Albert Einstein
From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879 - April 18, 1955) was a physicist and a scientist. In 1921, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Einstein is famous for his theories about light, matter, gravity, space, and time, which helped scientists to understand these things much better than they had before. These theories are called the theory of special relativity and the theory of general relativity. His most famous equation is E = mc2. It means that energy and mass are different forms of the same thing, and that the amount of energy in a piece of mass is the same as the amount of the mass multiplied by the speed of light times itself (a very big number).
[edit] His life
Einstein was born at Ulm in Württemberg, Germany. His family was Jewish but was not very religious. Albert went to a Roman Catholic school. He was not a good student, and many people thought he was stupid. One day, someone gave him a magnetic compass. He was very interested in trying to understand how an invisible force could make the needle move and became interested in studying science and mathematics.
When he became older, he went to a school in Switzerland. After he graduated, he got a job in the patent office there. While he was working there, he wrote the papers that made him famous as a great scientist.
Just before the start of World War I, he moved back to Germany, and became director of a school there. He lived in Berlin until the Nazi government came to power. The Nazis hated people who were Jewish or who came from Jewish families. They accused Einstein of helping to create "Jewish physics," and German physicists tried to prove that his theories were wrong. Einstein moved to the United States, and in 1940 he became a United States citizen.
During World War II, Einstein was one of the scientists who wrote to U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt, to say that the United States should invent an atomic bomb before the Nazi government could invent one first.
In 1952, the Israeli government asked Einstein to become the second President of Israel, but he said that he would not.
Einstein died on April 18, 1955 of heart disease.
[edit] What his beliefs were
Many scientists only care about their work, but Einstein also spoke and wrote often about politics and world peace. He liked the ideas of socialism and of having only one government for the whole world. He also worked for Zionism, the effort to try to create the new country of Israel.
Einstein's family was Jewish, but Einstein never practiced this religion seriously. He liked the ideas of the Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza and also thought that Buddhism was a good religion.
Even though Einstein thought of many ideas that helped scientists understand the world much better, he disagreed with many scientific theories that were developed later in his life. Many scientific theories discuss things that we cannot know for certain, but only as probabilities. Einstein didn't like these kinds of theories; he thought that it should be possible to understand anything, if we had the correct theory. He once said, "I do not believe that God plays dice with the Universe."
Because Einstein helped science so much, his name is now used for several different things. A unit used in photochemistry was named for him. It is equal to Avogadro's number multiplied by the energy of one photon of light. The chemical element Einsteinium is named after the scientist as well. In slang, we sometimes call a very smart person an "Einstein."
One of his inspiring sayings is "There are two ways to live your life, one is as though nothing is a miracle, the other is as though everything is a miracle."
