Einstein

In 1879, Albert Einstein was born to a middle-class German Jewish family. His parents were concerned that he scarcely talked until the age of three, but he was not so much a backward as a quiet child. He would build tall houses of cards and hated playing soldier. At the age of twelve, he was fascinated by a geometry book. The Albert Einstein Archives, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem 1895 At the age of fifteen, Albert quit high school, disgusted by rote learning and martinet teachers, and followed his family to Italy where they had moved their failing electrotechnical business. After half a year of wandering and loafing, he attended a congenial Swiss school. The next year he entered the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. It is almost a miracle that modern teaching methods have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for what this delicate little plant needs more than anything, besides stimulation, is freedom. 1900 After working hard in the laboratory but skipping lectures, Einstein graduated with an unexceptional record. For two grim years he could find only odd jobs, but he finally got a post as a patent examiner. He married a former classmate. 1905 Einstein wrote four fundamental papers, all in a few months. The first paper claimed that light must sometimes behave like a stream of particles with discrete energies, “quanta.” The second paper offered an experimental test for the theory of heat and proof of the existence of atoms. The third paper...

It's hard to understate the genius of Albert Einstein. As one of the world's foremost physicists, his discoveries revolutionized the way we see not just our world but the entirety of the universe. It's little wonder how the name Einstein has come to be synonymous with scientific genius. He is most well known for his theory of relativity, but his By pushing our understanding of physics far beyond what anyone thought possible or could even imagine at the time, Einstein stands nearly alone in the pantheon of physicists with his unparalleled brilliance. Early life and career Albert Einstein as a child, Source: Albert Einstein was Shortly after his birth, his family moved to Munich, where his father and uncle founded an electrical equipment manufacturing company. Einstein began receiving a primary education at a Catholic school in 1885 before transferring to the Luitpold-Gymnasium (since renamed the Albert Einstein Gymnasium, for obvious reasons) in 1888. Einstein was, surprisingly or maybe not so surprisingly, a mediocre student. So mediocre in fact that when Einstein wanted to attend the Eidgenoessische Polytechnische Schule (mercifully renamed ETH in later years) in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1895, he failed the entrance examination and had to attend the Kantonschule in Aarau, Switzerland, to remediate the subject areas whose test scores were insufficient. Receiving a diploma from the school in 1896, he was able to enroll in ETH soon thereafter with the goal of becoming a math ...

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) is well known as the most prominent physicist of the twentieth century. His contributions to twentieth-century philosophy of science, though of comparable importance, are less well known. Einstein’s own philosophy of science is an original synthesis of elements drawn from sources as diverse as neo-Kantianism, conventionalism, and logical empiricism, its distinctive feature being its novel blending of realism with a holist, underdeterminationist form of conventionalism. Of special note is the manner in which Einstein’s philosophical thinking was driven by and contributed to the solution of problems first encountered in his work in physics. Equally significant are Einstein’s relations with and influence on other prominent twentieth-century philosophers of science, including Moritz Schlick, Hans Reichenbach, Ernst Cassirer, Philipp Frank, Henri Bergson, Émile Meyerson. Late in 1944, Albert Einstein received a letter from Robert Thornton, a young African-American philosopher of science who had just finished his Ph.D. under Herbert Feigl at Minnesota and was beginning a new job teaching physics at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez. He had written to solicit from Einstein a few supportive words on behalf of his efforts to introduce “as much of the philosophy of science as possible” into the modern physics course that he was to teach the following spring (Thornton to Einstein, 28 November 1944, EA 61–573). Here is what Einstein offered in reply: ...