Category: Society/Culture gt; gt; Historical Figures
Problem description:
Einstein’s information
Analysis:
Boyhood
Albert Einstein, the greatest physicist of the 20th century, was born on March 14, 1879, in the city of Ulm in southwest Germany. A year later, he moved to Munich with his family. Einstein's parents were both Jewish. His father, Hermann Einstein, and his uncle, Jacob Einstein, jointly opened an electrical appliance factory that produced motors, arc lamps, and electrical instrumentation for power stations and lighting systems. Mother Pauline was a housewife with a secondary education. She loved music very much and taught Einstein to play the violin when he was six years old.
Einstein was not lively when he was a child. He could not speak even when he was more than three years old. His parents were worried that he was mute and took him to a doctor for examination. Fortunately, little Einstein was not mute, but he could not speak very smoothly until he was nine years old. Every word he spoke had to be thought through laboriously but carefully.
When Einstein was four or five years old, he was bedridden and his father gave him a compass. When he found that the compass always pointed in a fixed direction, he was very surprised and felt that there must be something deeply hidden behind this phenomenon. He happily played with the compass for several days and pestered his father and Uncle Jacob with a series of questions. Although he couldn't even pronounce the word "magnetism" well, he stubbornly wanted to know why the compass could guide. This profound and lasting impression could still be vividly recalled by Einstein until he was sixty-seven years old.
When Einstein was in elementary school and middle school, his homework was ordinary. Because he behaves slowly and doesn't like to interact with others, his teachers and classmates don't like him. The teacher who taught him Greek and Latin was even more disgusted with him. He once publicly scolded him: "Einstein, you will definitely not be successful when you grow up." And because he was afraid that he would affect other students in class, he actually wanted to Kick him out of school.
Einstein's uncle Jacob was responsible for technical matters in the electrical appliance factory, while Einstein's father was responsible for business dealings. Jacob was an engineer and loved mathematics very much. When little Einstein came to him to ask questions, he always introduced mathematical knowledge to him in very simple and popular language. Under the influence of his uncle, Einstein received early enlightenment in science and philosophy.
My father’s business is not doing well, but he is an optimistic and kind-hearted person. The family invites poor students who come to Munich to study one night a week for dinner, which is equivalent to providing relief to them. Among them are a pair of Jewish brothers Max and Bernard from Lithuania. They are both studying medicine and like to read books and have a wide range of interests. They were invited to Einstein's house for dinner and made good friends with the shy little Einstein, who had black hair and brown eyes.
Max can be said to be Einstein’s “initial teacher”. He borrowed some popular natural science books for him to read. Max gave Einstein a copy of Spilke's plane geometry textbook when he was twelve years old. When Einstein recalled this sacred little book in his later years, he said: "There are many assertions in this book, for example, that the three altitudes of a triangle intersect at one point. Although they are not obvious in themselves, they can be proved very reliably. So that any doubt seemed impossible. This clarity and reliability made an indescribable impression on me."
Einstein was also fortunate to know from an excellent popular book. The popular science books not only enhanced Einstein's knowledge, but also touched the curious heartstrings of young people and caused him to think deeply about the problem.
When Einstein was sixteen years old, he was admitted to the Engineering Department of the Federal University of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland, but failed the entrance examination. He accepted the advice of Professor Weber, the president of the Federal University of Technology and the school's famous physicist, and completed high school courses at the state high school in Aarau, Switzerland, to obtain a high school diploma.
In October 1896, Einstein entered the Technical University of Zurich and studied mathematics and physics in the Normal Department. He is very disgusted with the injective education in schools, believing that it leaves people with no time or interest to think about other issues. Fortunately, the compulsory education that stifles true scientific drive is much less common at Zurich's Federal University of Technology than at other universities. Einstein made full use of the free atmosphere in school and focused his energy on the subjects he loved. In school, he read extensively the works of physics masters such as Helmholtz and Hertz. He was most fascinated by Maxwell's electromagnetic theory. He has the ability to self-study, the habit of analyzing problems and the ability to think independently.
Early work
In 1900, Einstein graduated from the Technical University of Zurich. Due to his lack of enthusiasm for certain subjects and his indifference to teachers, he was refused a stay in school. Unable to find a job, he made a living as a tutor and substitute teacher. After being unemployed for a year and a half, Marcel Grossman, a classmate who cared about and understood his talents, reached out to him for help. Grossmann managed to persuade his father to introduce Einstein to the Swiss Patent Office as a technician.
Einstein was forever grateful to Grossman for his help. In a letter to commemorate Grossman, he talked about this incident and said that when he graduated from college, he was "suddenly abandoned by everyone and helpless to face life. He helped me, and through him and his father, I Later, I came to Halle (the director of the Swiss Patent Office at the time) and entered the patent office. This was a bit like a life-saving grace. Without him, I probably wouldn’t have died of hunger, but my spirit would have become depressed.”
On February 21, 1902, Einstein obtained Swiss citizenship and moved to Bern, waiting for recruitment by the Patent Office. On June 23, 1902, Einstein was officially employed by the Patent Office as a third-level technician. His job responsibilities were to review various technological inventions and creations applying for patent rights. In 1903, he married his college classmate Mileva Marik.
From 1900 to 1904, Einstein wrote a paper every year and published it in the German Journal of Physics. The first two articles were about the thermodynamics of liquid surfaces and electrolysis, in an attempt to provide a mechanical basis for chemistry. Later, I found that this path was unavailable, and I turned to the study of the mechanical basis of thermodynamics. In 1901, some basic theories of statistical mechanics were proposed, and three papers from 1902 to 1904 all belonged to this field.
The 1904 paper carefully explored the fluctuations predicted by statistical mechanics and found that energy fluctuations depended on Boltzmann's constant. It not only applied this result to mechanical systems and thermal phenomena, but also boldly applied it to radiation phenomena to derive the formula for the fluctuation of radiant energy, thereby deriving Wien's displacement law. The study of fluctuation phenomena enabled him to make major breakthroughs in both radiation theory and molecular kinetic theory in 1905.
The Miracle of 1905
In 1905, Einstein created an unprecedented miracle in the history of science. He wrote six papers this year. In the six months from March to September, he used his spare time after working eight hours a day at the Patent Office to make four epoch-making contributions in three fields. He published Four important papers were published on the quantum theory of light, molecular size determination, Brownian motion theory and special relativity.
In March 1905, Einstein sent the paper he believed to be correct to the editorial office of the German "Annals of Physics". He shyly said to the editor: "I would be very happy if you could find space in your annual report to publish this paper for me." The paper he was "embarrassed" to send was called "About Light" A Speculative View of Generation and Transformation”.
This paper extends the quantum concept proposed by Planck in 1900 to the propagation of light in space and proposes the light quantum hypothesis. It is believed that: for time averages, light behaves as fluctuations; for instantaneous values, light behaves as particles. This is the first time in history that the unity of wave nature and particle nature of microscopic objects is revealed, that is, wave-particle duality.
At the end of this article, he used the concept of light quantum to easily explain the photoelectric effect that cannot be explained by classical physics, and deduced the relationship between the maximum energy of photoelectrons and the frequency of incident light. This relationship was experimentally confirmed by Millikan 10 years later. In 1921, Einstein won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his "discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect."
This was just the beginning. Albert Einstein was advancing hand in hand in the three fields of light, heat, and electrical physics and was out of control. In April 1905, Einstein completed "A New Method for Determining the Size of Molecules" and in May he completed "The Movement of Suspended Particles in Hydrostatic Liquids Required by the Molecular Kinetic Theory of Heat". These are two papers on the study of Brownian motion. Einstein's purpose at that time was to determine the actual size of molecules by observing the irregular motion of suspended particles produced by the fluctuation phenomenon of molecular motion, so as to solve the atomic problem that has been debated in the scientific and philosophical circles for more than half a century. Does the problem exist?
Three years later, French physicist Perrin confirmed Einstein's theoretical predictions with sophisticated experiments. This irreproachably proved the objective existence of atoms and molecules. This led Ostwald, the German chemist who most firmly opposed atomic theory and the founder of energeticism, to proactively declare in 1908: "The atomic hypothesis has become a fundamental and solid foundation." scientific theory".
In June 1905, Einstein completed a long paper "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" that ushered in a new era of physics, and fully proposed the special theory of relativity. This is the result of Einstein's 10 years of brewing and exploration. It has largely solved the crisis of classical physics that emerged at the end of the 19th century, changed the concept of space and time in Newtonian mechanics, revealed the equivalence of matter and energy, and created the A brand new world of physics is the greatest revolution in the field of modern physics.
The special theory of relativity can not only explain all phenomena that can be explained by classical physics, but can also explain some physical phenomena that cannot be explained by classical physics, and predicts many new effects. The most important conclusion of the special theory of relativity is that the principle of conservation of mass has lost its independence. It is integrated with the law of conservation of energy. Mass and energy can be converted into each other. Others include the more commonly mentioned clocks slowing down, the speed of light remaining unchanged, the rest mass of photons being zero, etc. Classical mechanics has become a limiting case of relativistic mechanics when moving at low speeds. In this way, mechanics and electromagnetism are unified on the basis of kinematics.
In September 1905, Einstein wrote a short article "Is the inertia of an object related to the energy it contains?" ", as a corollary of the theory of relativity. Mass-energy equivalence is the theoretical basis of nuclear physics and particle physics, and also opened the way for the release and utilization of nuclear energy realized in the 1940s.
In this short period of six months, Einstein's breakthrough achievements in science can be said to be "ground-breaking and unprecedented." Even if he gave up the study of physics, even if he only completed any of the above three aspects of achievements, Einstein would have left an extremely important mark in the history of the development of physics. Einstein cleared away the "dark clouds in the clear sky of physics" and ushered in a more glorious new era of physics.