Essay: Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein was born on 14^th or March, 1879. He was born in Germany to a middle class Jewish family. He spent most of his young age in Munich. He is best known for his formula related to the relation of inter convergence of mass and energy or E=mc². His services are enormous in the field of theoretical physics and in the search for a peaceful world where all human beings can live in harmony and peace. He was the first to recognize the relation between time and space. He wrote more than 300 Scientific papers (Scientific Background on the Nobel Prize in Physics, 2011). He died on 18^th of April 1955 in Princeton, New Jersey, United States.

At the start of his professional life, after graduation, Einstein worked as an assistant examiner at the Federal Office of Intellectual Property. The office was responsible to issues patents to the new inventors in different technological fields. The time spent at the patent office was not rewarding in terms of financial support for Einstein but it did provide Einstein with an opportunity to introspect on the physical properties of light, space, time and other interesting scientific phenomenon.

Einstein proposed many scientific ideas which proved pivotal for the present technological advancements. His scientific work related to the Production and Transmission of Light answered the centuries old question of how energy is exchanged in relation to matter. This explanation of the light provided Einstein with an understanding that later lead to the development of the Quantum Theory (Spielberg and Anderson, 1995).

Einstein has many more scientific achievement to his name that could be discussed in detail but due to the limited space I have here, I would just like to name the broader areas that he worked on. They are General Principles of Relativity, Theory of Relativity, Photon and Energy Quanta, Quantized Atomic Vibration, Cosmology and much more to his credit.

Einstein traveled to many countries to give lectures about his work and meet the scientific community. He went on a tour of America in 1921 (Highfield, Roger, Carter, Paul, 1993). His first stop there was New York City where he lectured for weeks. He was warmly received by the scientists and general public at the University of Columbia. He went on to deliver speeches and lectures at different venues and visited the White House during his visit. In the year 1922, Einstein was hosted by one of the greatest philosopher and politician Viscount Haldane in London. He was invited to deliver a lecture at the King’s College.

Einstein visited America in 1930 and then in 1933. At his last visit he requested for an immigration to the US as he was certainly going to face prosecution at the hands of Nazis at his return to Germany because of his Jewish ancestry and his ties to the scientific community in the US. He applied for an American Nationality in 1935 (Arntzenius, 2011) and remained an American National till his last moments. During his time in America there were speculations that German Nazis were planning to build an atomic bomb that could prove to be catastrophic for the whole world. Einstein wrote a letter to the then president of USA Roosevelt in 1939 stressing on the need to develop an atomic weapon to counter the Nazis.

Einstein won many prestigious awards during his life time. The most prestigious award to his account was the Nobel Prize in Physics that he won in 1920. He also won the Barnard Medal in 1921, the Matteucci Medal in 1921 and the MaxPlanck Medal in 1929. He was declared as the “Time Person of the Century” by the Time Magazine in 1999.