Albert einstein what was he

Questions and Answers on Albert Einstein. Six weeks later the family moved to Munich, where he later on began his schooling at the Luitpold Gymnasium. Later, they moved to Italy and Albert continued his education at Aarau, Switzerland and in he entered the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich to be trained as a teacher in physics and mathematics.

In , the year he gained his diploma, he acquired Swiss citizenship and, as he was unable to find a teaching post, he accepted a position as technical assistant in the Swiss Patent Office. During his stay at the Patent Office, and in his spare time, he produced much of his remarkable work and in he was appointed Privatdozent in Berne. In he became Professor Extraordinary at Zurich, in Professor of Theoretical Physics at Prague, returning to Zurich in the following year to fill a similar post.

He became a United States citizen in and retired from his post in Chaim Weizmann in establishing the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Einstein always appeared to have a clear view of the problems of physics and the determination to solve them. His general theory of relativity changed our understanding of space and time, becoming one of the two pillars of modern physics — the other being quantum mechanics.

It arose from his special theory of relativity , which proposed that in the vacuum of space, the speed of light is always the same , regardless of the movement of the person observing it. It also suggested that measurements of distance and time both change as you get closer to the speed of light: clocks run slower and lengths appear to get shorter.

In the same year, aged just 26, he developed three other ground-breaking theories — on Brownian motion, mass-energy equivalence, and the law of the photoelectric effect, for which he went on to win the Nobel Prize in However, stock markets follow what mathematicians call a random walk: Unless some spectacular event occurs, the prices at the end of any given day are just as likely to have decreased as they are to have risen.

If there are patterns that can be exploited, they must be extremely subtle and hard to find—which is why financial mathematicians are so highly paid. And some of the math behind these delicate stock market analyses can be traced back to Einstein. He was trying to explain an odd fact that was first noticed by English botanist Robert Brown in Brown looked through his microscope and saw that the dust grains in a droplet of water were jittering around aimlessly.

This Brownian motion, as it was first dubbed, had nothing to do with the grains being alive, so what kept them moving? Still thinking about atoms and molecules, Einstein realized that the visible grains were actually getting jostled by invisible water molecules. On average, he reasoned, the impacts would come from every side equally. But at any given instant, more water molecules would be hitting one side of the grain than the other, giving it a quick kick in some random direction.

Einstein turned this insight into an equation that described the jittering mathematically. His Brownian motion paper is widely recognized as the first incontrovertible proof that atoms and molecules really exist—and it still serves as the basis for some stock market forecasts. In March , the U. Navy launched a grapefruit-size sphere dubbed Vanguard I into orbit around Earth. People paid attention, partly because it was the first to be powered by a futuristic technology known as solar cells—shiny slabs of semiconductor that turned sunlight into electricity.

Today, solar cells power almost all the hundreds of satellites orbiting Earth, along with many of the probes being sent to planets as distant as Jupiter. On the ground, solar cells are spreading across suburban rooftops, as rapidly falling prices bring them closer to being competitive with conventional electric power. But he did sketch out their basic principle of operation in His starting point was a simple analogy: If matter is lumpy—that is, if every substance in the universe consists of atoms and molecules—then surely light must be lumpy as well.

After all, Einstein argued, physicists had recently discovered that when a solid object absorbed or emitted light, it could do so only by taking a discrete step up or down in energy.

And the easiest way to understand that weird fact, said Einstein, was to assume that light itself was just a swarm of discrete energy packets—particles of light that would later be named photons. If the frequency was high enough, at least a few of its energy packets would have enough zing to knock electrons loose from the metal and send them flying out, so that experimenters could detect them.

Solar cells work in essentially this way: Light streaming from the sun kicks electrons in the cell up to higher energy levels, producing a flow of electric current. No one before Einstein had been able to fully explain this phenomenon. In the nearly six decades since physicists demonstrated the first laboratory prototype of a laser in , the devices have come to occupy almost every niche imaginable, from barcode readers to systems for hair removal.

All of it grows out of an idea that Einstein had in , as he was trying to understand more about how light interacted with matter. He started by imagining a bunch of atoms that are bathed in light. As he knew from his previous work, atoms that are sitting in their lowest energy state can absorb photons and jump to a higher energy state. Likewise, the higher energy atoms can spontaneously emit photons and fall back to lower energies.