Albert Einstein

Born on March 14, 1879 in Ulm, Wrttemberg, Germany, Albert Einstein grew
up in a secular Jewish family. His father, Hermann Einstein, was a salesman
and engineer who with his brother founded Elektrotechnische Fabrik J.
Einstein & Cie, a Munich-based company that manufactured electrical
equipment. His mother, the former Pauline Koch, ran the family household.
Einstein had one sister, Maja, born two years after him.
Einstein attended elementary school at the Luitpold Gymnasium in Munich.
However, he felt alienated there and struggled with the institution's rigid
pedagogical style. He also had what were considered to be speech
challenges, though he developed a passion for classical music and playing
the violin that would stay with him into his later years. Most significantly,
Einstein's youth was marked by deep inquisitiveness and inquiry.
Towards the end of the 1880s, Max Talmud, a Polish medical student who
sometimes dined with the Einstein family, became an informal tutor to young
Albert. Talmud had introduced his pupil to a childrens science text that
inspired Einstein to dream about the nature of light. Thus, during his teens,
Einstein penned what would be seen as his first major paper, "The
Investigation of the State of Aether in Magnetic Fields."
The following station of Einstein's scientific discoveries provides a context for
the publications listed below, and clarifies the major themes running through
his work. The first four entries come from his Annus Mirabilis papers or
miracle year papers.
In 1905, Einstein proposed the existence of the photon, an elementary
particle associated with electromagnetic radiation (light), which was the
foundation of quantum theory. In 1909, Einstein showed that the photon
carries momentum as well as energy and that electromagnetic radiation
must have both particle-like and wave-like properties if Planck's law holds;
this was a forerunner of the principle of waveparticle duality. He would go
on to receive the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for this work.
Likewise in 1905, Einstein developed a theory of Brownian motion in terms of
fluctuations in the number of molecular collisions with an object, providing
further evidence that matter was composed of atoms. A few weeks earlier,
he had derived the Einstein relation for diffusion, which was the first example
of the general fluctuation-dissipation theorem and allowed a good estimate
of the Avogadro constant.
Additionally In 1905, Einstein developed the theory of special relativity,
which reconciled the relativity of motion with the observed constancy of the
speed of light (a paradox of 19th-century physics). Special relativity is now a
core principle of physics. Its counterintuitive predictions that moving clocks
run more slowly, that moving objects are shortened in their direction of

motion, and that the order of events is not absolute have been confirmed
experimentally.
Also in 1905, Einstein developed his concept of Massenergy equivalence. Its
relation E=mc2 suggested that matter was a form of energy, which was later
verified by the mass defect in atomic nuclei. The energy released in nuclear
reactionswhich is essential for nuclear power and nuclear weaponscan be
estimated from such mass defects.
In 1907 and again in 1911, Einstein developed the first quantum theory of
specific heats by generalizing Planck's law. His theory resolved a paradox of
19th-century physics that specific heats were often smaller than could be
explained by any classical theory. His work was also the first to show that
Planck's quantum mechanical law E=h was a fundamental law of physics,
and not merely special to blackbody radiation.
Between 1907 and 1915, Einstein developed the theory of general relativity,
a classical field theory of gravitation that provides the cornerstone for
modern astrophysics and cosmology. General relativity is based on the
surprising idea that time and space dynamically interact with matter and
energy, and has been checked experimentally in many ways, confirming its
predictions of matter affecting the flow of time, frame dragging, black holes,
and gravitational waves.
In 1917, Einstein published the idea for the EinsteinBrillouinKeller method
for finding the quantum mechanical version of a classical system. The
famous Bohr model of the hydrogen atom is a simple example, but the EBK
method also gives accurate predictions for more complicated systems, such
as the dinuclear cations H2+ and HeH2+.
In 1918, Einstein developed a general theory of the process by which atoms
emit and absorb electromagnetic radiation (his A and B coefficients), which is
the basis of lasers (stimulated emission) and shaped the development of
modern quantum electrodynamics, the best-validated physical theory at
present.
In 1924, together with Satyendra Nath Bose, Einstein developed the theory
of BoseEinstein statistics and BoseEinstein condensates, which form the
basis for superfluidity, superconductivity, and other phenomena.
In 1935, together with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, Einstein put forward
what is now known as the EPR paradox, and argued that the quantummechanical wave function must be an incomplete description of the physical
world.
In the final thirty years of his life, Einstein explored whether various classical
unified field theories could account for both electromagnetism and
gravitation and, possibly, quantum mechanics. However, his efforts were
unsuccessful, since those theories did not match experimental observations.
Bibliography:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientific_publications_by_Albert_Einstein

http://www.biography.com/people/albert-einstein-9285408#early-life