Albert Einstein was exhausted. For the third night in a row, his baby son Hans, crying, kept his family awake until dawn. When Albert finally fell asleep it was time to get up and go to work. He couldn't skip a day. He needs to work to support his family.
He walked briskly to the patent office, where he was a "technical expert, third level," and Albert worried his mother. She grew weaker, she disapproved of his marriage to Mileva, and the relationship was tense. Albert glanced at the window of a passing store. His hair was a mess; he had forgotten to comb it.
Work. family. Make ends meet. Albert felt all the pressures and responsibilities of any young husband and father.
Relax, he revolutionized physics.
In 1905, at the age of 26, four years after he had found a job as a professor of physics, Einstein published "five of the most important papers in the history of science" - all in his spare time time." He proved the existence of atoms and molecules. Before 1905, scientists didn't know that. He believed that light was small pieces (later called "photons"), thus laying the scientific foundation of quantum force. He described his theory of special relativity: space and time are threads of the same fabric, which he proposed can be bent, stretched and twisted.
Oh, by the way, E = mc2.
Before Einstein, the last scientist with such outstanding creativity was Mr. Isaac Newton. It happened in 1666 when Newton quarantined his mother's farm to avoid an outbreak of plague in Cambridge. With nothing better to do, he raised his gravitational pull.
For centuries, historians have called 1666 Newton's "miracle year." Now those words have a different meaning: Einstein and 1905. The United Nations has declared 2005 "World Year of Physics" to celebrate love The 100th anniversary of Einstein’s “miracle year.”
Modern pop culture draws Einstein as a bushy-haired superthinker. We are told that his ideas were unlikely to be far ahead of those of other scientists. He must have come from some other planet - perhaps the same one Newton grew up on.
"Einstein was not an alien," laughs Peter, a Harvard physicist and historian of science. "He was a man of his time." All of his 1905 documents revealed are being studied by other scientists, with mixed success. "If Einstein had not been born, [the documents] would have ended up being written in some form by someone else." Come out," Galison said.
It is noteworthy that in 1905, all five documents were written by one man, plus the original, Einstein arrived at his conclusions in an irreverent manner.
For example: photoelectric effect. This was a difficult problem in the early 20th century. When light hits a metal, such as zinc, electrons fly away. This only happens when a small amount of light hits the free electrons in a concentrated manner. The propagating waves have no photoelectric effect.
The solution seems simple - particles of light. In fact, this was the solution that Einstein proposed in 1905 and won the Nobel Prize in 1921. Other physicists such as Planck (who worked on the problem: blackbody radiation) were one step ahead and more experienced than Einstein, and were closer to the answer, but Einstein got there first. Why?
This is a matter of authority.
"In Einstein's day, if you wanted to say that light was made of particles, you found yourself disagreeing with physicist James Maxwell's theory." No one wanted to Do things like this," Galison said. Maxwell's equations were a huge success, unifying the physics of electricity, magnetism and optics. Maxwell proved beyond a doubt that light is an electromagnetic wave. Maxwell was an Authority Figures.
Einstein didn't care about authority. He didn't resist being told what to do, but he hated being told what was true, even as a child he was constantly doubting and questioning.
"Your presence here destroys the respect the class has for me," said his seventh-grade teacher, Dr. Joseph Degenhart. (Diegenhart also predicted that Einstein would accomplish nothing.") This character flaw was a key factor in Einstein's discovery.
"In 1905," Galison records, "Einstein had just Obtain a Ph.D. He is not beholden to a mentor or any other authority figure. "His mind was free to roam therefore.
In retrospect, Maxwell was right. Light is a wave. But Einstein was right too. Light is a particle. This strange binary Physics101 students puzzled Einstein in 1905. How could Einstein not know?
But that didn't slow down Einstein. Adopting the Intuitive Leap as a Basic Tool "I believe in intuition and inspiration," he wrote in 1931. "Sometimes I feel I am right but don't know why. "
Although Einstein's five papers were published within a year, he had been thinking deeply about physics since childhood. "In the Einstein family, science was on the table "The conversation," Galison explains. Albert's father Hermann and his uncle Jacob had a German company that made generators, arc lamps, light bulbs, and telephones. This was high tech at the turn of the century, "like one of the companies in Silicon Valley now." ,” Galison records. “Albert was naturally interested in technology. ”
Einstein’s parents sometimes took Albert to parties. A babysitter was unnecessary: ??while others danced around him, Albert sat on the sofa, absorbed and quietly doing Math problems. Pen and paper were Albert's toys!
He had an impressive ability to concentrate. Einstein's sister, Maya, recalled: "... even with great Noise, he would lie on the sofa, pick up paper and pen, and leisurely balance an inkwell on the backrest to immerse himself in the problem as the background noise promoted rather than disturbed him.
Einstein was smart, but no more special than his peers. "I have no special talents," he said, "I just have a strong curiosity." ” Added: “The contrast between popular assessments of my power… and reality is ridiculous. ” Einstein attributed his discoveries to imagination and endless questioning rather than to conventional wisdom.
In later life, we should remember that he worked hard to produce a unified field theory that combined Gravity and other forces of nature. Einstein's intelligence was not infinite. It was discovered by Dr. Thomas Harvey when Einstein died in 1955. Removed. He might have expected to find something surprising: But Einstein's brain looked like any other, gray, wrinkled, and, if anything, a little smaller than the average human's.