Albert Einstein: biography of a revolutionary genius

Albert Einstein, more than a scientist, was an inspiring visionary. Someone who found beauty in the darkness, who revolutionized physics and allowed us to understand the universe in a different way. He used to say of himself that he lacked talent and that he was just a passionately curious man. That facet, curiosity and creativity, were undoubtedly his best standard.

To talk about Einstein is to refer to one of the most charismatic figures of the 20th century. Andy Warhol himself turned his image into an icon. We all know his famous mass-energy equivalence equationE=mc². But we owe him, above all, to lay the foundations of cosmology, statistical physics and quantum mechanics.

In addition, There are many who often define him as the “father of the atomic bomb.” Much to his regret, his work facilitated the development of the Manhattan program with its obvious consequences. However, Einstein himself always defined himself as a pacifist.

In fact, it was common for him to reiterate his regret for having convinced President Roosevelt to finance that research. Whatever it was, All of his advances and discoveries changed history in many ways.

The works of Albert Einstein, for example, were key for another great scientist such as Stephen Hawking.. His legacy is so immense and inspiring that many of his predictions continue to be confirmed today, as is the case with gravitational waves.

The life of a child without (apparent) talent who dazzled the world

Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany, into a Jewish family.. His father, Hermann Einstein, was in the cereal business. His mother, Pauline Koch, played the piano. As we see, the musical side has always accompanied the famous scientist.

However, It should be noted that his first years as a student were not very prosperous. He began to speak very late and was also a slow child in the reading-writing process. His character did not seem to suit him at first either: he was secretive, silent and very introverted. All of this caused both his parents and his teachers to think that Einstein suffered from some type of developmental delay.

Now, that stage of his life was, according to him, a period of subtle reflection from which he began to ask himself questions that no one else asked at that age. At the age of seven he was already questioning aspects related to space and time.. Little by little, and thanks to the musical education of his mother, his patient sister and his uncle Jakob, who was passionate about algebra and research, little Albert began to open up to the world and his passion for knowledge.

At the age of 15 he began studying infinitesimal calculus on his own. and at 17, he entered the Federal Polytechnic School of Zurich, Switzerland, to study physics and mathematics. Shortly afterward he would meet the love of his life, Mileva Marić, a brilliant classmate of Serbian origin, with whom he would later have two children.

His legacy as a scientist

It was in 1905 when he developed several fundamental works in his legacy as a scientist.. In the first of them he already delved into the Brownian movement (random movement of particles found in a fluid medium). The others made reference to such significant facts as the photoelectric effect, special relativity and mass-energy equivalence.

The phototoelectric effect would earn him the Nobel Prize in physics almost two decades later, in 1921. Albert Einstein was a professor and later a professor at the universities of Bern, Prague and Berlin. However, with Hitler coming to power in 1933, he had to move to live in the United States, where he would spend the last 25 years of his life but becoming, in turn, the most renowned scientist.

He would leave us on April 16, 1955 after hemorrhaging due to an abdominal aortic aneurysm. He was 76 years old.

Albert Einstein was an innovative genius

Albert Einstein was an innovative genius. He made use of what he defined as thought experiments. He spent much of his time imagining various aspects of his theories. She used to visualize, for example, a man traveling through space inside an elevator. He also imagined blind beetles crawling along curved surfaces.

These experiments allowed him to explain, without the need for telescopes, aspects about the force of gravity or the way in which the photons of light (his blind beetles) travel following a curved path and not a straight line as they believed. The legacy that Einstein left us lives on and advances. It’s more, Today many of his theories continue to be demonstrated, those that he previously devised in his imagination.

The photoelectric effect

Many think that Albert Einstein received the Nobel Prize for his theory of relativity, however, it was not for that, but for the photoelectric effect.. In fact, thanks to this advance, today we have such essential technologies as television, solar panels, microchips, motion detectors, photocopiers, digital cameras, automatic lamps, etc.

The theory of relativity

It was in 1915 when Einstein presented his theory of relativity general with which tried to replace Isaac Newton’s law of gravity. This theory provided the most important foundations to establish knowledge about many of the aspects we have about the Universe today.

Other contributions

Albert Einstein’s legacy is very extensive and begins with his first publications in 1905, passing through Brownian motion, mass-energy equivalence until reaching its unified field theory. This occupied him much of his last years, with the purpose of unifying his studies of gravitation with electromagnetism. Those are his other lesser-known contributions.

Currently, many of these proposals remain unanswered. Or, sometimes, they are found little by little, to show us something undeniable. Albert Einstein was a pioneer when it came to revealing the secrets of the universe and the mysteries of the atom.

His creativity, like his curiosity, had no limits and was also linked to his rebellion., to that critical spirit capable of challenging everything that others took for granted. Because that is, after all, the attitude of a true scientist. From the true explorer of knowledge: challenge the established.

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