Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein was born in the Bavarian city of Ulm on March 14, 1879. He was
the eldest son of Hermann Einstein and Pauline Koch, both Jews whose families
came from Swabia. The following year they moved to Munich, where his father
was established, along with his brother Jakob, as a trader in electrotechnical
innovations of the time.
In 1894, the economic difficulties caused family (increased since 1881 with the
birth of a daughter, Maya) moved to Milan; Einstein remained in Munich to
finish high school, meeting with parents the following year. In the fall of 1896
he began his studies at the Technische Hochschule Zurich Eidgenossische,
where he was student of the mathematician Hermann Minkowski, who later
generalized the four-dimensional formalism introduced by the theories of his
former student.
The June 23, 1902, Albert Einstein began to serve in the Confederal Bureau of
Intellectual Property in Bern, where he worked until 1909. In 1903 he married
Mileva Maric, a former fellow student in Zurich, with whom he had two sons
Hans Albert and Eduard, born respectively in 1904 and 1910. in 1919 they
divorced and remarried Einstein with his cousin Elsa.
Einstein effort immediately placed him among the most eminent of European
physicists, but the public recognition of the true extent of his theories came
quickly; the Nobel Prize in Physics, which he received in 1921, was granted

exclusively "for his work on Brownian motion and its interpretation of the
photoelectric effect." In 1909 he began his career as a university lecturer in
Zurich, moving to Prague and returning back to Zurich in 1912 to become a
professor of the Polytechnic, where he had done his studies.
In 1914 he went to Berlin as a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences.
The outbreak of the First World War forced him to leave his family (then Rentals
Switzerland), who did not return to meet him. Against the general feeling of the
Berlin academic community, Einstein said that time openly antiwar, influenced
their attitudes pacifist doctrines of Romain Rolland.
The April 16, 1955, Albert Einstein experienced internal bleeding caused by a
ruptured aneurysm of the abdominal aorta, which had previously been
reinforced surgically by Dr. Rudolph Nissen in 1948. Einstein refused surgery,
saying: "I want to go when I want to. it is tasteless to prolong life artificially. I've
done my part, it's time to go. I'll do it in style. " He died in Princeton Hospital
early on April 18, 1955 at the age of 76 years. On the table was the draft of the
speech in front of millions of Israelis for the seventh anniversary of Israel's
independence would never come to utter, and began: "Today I speak to you not
as an American citizen, nor a Jew, but as being human".

The eclipse experiment

This great researcher says that light is not always moved in a straight line, as
argued before, it was also subject to the force of gravity. This idea could be
confirmed by an experiment measuring the light during an eclipse would see
how it affected the mass of the Sun and the light from the star, taking
advantage of this moment of darkness.
The experiment to confirm the curvature could not be carried out until the next
solar eclipse. In 1919, the British astronomer moved with his team of cameras
to Brazil. His snapshots are reveleron in London amid great expectation.
A meeting at the Royal Society allowed the world to publicize the success of
the experiment. The Swiss physicist had completely accurate their forecasts,
since the photograph confirmed how light was also attracted by solar gravity.
To be a great scientist but limited to a community of insiders, Einstein went on
to become a scientist of boundless fame. He had overthrown Newton and his
feat became cover for weeks in major newspapers around the world. Albert
Einstein had become a star.

Photoelectric effect

A diagram illustrating the emission of electrons from a metal plate, requiring

energy which is absorbed a photon.
The first article of 1905 A heuristic point of view was entitled on production and
transformation of light. It Einstein proposed the idea of "quantum" of light (now
called photons) and showed how you could use this concept to explain the
photoelectric effect.
The theory of light quanta was a strong indication of wave-particle duality and
that physical systems can display both wave and corpuscular properties. This
article was one of the cornerstones of quantum mechanics. A full explanation of
the photoelectric effect could only be made when quantum theory was more
advanced. For this work, and for his contributions to theoretical physics,
Einstein received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921.

Brownian motion
The article on Brownian motion, the fourth degree of importance, is closely
related with the article on molecular theory. This is a piece of elaborate
statistical mechanics, remarkable by the fact that Einstein had not heard of
measurements Brown 1820s until the end of the same year (1905); So wrote
this article titling it "On the theory of Brownian motion"

The article explained the phenomenon using the statistics of the thermal
motion of individual atoms in a fluid. Brownian movement had baffled scientists
since its discovery a few decades ago. Einstein's explanation provided a
incontestable experimental evidence about the existence of atoms. The article
also provided a strong impetus to statistical mechanics and the kinetic theory
of fluids, two fields that then remained controversial.
Prior to this work the atoms are considered a useful concept in physics and
chemistry, but contrary to what the legend, most contemporary physicists
already believed in atomic theory and statistical mechanics developed by
Boltzmann, Maxwell and Gibbs ; moreover they had already done enough good
estimates of the radii of the core and the number of Avogadro. Einstein's paper
on atomic movement gave experimentalists a simple way to count atoms by
looking through a microscope ordinario.
Wilhelm Ostwald, one of the leaders of the anti-nuclear school, told Arnold
Sommerfeld that had been transformed into a believer in atoms by Einstein's
explanation of Brownian motion.