The Man Who Changed the World
Born in 1879, in Ulm, Germany, Einstein was two years old when his parents moved to Munich. There his father opened a business in electrical supplies. As a boy, Einstein did not learn to talk until later than others of his age, and in his early childhood he was not considered especially bright. But by the time he was fourteen years old, he had recovered from a slow start to the extent that he had taught himself advanced mathematics from textbooks. By then he knew what he wanted to be when he grew up. He wanted to be a physicist and devote himself to research.
The Einsteins, however, could not afford to pay for the advanced education young Einstein needed. The family business had declined, and they were forced to leave Munich to live in Milan, Italy, where they had relatives. As for Albert, the family did manage to send him to a technical school in Switzerland, and later to the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.
In 1901, when Einstein was twenty-two years old, he began teaching, and in 1902 he went to work as a patent office examiner in Bern. Now able to pay his own expenses, he continued his schooling at the University of Zurich, where he received a doctor's degree in 1905. This was the period when he first began the research which led to his famous theory of relativity.
To most people it is not easy to explain why Einstein's theory has had such an immense effect upon the whole scientific and intellectual world. After its formation, scientists never again regarded the world as they had before. The theory set forth new and far-reaching conclusions about the nature of space, time, motion, mass, energy, and the relations governing all these. Basically the theory proposed, among other things, that the greatest speed possible is the speed of light; that the rate of a clock moving through space will decrease as its speed increases; and that energy and mass are equal and interchangeable. This latter claim, based on the formula E = mc2(energy equals mass times the square of the speed of light) was later proved by atomic fission, on which the atomic bomb is based.
Toward the fend of his life, when Einstein was asked to explain his law of relativity to a group of young students, he said; "When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, you think it's only a minute. But when you sit on a hot stove for a minute, you think it's two hours. That is relativity. "
Einstein had an effect on science and history that only a few men have ever achieved. An American university president once commented that "Einstein has created a new outlook, a new view of the universe. It may be some generations before the average mind grasps the identity of time and space, and so on—but even ordinary men understand now that the universe is something vaster than ever thought before. "
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