Why is Albert Einstein a Genius

Albert Einstein is one of the most famous and admired physicists in the history of science: knowing that there are so many hardly conceivable ideas (for example, that the mass of a body increases with speed) does not leave more option than to surrender to his genius. Albert Einstein was born in the German city of Ulm on March 14, 1879. He was the firstborn son of Hermann Einstein and Pauline Koch, both Jews, whose families came from Swabia. The following year they moved to Munich, where the father established himself, along with his brother Jakob, as a merchant in the electrotechnical novelties of the time.

The studies in physics and the research of the photoelectric effect led Albert Einstein to earning a Nobel Prize.

Little Albert was a quiet and self-absorbed boy, and he had a slow intellectual development. Einstein himself attributed to this slowness the fact that he was the only person to elaborate a theory like that of relativity. On June 23, 1902, Albert Einstein began serving at the Federal Intellectual Property Office in Bern, where he worked until 1909 (Gramalath 32). In 1903 he married Mileva Maric, a former study partner in Zurich, with whom he had two children. Hans Albert and Eduard, born respectively in 1904 and 1910. In 1919 they divorced, and Einstein remarried his cousin Elsa.

During 1905, he published five works in the Annalen der Physik: the first of them earned him a doctorate from the University of Zurich. The remaining four would eventually impose a radical change in the image that science offers of the universe. Of these four, the first provided a theoretical explanation in statistical terms of Brownian motion (named after its discoverer, Robert Brown), and the second gave an interpretation of the photoelectric effect based on the hypothesis that light is composed of photons. The remaining two works laid the foundations for the restricted theory of relativity, establishing the equivalence between the energy (E) of a certain amount of matter and its mass (m) in terms of the famous equation E = mc². Where c is the speed of light , which is assumed constant.

Einstein’s effort immediately placed him among the most eminent of European physicists, but public recognition of the true scope of his theories was slow in coming. The Nobel Prize in Physics, which he received in 1921, was awarded exclusively for his work on Brownian motion and his interpretation of the photoelectric effect (Wallis 148). In 1909 he started his university teaching career in Zurich, then went to Prague and returned to Zurich in 1912 to become a professor at the Polytechnic, where he had studied. Beginning in 1933, with Hitler’s accession to power, his loneliness was compounded by the need to renounce German citizenship and move to the United States. Einstein spent the last twenty-five years of his life at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, the city where he died on April 18, 1955.

Albert Einstein is still a mythical figure of our time; even more so than in life. If one takes into account that photograph of him in which he exhibits an unusual gesture of mockery (sticking out his tongue in a comical and irreverent expression) has been recognized as an icon after being made into a poster as common as those of the song idols and the Hollywood stars. However, it is not his scientific genius or his human stature that best explain him as myth, but, perhaps, the accumulation of paradoxes contained in his own biography, accentuated with historical perspective. The champion of pacifism Einstein is still remembered as the father of the bomb; and it is still common to attribute the demonstration of the principle that everything is relative precisely to him, who fought bitterly against the possibility that knowing reality meant playing with the blind chicken.

Works Cited

1. Gamalath, K. A. I. L. W. Einstein?: His Life and Works . Alpha Science International Ltd., 2012.
2. Wallis, Max. “Einstein’s Nobel Prize: A Glimpse Behind Closed Doors.” British Journal for the History of Science, vol. 41, no. 148, Cambridge University Press, 1 Mar. 2008, pp. 148–49, http://search.proquest.com/docview/215731963/. 

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