contradicting other
theories, and finally Einstein pointed out what should have been obvious: that if you
assumed aether didn't exist, you could come up with a new theory that didn't have such
contradictions. Doing so required changing the very model of the universe itself.

During the first world war, Einstein worked on his more radical theory of general relativity.
While special relativity had undone the aether, general relativity contradicted Newton's
model of gravity, one of the most basic and seemingly intuitive concepts in physics.
Einsteinian gravity is an effect of curving spacetime, a harder concept to illustrate than an
apple falling off a tree. The effect of Einstein's theories was delayed, despite the fame he
had attained from the Annus Mirabilis papers; the war made it difficult to disseminate
scientific papers. But in 1919, astronomical experiments conducted during the solar eclipse
confirmed what general relativity predicted about the bending of light -- while Newtonian
models were shown to be in error. Though the general public didn't seem to immediately
understand what the big deal was, the effect in the scientific community was tremendous.

Einstein spent the next two decades debating with fellow scientists more than working on
new theories. He contested the claims of quantum mechanics (especially Niels Bohr and
Werner Heisenberg) using his photoelectric paper to shore up their ideas, being too
skeptical of anything so radical and incomplete. "He (God) does not throw dice," Einstein
said, referring to the apparent randomness of the universe demanded by quantum
mechanics. Meanwhile, his mass-energy equivalence work led to the development of atomic
weapons -- which he encouraged the United States to pursue during World War II (he had
taken a teaching job at Princeton and deeply opposed the Nazis), out of concern that the
Germans would do so first. He became an American citizen just before the start of the war,
and was later offered the position of President of Israel, which he declined.

In his scientific research, Einstein's later work revolved around the search for a "unified field
theory." The search for such a theory, a single theory that would describe all the physical
laws governing the universe, had begun in the nineteenth century, and every revolution in
physics rewrote those laws and thus the theory's demands. His approach centered around
the treatment of curving spacetime, and became increasingly abstract. It has been
suggested that in refusing to incorporate quantum mechanics into his views, he may have
found himself coming up with the same sort of convoluted explanations of the universe as
the aetherists had.

He lived a quiet life in the post-war years, and died in 1955 of an aneurysm, at the age of
76. A teacher for much of his career, he had spent the last years of his life working with civil
rights groups and calling for an end to wars like the ones the world had seen in his lifetime.
In the time since, his name has become synonymous with genius.

WORKS
Like most physicists, Einstein wrote primarily for other physicists -- or at least members of
the scientific community. Little of his work is written for the general public, and in the case
of many of his scientific papers, even readers with a scientific background may be confused,
given that the scientific climate in which he was writing -- and the terminology he used --
differed from today's. For that reason, it's recommended that Einstein's work be approached
with the aid of secondary sources.