In , he gained his diploma and acquired Swiss citizenship. Unable to find a teaching post, he accepted a position as technical assistant in the Swiss Patent Office, obtaining his doctor's degree in In , Einstein was appointed Privadozent in Berne. The next year, he became Professor Extraordinary in Zurich, and in Professor of Theoretical Physics at Prague, returning to Zurich in to fill a similar post. He became a German citizen in and remained in Berlin until , when he renounced his citizenship for political reasons and emigrated to America to take the position of Professor of Theoretical Physics at Princeton.
He became a U. Albert Einstein, the German-born Nobel prize-winning physicist, became an outspoken civil rights advocate after immigrating to the United States in the s to escape the Nazis. But newly published travel diaries from the s, when Einstein and his wife Elsa embarked on a Albert Einstein may have been a genius, but when it came to relationships, he was just as clueless as the rest of us—maybe even more so. In a letter written near the end of his life to the family of his closest friend, Michele Besso, the great physicist shared poignant regrets Nicolaus Copernicus was a Polish astronomer known as the father of modern astronomy.
He was the first modern European scientist to propose that Earth and other planets revolve around the sun, or the Heliocentric Theory of the universe. Prior to the publication of his major In his 84 years, Thomas Edison acquired a record number of 1, patents singly or jointly and was the driving force behind such innovations as the phonograph, the incandescent light bulb and one of the earliest motion picture cameras.
Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. Recommended for you. Albert Einstein. Beyond the Big Bang: Albert Einstein. He was trying to explain an odd fact that was first noticed by English botanist Robert Brown in Brown looked through his microscope and saw that the dust grains in a droplet of water were jittering around aimlessly. This Brownian motion, as it was first dubbed, had nothing to do with the grains being alive, so what kept them moving?
Still thinking about atoms and molecules, Einstein realized that the visible grains were actually getting jostled by invisible water molecules. On average, he reasoned, the impacts would come from every side equally. But at any given instant, more water molecules would be hitting one side of the grain than the other, giving it a quick kick in some random direction. Einstein turned this insight into an equation that described the jittering mathematically.
His Brownian motion paper is widely recognized as the first incontrovertible proof that atoms and molecules really exist—and it still serves as the basis for some stock market forecasts. In March , the U. Navy launched a grapefruit-size sphere dubbed Vanguard I into orbit around Earth. People paid attention, partly because it was the first to be powered by a futuristic technology known as solar cells—shiny slabs of semiconductor that turned sunlight into electricity.
Today, solar cells power almost all the hundreds of satellites orbiting Earth, along with many of the probes being sent to planets as distant as Jupiter. On the ground, solar cells are spreading across suburban rooftops, as rapidly falling prices bring them closer to being competitive with conventional electric power.
But he did sketch out their basic principle of operation in His starting point was a simple analogy: If matter is lumpy—that is, if every substance in the universe consists of atoms and molecules—then surely light must be lumpy as well. After all, Einstein argued, physicists had recently discovered that when a solid object absorbed or emitted light, it could do so only by taking a discrete step up or down in energy.
And the easiest way to understand that weird fact, said Einstein, was to assume that light itself was just a swarm of discrete energy packets—particles of light that would later be named photons. If the frequency was high enough, at least a few of its energy packets would have enough zing to knock electrons loose from the metal and send them flying out, so that experimenters could detect them. Solar cells work in essentially this way: Light streaming from the sun kicks electrons in the cell up to higher energy levels, producing a flow of electric current.
No one before Einstein had been able to fully explain this phenomenon. In the nearly six decades since physicists demonstrated the first laboratory prototype of a laser in , the devices have come to occupy almost every niche imaginable, from barcode readers to systems for hair removal. He contributed to statistical mechanics by his development of the quantum theory of a monatomic gas and he has also accomplished valuable work in connection with atomic transition probabilities and relativistic cosmology.
After his retirement he continued to work towards the unification of the basic concepts of physics, taking the opposite approach, geometrisation, to the majority of physicists.
Among his non-scientific works, About Zionism , Why War? Albert Einstein received honorary doctorate degrees in science, medicine and philosophy from many European and American universities. He gained numerous awards in recognition of his work, including the Copley Medal of the Royal Society of London in , and the Franklin Medal of the Franklin Institute in He died on April 18, at Princeton, New Jersey.
It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures.
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