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His
political leanings and his American citizenship
The
period after 1919 brought Einstein international acclaim. Do remember that
the element einsteinium discovered in 1952 was named after Albert
Einstein.
One
incident that contributed to this was the confirmation of one of his
scientific theories during a solar eclipse in 1919. Honors and awards
from scientific societies across the world came his way and he was awarded
the Nobel Prize for his work on
the photoelectric effect
in 1921.
Einstein
put this international exposure to good use for publicizing his political
and social beliefs too. Pacifism and Zionism had his support and he was
not afraid of criticizing Germany’s involvement in the war. This earned
him enemies in Germany and he faced public ridicule there. He left Germany
and took up residence in the United States, taking up at position at the
Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey.
This
period also saw him renounce his pacifist leanings. In 1939 he, in
collaboration with others in the scientific community, wrote to the
American President Franklin D Roosevelt about the possibility of an atomic
bomb and the likelihood of Germany making it. By this he had unknowingly
set the ball rolling for the making of an atomic bomb. He was, however,
all for international disarmament and advocated it world-wide. He was even
offered the post of President of the state of Israel, but he declined.
On April 18, 1955 Einstein breathed his last in Princeton.
His
Work & Accomplishments
Three
of his papers published in 1905 were pivotal and paved the way for a lot
of work done in physics in the western world during that time. The topics
discussed were the quantum nature of light, Brownian motion (a description
of molecular motion) and an introduction to the special theory of
relativity. In 1911, he
worked on the equivalence of gravitation and inertia, and in 1916 he
completed his mathematical formulation of a general theory of relativity
that is a physical theory of gravity, space and time. This theory has been
an inspiration for many a novel and movie on time travel.
Einstein’s next work
was on the unified field theory, which attempts to explain gravitation,
electromagnetism, and subatomic phenomena in one set of laws. This work
was however not very successful.
Einstein’s writings
cover both science and social causes and his main works include Relativity:
The Special and General Theory (1916); About
Zionism (1931); Builders of the
Universe (1932); The World as I
See It (1934) and Out of My
Later Years (1950). He has collaborated with Sigmund Freud to produce Why War? in the year 1933 and with the Polish physicist Leopold
Infeld on the work The Evolution of
Physics (1938).
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