Albert Einstein
Life
The greatest physicist of the 20th century, Albert Einstein, was born on March 14, 1879. In the city of Ulm in southwest Germany, he moved to Munich with his family a year later. Einstein's parents were both Jewish. His father, Hermann Einstein, and his uncle, Jacob Einstein, jointly opened an electrical appliance factory that produced motors, arc lamps, and electrical instrumentation for power stations and lighting systems. Mother Pauline was a housewife with a secondary education. She loved music very much and taught Einstein to play the violin when he was six years old.
Einstein was not lively when he was a child. He could not speak even when he was more than three years old. His parents were worried that he was mute and took him to a doctor for examination. Fortunately, little Einstein was not mute, but he could not speak very smoothly until he was nine years old. Every word he spoke had to be thought through laboriously but carefully.
When Einstein was four or five years old, he was bedridden and his father gave him a compass. When he found that the compass always pointed in a fixed direction, he was very surprised and felt that there must be something deeply hidden behind this phenomenon. He happily played with the compass for several days and pestered his father and Uncle Jacob with a series of questions. Although he couldn't even pronounce the word "magnetism" well, he stubbornly wanted to know why the compass could guide. This profound and lasting impression could still be vividly recalled by Einstein until he was sixty-seven years old.
When Einstein was in elementary school and middle school, his homework was ordinary. Because he behaves slowly and doesn't like to interact with others, his teachers and classmates don't like him. The teacher who taught him Greek and Latin was even more disgusted with him. He once publicly scolded him: "Einstein, you will definitely not be successful when you grow up." And because he was afraid that he would affect other students in class, he actually wanted to Kick him out of school.
Einstein's uncle Jacob was responsible for technical matters in the electrical appliance factory, while Einstein's father was responsible for business dealings. Jacob was an engineer and loved mathematics very much. When little Einstein came to him to ask questions, he always introduced mathematical knowledge to him in very simple and popular language. Under the influence of his uncle, Einstein received early enlightenment in science and philosophy.
My father’s business was not doing well, but he was an optimistic and kind-hearted person. The family would invite poor students who came to study in Munich to have dinner one night a week, which was equivalent to providing relief to them. Among them are a pair of Jewish brothers Max and Bernard from Lithuania. They are both studying medicine and like to read books and have a wide range of interests. They were invited to Einstein's house for dinner and made good friends with the shy little Einstein, who had black hair and brown eyes.
Max can be said to be Einstein’s “initial teacher”. He borrowed some popular natural science books for him to read. Max gave Einstein a copy of Spilke's plane geometry textbook when he was twelve years old. When Einstein recalled this sacred little book in his later years, he said: "There are many assertions in this book, for example, that the three altitudes of a triangle intersect at one point. Although they are not obvious in themselves, they can be proved very reliably. So that any doubt seemed impossible. This clarity and reliability made an indescribable impression on me."
Einstein was also fortunate to know from an excellent popular book. The popular science books not only enhanced Einstein's knowledge, but also touched the curious heartstrings of young people and caused him to think deeply about the problem.
When Einstein was sixteen years old, he entered the Engineering Department of the Federal University of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland, but failed the entrance examination. He accepted the advice of Professor Weber, the president of the Federal University of Technology and the school's famous physicist, and completed high school courses at the state high school in Aarau, Switzerland, to obtain a high school diploma.
In October 1896, Einstein entered the Technical University of Zurich and studied mathematics and physics in the Normal Department. He is very disgusted with the injective education in schools, believing that it leaves people with no time or interest to think about other issues. Fortunately, the compulsory education that stifles true scientific drive is much less common at Zurich's Federal University of Technology than at other universities. Einstein made full use of the free atmosphere in school and focused his energy on the subjects he loved. In school, he read extensively the works of physics masters such as Helmholtz and Hertz. He was most fascinated by Maxwell's electromagnetic theory.
He has the ability to self-study, the habit of analyzing problems and the ability to think independently.
Early work
In 1900, Einstein graduated from the Technical University of Zurich. Due to his lack of enthusiasm for certain subjects and his indifference to teachers, he was refused a stay in school. Unable to find a job, he made a living as a tutor and substitute teacher. After being unemployed for a year and a half, Marcel Grossman, a classmate who cared about and understood his talents, reached out to him for help. Grossmann managed to persuade his father to introduce Einstein to the Swiss Patent Office as a technician.
Einstein was forever grateful to Grossman for his help. In a letter to commemorate Grossman, he talked about this incident and said that when he graduated from college, he was "suddenly abandoned by everyone and helpless to face life. He helped me, and through him and his father, I Later, I came to Halle (the director of the Swiss Patent Office at the time) and entered the patent office. This was a bit like a life-saving grace. Without him, I probably wouldn’t have died of hunger, but my spirit would have become depressed.”
On February 21, 1902, Einstein obtained Swiss citizenship and moved to Bern, waiting for recruitment by the Patent Office. On June 23, 1902, Einstein was officially employed by the Patent Office as a third-level technician. His job responsibilities were to review various technological inventions and creations applying for patent rights. In 1903, he married his college classmate Mileva Marik.
From 1900 to 1904, Einstein wrote a paper every year and published it in the German Journal of Physics. The first two articles were about the thermodynamics of liquid surfaces and electrolysis, in an attempt to provide a mechanical basis for chemistry. Later, I found that this path was unavailable, and I turned to the study of the mechanical basis of thermodynamics. Some basic theories of statistical mechanics were proposed in 1901, and three papers from 1902 to 1904 all belong to this field.
The 1904 paper carefully explored the fluctuations predicted by statistical mechanics and found that energy fluctuations depended on Boltzmann's constant. It not only applied this result to mechanical systems and thermal phenomena, but also boldly applied it to radiation phenomena to derive the formula for the fluctuation of radiant energy, thereby deriving Wien's displacement law. The study of fluctuation phenomena enabled him to make major breakthroughs in both radiation theory and molecular kinetic theory in 1905.
The Miracle of 1905
In 1905, Einstein created an unprecedented miracle in the history of science. He wrote six papers this year. In the six months from March to September, he used his spare time after working eight hours a day at the Patent Office to make four epoch-making contributions in three fields. He published Four important papers were published on the quantum theory of light, molecular size determination, Brownian motion theory and special relativity.
In March 1905, Einstein sent the paper he believed to be correct to the editorial office of the German "Annals of Physics". He shyly said to the editor: "I would be very happy if you could find space in your annual report to publish this paper for me." The paper he was "embarrassed" to send was called "About Light" A Speculative View of Generation and Transformation”.
This paper extends the quantum concept proposed by Planck in 1900 to the propagation of light in space and proposes the light quantum hypothesis. It is believed that: for time averages, light behaves as fluctuations; for instantaneous values, light behaves as particles. This is the first time in history that the unity of wave nature and particle nature of microscopic objects is revealed, that is, wave-particle duality.
At the end of this article, he used the concept of light quantum to easily explain the photoelectric effect that cannot be explained by classical physics, and deduced the relationship between the maximum energy of photoelectrons and the frequency of incident light. This relationship was experimentally confirmed by Millikan 10 years later. In 1921, Einstein won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his "discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect."
This was just the beginning. Albert Einstein was advancing hand in hand in the three fields of light, heat, and electrical physics, and he was out of control. In April 1905, Einstein completed "A New Method for Determining the Size of Molecules" and in May he completed "The Movement of Suspended Particles in Hydrostatic Liquids Required by the Molecular Kinetic Theory of Heat". These are two papers on the study of Brownian motion. Einstein's purpose at that time was to determine the actual size of molecules by observing the irregular motion of suspended particles produced by the fluctuation phenomenon of molecular motion, so as to solve the atomic problem that has been debated in the scientific and philosophical circles for more than half a century. Does the problem exist?
Three years later, French physicist Perrin confirmed Einstein's theoretical predictions with sophisticated experiments. This irreproachably proved the objective existence of atoms and molecules. This led Ostwald, the German chemist who most firmly opposed atomic theory and the founder of energeticism, to proactively declare in 1908: "The atomic hypothesis has become a fundamental and solid foundation." scientific theory".
In June 1905, Einstein completed a long paper "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" that ushered in a new era of physics, and fully proposed the special theory of relativity. This is the result of Einstein's 10 years of brewing and exploration. It has largely solved the crisis of classical physics that emerged at the end of the 19th century, changed the concept of space and time in Newtonian mechanics, revealed the equivalence of matter and energy, and created the A brand new world of physics is the greatest revolution in the field of modern physics.
Special relativity can not only explain all phenomena that classical physics can explain, but also explain some physical phenomena that classical physics cannot explain, and predicts many new effects. The most important conclusion of the special theory of relativity is that the principle of conservation of mass has lost its independence. It is integrated with the law of conservation of energy. Mass and energy can be converted into each other. Others include the more commonly mentioned clocks slowing down, the speed of light remaining unchanged, the rest mass of photons being zero, etc. Classical mechanics has become a limiting case of relativistic mechanics when moving at low speeds. In this way, mechanics and electromagnetism are unified on the basis of kinematics.
In September 1905, Einstein wrote a short article "Is the inertia of an object related to the energy it contains?" ", as a corollary of the theory of relativity. Mass-energy equivalence is the theoretical basis of nuclear physics and particle physics, and also opened the way for the release and utilization of nuclear energy realized in the 1940s.
In this short period of six months, Einstein's breakthrough achievements in science can be said to be "ground-breaking and unprecedented." Even if he gave up the study of physics, even if he only completed any of the above three aspects of achievements, Einstein would have left an extremely important mark in the history of the development of physics. Einstein cleared away the "dark clouds in the clear sky of physics" and ushered in a more glorious new era of physics.
Exploration of the general theory of relativity
After the establishment of the special theory of relativity, Einstein was not satisfied and tried to extend the scope of application of the principle of relativity to non-inertial systems. He found a breakthrough from the ancient experimental fact that all objects in the gravitational field have the same acceleration discovered by Galileo, and proposed the equivalence principle in 1907. In this year, his university teacher and famous geometer Minkovsky proposed a four-dimensional space representation of the special theory of relativity, which provided a useful mathematical tool for the further development of the theory of relativity. Unfortunately, Einstein did not realize its value at the time. .
Einstein considered the discovery of the equivalence principle to be the happiest thought in his life, but his subsequent work was very difficult and took a lot of detours. In 1911, he analyzed a rigid rotating disk and realized that Euclidean geometry was not strictly valid in gravitational fields. At the same time, it was also discovered that the Lorenz change is not universal, and the equivalence principle is only valid for infinitesimal areas... At this time, Einstein already had the idea of ??general relativity, but he still lacked the mathematical foundation necessary to establish it.
In 1912, Einstein returned to work at his alma mater in Zurich. With the help of Grossmann, his classmate and professor of mathematics at his alma mater, he found the mathematical tools to establish the general theory of relativity in Riemannian geometry and tensor analysis. After a year of hard cooperation, they published the important paper "Outline of General Relativity and Theory of Gravity" in 1913, proposing the metric field theory of gravity. This is the first time that gravity and metrics have been combined to give Riemannian geometry real physical meaning.
However, the gravitational field equation they obtained at that time was only covariant for linear transformations, and did not yet have covariance under any coordinate transformation required by the principle of general relativity. This is because Einstein was not familiar with tensor operations at the time and mistakenly believed that as long as he adhered to the law of conservation, he had to limit the choice of coordinate systems. In order to maintain causality, he had to give up the requirement of universal covariance.
A long and difficult exploration
After the completion of the general theory of relativity, Einstein still felt dissatisfied and wanted to extend the general theory of relativity to include not only the gravitational field, but also the electromagnetic field. He believed that this was the third stage in the development of relativity, that is, unified field theory.
After 1925, Einstein went all out to explore a unified field theory. In the first few years, he was very optimistic and thought that victory was in sight; later he found many difficulties and he believed that the existing mathematical tools were not enough; after 1928, he turned to the exploration of pure mathematics. He tried various methods, but failed to achieve results of real physical significance.
In the 30 years from 1925 to 1955, apart from the completeness of quantum mechanics, gravitational waves and the motion problems of general relativity, Einstein devoted almost all of his scientific and creative energy to The search for unified field theory.
In 1937, with the cooperation of two assistants, he derived the equations of motion from the gravitational field equations of general relativity, further revealing the unity between space, time, matter, and motion. This is the generalized theory of The major development of the theory of relativity was also the last major achievement achieved by Einstein in his scientific creation activities.
In terms of unified field theory, he never succeeded. He never got discouraged and started from the beginning with full confidence every time. Because he stayed away from the mainstream of physics research at that time and attacked problems on his own that were unsolvable at the time, he was very isolated in the physics community in his later years, contrary to his situation in the 1920s. However, he remained fearless and unswervingly followed the path he had identified. Until the day before his death, he was still preparing to continue his mathematical calculations on the unified field theory in his hospital bed.
The style of the greatest scientist
For his achievements in science, Einstein received many awards and honorary doctorate certificates. Ordinary people would hang these things up high. But Einstein put all the above things, including the Nobel Prize certificate, in a messy box without even looking at it. Infeld said he sometimes thought Einstein might not even know what a Nobel Prize was. It is said that on the day he won the award, his face was as calm as usual, and he did not show any special joy or excitement.
When Einstein was a boy living in Switzerland, he lived the life of a poor student. He did not have high requirements for material life. He was very satisfied with a plate of spaghetti and a little sauce. After becoming famous, becoming a professor and later immigrating to the United States to escape Nazi persecution, he had the conditions to live a good material enjoyment, but he still retained the simple and unpretentious life of a poor student. When Einstein came to work at the Institute of Advanced Science in Princeton, the authorities gave him a fairly high salary—16,000 U.S. dollars per year. But he said: "With this much money, can you give me less? Give me three thousand U.S. dollars." That’s enough.”
Einstein also didn’t pay attention to his clothes. He wore a black leather jacket for many years, no socks, no tie, and sometimes neither a belt nor a tie. Suspenders, when he and others were discussing issues in front of the blackboard, while writing on the blackboard, he would hold his pants that seemed to be sliding down with his hands. This situation was a bit funny, but his hair was kept long. Add embellishments. This was surprising to the students of Princeton University, the "aristocratic institution" at that time. No wonder they hoped that God would tell him to cut off his hair. Einstein was a very frugal man. He wrote on both sides of the paper for calculations. He also cut open the envelopes of many letters sent to him and used them as scratch paper for calculations, preventing them from entering the paper basket before they were sent to him. Loss of reusable value. Einstein often took second- and third-class trains when he went out, and usually only ate some simple food.
In July 1909, Einstein was invited to Geneva to participate in the grand 350th anniversary of the University of Geneva and the celebration in memory of the founder of the University, Calvin, and accept the honor awarded to him by the University of Geneva. Ph.D. During the celebration parade, dignitaries from the school and government figures all wore tailcoats and top hats, or medieval-style rust-gold robes and flat silk hats, but Einstein Wearing a set of clothes that you usually wear on the street, wearing a straw hat. Einstein was very disapproving of the grand banquet held for this celebration. He said to the people sitting next to him, "If Calvin were still alive, he would pile up a lot of firewood because of such extravagance." Feast and burn us all to death." Einstein himself once said: "Easy and happiness have never been the goal for me. I call these ethical foundations the swineherd's ideal...". He even refused to be placed in the upper class and occupied a different position, and was angry at the special care given to him in society.
Einstein was a person who valued time very much. He did not like to participate in social activities and banquets. He once said sarcastically: "This is feeding time to the zoo." He concentrated on his studies. You don’t want to waste your precious time on meaningless social conversations. Nor did he want to hear flattery and praise. He believed: "A person who has benefited the whole world with his great creative ideas does not need praise from future generations. His achievements themselves have given him a higher reward." In March 1929, in order to avoid his fiftieth birthday In order to celebrate the occasion, a few days before his birthday, he secretly went to live in seclusion in a gardener's farmhouse on the outskirts of Berlin.
As a great scientific master in the revolution of physics, Einstein never considered himself a superman. He realized that the path he was taking was an extension of the path taken by his predecessors, and that the new era of science was a reasonable development based on the work of his predecessors. Therefore, he always appreciated the contributions of his predecessors with gratitude and admiration. . When talking about the creation of the theory of relativity, he said: "The theory of relativity can actually be said to be the final touch on the great idea of ??Maxwell and Lorentz, because it strives to expand field physics to all phenomena including gravity. "Einstein wrote several times in letters to friends who praised his achievements: "I am fully aware that I have no special talents: interest, concentration, tenacious work, and self-criticism make me achieve what I want to achieve. "The ideal state."
Concerned about the destiny of all mankind
Einstein loved science and also loved mankind. He did not put himself outside society because he was immersed in scientific research. He has always been concerned about human civilization and progress, and fought tenaciously and bravely for it. He said: "Only by dedicating oneself to society can one find out the meaning of a life that is actually short and risky." This is exactly what he did.
The secret of success
Once, an American reporter asked Einstein about the secret of his success. He replied: "As early as 1901, when I was a twenty-two-year-old young man, I had already discovered the formula for success. I can tell you the secret of this formula, that is A=X+Y+Z! A is success. , X is to work hard, Y is to know how to rest, and Z is to talk nonsense! This formula works for me, and I think it will work for many people too. ”