Einstein, Albert 1879-1955
German-Swiss-US mathematical physicist

Albert Einstein, who ranks with Galileo Galilei and Sir Isaac Newton as one of the great contributors to the understanding of the universe, was born in Ulm, Bavaria, of Jewish parents, and educated in Munich, Aarau and Zurich. He took Swiss nationality in 1901, was appointed examiner at the Swiss Patent Office (1902-05), and began to publish original papers on the theoretical aspects of problems in physics. He achieved world fame by his special and general theories of relativity (1905 and 1916), and won the 1921 Nobel Prize for physics for his work. The special theory provided a new system of mechanics which accommodated James Clerk Maxwell's electromagnetic field theory, as well as the hitherto inexplicable results of the Michelson-Morley experiments on the speed of light. He showed that in the case of rapid relative motion involving velocities approaching the speed of light, puzzling phenomena such as decreased size and mass are to be expected. His general theory accounted for the slow rotation of the elliptical path of the planet Mercury, which Newtonian gravitational theory had failed to do.

In 1909 a special professorship was created for Einstein at Zurich; and in 1911 he became professor at Prague. In 1912 he returned to Zurich and from 1914 to 1933 was director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Physical Institute in Berlin. By 1930 his best work was complete. After Hitler's rise to power he left Germany and lectured at Princeton, USA, from 1934, becoming a US citizen and professor at Princeton in 1940. In September 1939 he wrote to President Roosevelt warning him of the possibility that Germany would try to make an atomic bomb, thus helping to initiate the Allied attempt to produce one (called the Manhattan Project).

After World War II Einstein urged international control of atomic weapons and protested against the proceedings of the un-American Activities Senate Subcommittee, which had arraigned many scientists. He spent the rest of his life trying, by means of his unified field theory (1950), to establish a merger between quantum theory and his general theory of relativity, thus bringing subatomic phenomena and large-scale physical phenomena under one set of determinate laws. His attempt was not successful.

Bibliography: His works include About Zionism: Speeches and Letters (1930), Why War (1933, with Sigmund Freud), The Evolution of Physics (1938) and Out of My Later Years (1950). See also Ronald W Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times (1971); Peter Michelmore, Einstein: Profile of the Man (1962).