Albert Einstein :: essays research papers

Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879 in Ulm, Germany. Further to this, his parents initially believed him to be somewhat backward as he was late in starting to talk. Einstein was noted for saying that he waited until he could speak in complete sentences before he would say a word. He entered school at the age of six and to his parents surprise, he did very well. Albert did not mix well with other students, often preferring to play his own private games or reading books; he never liked school. At the age of 12 he was given a book on geometry, from that point on he taught himself anything he wanted to learn. "In 1905 Einstein received his doctorate from the University of Zurich for a theoretical dissertation on the Dimensions of Molecules, and he also published three theoretical papers important to the development of 20th century physics." (http://www.physics.gla.ac.uk/introPhy/Famous/ei†¦n/einstein.html) The first of these, on Brownian Motion, made significant predictions about the motion of particles that are randomly distributed in a fluid. This theory was later proven by experiment. The second paper, on the Photoelectric Effect, presented a hypothesis on the Nature of light. He not only proposed that under certain circumstances light can be considered as consisting of particles, but also stated that the energy carried by a photon is proportional to the frequency of the radiation. No one accepted this theory, even Robert Millikan was overwhelmed when Einstein prove this theory to be correct. "In 1915 Einstein published his third paper on the General theory of Relativity, his theory of Gravity."(http://www.humboldt.com/~gralsto/einstein/einstein.html) In this theory Einstein made his statement on equivalence, in which it’s impossible to distinguish between whether the force acting on a body is caused by the body accelerating or whether it’s gravity. For example, if you were weightless inside a lift in outer space and you then feel a force pulling your feet to the floor you can’t distinguish whether the lift is accelerating upwards, or whether there is a large volume of matter below causing the attraction. "The General Theory of Relativity describes gravity as being the result of a four-dimensional continuum (space-time) and that matter produces curves in this space-time with the measure of the curvature being a measure of the strength of gravity. In this perspective, bodies of matter follow the path of ‘shortest distance or least resistance’ and hence in the case of curved space-time around a star a planetary body would follow a ‘circular/elliptical’ orbit. Einstein’s theory was able to explain anomalies in the Mercury’s orbit which had eluded explanation from Newton’s Laws.