Shannah barrett biography of albert einstein

According to a letter he wrote to future wife Elsa, he stopped wearing them because he was annoyed by his big toe pushing through the material and creating a hole. One of the most recognizable photos of the 20 th century shows Einstein sticking out his tongue while leaving his 72 nd birthday party on March 14, According to Discovery.

Tired from doing so all night, he refused and rebelliously stuck his tongue out at the crowd for a moment before turning away. UPI photographer Arthur Sasse captured the shot. Einstein was amused by the picture and ordered several prints to give to his friends. He was taken to the hospital for treatment but refused surgery, believing that he had lived his life and was content to accept his fate.

I have done my share, it is time to go. I will do it elegantly. He was able to photograph the office just as Einstein left it. However, during his life, Einstein participated in brain studies, and at least one biography claimed he hoped researchers would study his brain after he died. In keeping with his wishes, the rest of his body was cremated and the ashes scattered in a secret location.

According to The New York Times , the researchers believe it might help explain why Einstein was so intelligent. Rorke-Adams said she received the brain slides from Harvey. Einstein has also been portrayed on screen. Walter Matthau portrayed Einstein in the fictional comedy I. A much more historically accurate depiction of Einstein came in , when he was the subject of the first season of Genius , a part scripted miniseries by National Geographic.

Johnny Flynn played a younger version of the scientist, while Geoffrey Rush portrayed Einstein in his later years after he had fled Germany. Ron Howard was the director. Robert Oppenheimer during his involvement with the Manhattan Project. The Biography. We have worked as daily newspaper reporters, major national magazine editors, and as editors-in-chief of regional media publications.

Among our ranks are book authors and award-winning journalists. Our staff also works with freelance writers, researchers, and other contributors to produce the smart, compelling profiles and articles you see on our site. Tyler Piccotti joined the Biography. He previously worked as a reporter and copy editor for a daily newspaper recognized by the Associated Press Sports Editors.

In his current role, he shares the true stories behind your favorite movies and TV shows and profiles rising musicians, actors, and athletes. When he's not working, you can find him at the nearest amusement park or movie theater and cheering on his favorite teams. Martin Luther King Jr. It also means that even an inert, stationary object has a huge amount of energy locked up inside it.

Besides being a mind-blowing idea, the concept has practical applications in the world of high-energy particle physics. According to the European Council for Nuclear Research CERN , if sufficiently energetic particles are smashed together, the energy of the collision can create new matter in the form of additional particles. Lasers are an essential component of modern technology and are used in everything from barcode readers and laser pointers to holograms and fiber-optic communication.

Although lasers are not commonly associated with Einstein, it was ultimately his work that made them possible. The word laser, coined in , stands for "light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation" — and stimulated emission is a concept Einstein developed more than 40 years earlier, according to the American Physical Society.

In , Einstein wrote a paper on the quantum theory of radiation that described, among other things, how a photon of light passing through a substance could stimulate the emission of further photons. Einstein realized that the new photons travel in the same direction, and with the same frequency and phase, as the original photon. This results in a cascade effect as more and more virtually identical photons are produced.

As a theoretician, Einstein didn't take the idea any further, while other scientists were slow to recognize the enormous practical potential of stimulated emission. But the world got there in the end, and people are still finding new applications for lasers today, from anti-drone weapons to super-fast computers. Related: The world's biggest laser: Function, fusion power and solving a supernova.

Einstein's theory of special relativity showed that space-time can do some pretty weird things even in the absence of gravitational fields. But that's only the tip of the iceberg, as Einstein discovered when he finally succeeded in adding gravity into the mix, in his theory of general relativity. He found that massive objects like planets and stars actually distort the fabric of space-time, and it's this distortion that produces the effects we perceive as gravity.

Einstein explained general relativity through a complex set of equations, which have an enormous range of applications. Perhaps the most famous solution to Einstein's equations came from Karl Schwarzschild's solution in — a black hole. Even weirder is a solution that Einstein himself developed in in collaboration with Nathan Rosen, describing the possibility of shortcuts from one point in space-time to another.

Originally dubbed Einstein-Rosen bridges, these are now known to all fans of science fiction by the more familiar name of wormholes. Our view of the Universe was changed forever. Just as important were the political implications. In the charged environment of a world returning from war, a British confirmation of a German pacifist Jew's theory had a powerful resonance.

His distinctive appearance and surprising demeanour saw him capture the attention of the press pack.

Shannah barrett biography of albert einstein

To Americans, he came across not as an aloof intellectual with strange ideas about the nature of reality but as a warm, likeable and humble character, who often smiled and had a talent for providing journalists with quotable lines. The feeling was mutual; in an essay about his impressions of the country he wrote "The American is friendly, self-confident, optimistic, and without envy".

In Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the photoelectric effect. This was largely because his better known work on relativity had remained controversial with some influential figures, including ophthalmologist Allvar Gullstrand, who served on the Nobel committee. But he did continue to make substantial contributions to physics.

For example, his work with Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose predicted the existence of a new state of matter — a Bose-Einstein condensate. It also described strange quantum phenomena such as the behaviour of superfluids — a state of matter that behaves like a fluid, but has zero viscosity. Ben Miller discovers the surprising behaviour of low-temperature helium.

Horizon: What is One Degree? BBC Two, Quantum physics was on an unstoppable rise — making sense of sub-atomic behaviour in a way that general relativity could not. Einstein disliked the uncertainty of quantum mechanics and sought a more complete theory. At the Solvay conference in Brussels, Einstein came into disagreement with the leader of the quantum group, Niels Bohr.

Their rivalry clarified the nature of wave-particle duality. Einstein spent most of the rest of his life trying to formulate a single theory which would unite relativity with quantum mechanics. It is a fundamental problem that eludes physicists to this day. A longtime pacifist and a Jew, Einstein became the target of hostility in Weimar Germany, where many citizens were suffering plummeting economic fortunes in the aftermath of defeat in the Great War.

In December , a month before Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, Einstein made the decision to emigrate to the United States, where he took a position at the newly founded Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He would never again enter the country of his birth. In the process, Einstein became increasingly isolated from many of his colleagues, who were focused mainly on the quantum theory and its implications, rather than on relativity.

Roosevelt advising him to approve funding for the development of uranium before Germany could gain the upper hand. Einstein, who became a U. Throughout the last years of his life, Einstein continued his quest for a unified field theory. Though he published an article on the theory in Scientific American in , it remained unfinished when he died, of an aortic aneurysm, five years later.

Originally stolen by the doctor trusted to perform his autopsy, scientists over the decades have examined the brain of Albert Einstein to try and determine what made this seemingly normal man tick. You can opt out at any time.