The Great Achievements of Albert Einstein On March 14, 1789, Albert Einstein was born in Württemberg, Germany. Just 1 year later, in 1880, Einstein and his family moved to Munich. Einstein was always a very bright and intelligent child. He took an interest in the violin and the piano at a very young age and was also a top student in his school. He was raised with a Jewish family but was not extremely religious as he went to a Catholic school. Albert Einstein didn’t like school because he felt alone there, and also had a speech impediment.
Einstein was always fascinated with certain objects as a child, an example is his compass.
Einstein claims that he was not a special human or a genius, he was simply a curious person who wondered about our world. When Einstein was only 5 years old, his father Hermann gave him a magnetic compass, he would play with the compass and tried to trick the compass into making the needle move into another side, but couldn’t.
This was the start of Einstein’s intense questioning that led him to make one of the greatest discoveries in the 20th century. When Einstein grew older, he was very interested in the speed of light. He always had questions such as “what would happen if I looked into a mirror traveling at the speed of light?”.
In 1905, Einstein published his theory of general relativity. This paper was revolutionary as it was a great step in the world of science and physics.
The Theory of Relativity is a very complex paper that many people don’t understand, even Stephen Hawking believes that only a few people truly understand the theory as stated in his book “The Origin of the Universe”. The first step to understanding Einstein’s Theory of Relativity is understanding that there is no such thing as absolute motion or absolute rest. Everything moves relative to each other, and there can’t be absolute rest because the earth and the galaxy that we are on is always rotating at a very high speed.
The second step is acknowledging time dilation. The speed of light is constant, which means it is the same speed for everybody on earth. If you were to look at yourself in a mirror while traveling close to the speed of light, light beams travel further than if you weren’t traveling as fast. Time=distance over speed, which means if you were traveling at the speed of light, time would actually slow down. This is a very hard concept to grasp because it is so bizarre, but based on Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, time can theoretically slow down. The next part is length contraction when you travel at the speed of light, time not only slows down, but everything traveling at the speed of light actually becomes contracted. Since we now know that time is in fact relative, we get into the idea of “spacetime”.
Albert Einstein didn’t like to think of space and time as two different things, instead, he combined the two into a topic called spacetime, which is now a huge part of physics today. He also talks about time travel. Since we already know time slows down when objects move at the speed of light, it has to be understood that time comes to a complete stop when an object travels at exactly the speed of light, therefore, time actually travels backward when an object is moving faster than the speed of light. Nothing has ever traveled even close to the speed of light, so this is all very theoretical and has not been physically seen. This is why it is impossible to travel back in time since nothing has ever been able to travel faster than the speed of light.
Einstein has proven that this is all true with highly complex equations and even some experiments. Einstein was also very famous for his equation E = mc2. This equation simply means that mass and energy are related to each other by a constant. E = mc2 stands for: Energy is equal to mass multiplied by the speed of light to the second power. Light travels at 300,000,000 meters per second, which means if we had 1-kilogram of mass and convert it to energy, we get 90,000,000,000,000,000 Jouls of energy, which, if you can’t tell, is an enormous amount of energy.
Albert Einstein changed the world in a couple of different ways. Although he was not an inventor, his discoveries led to a lot of inventions by other people. Also, his equation E = mc2 led to nuclear energy and weapons such as the Hiroshima bombing. Also Einstein’s Theory of Relativity is why GPS’s are pretty accurate nowadays. Einstein solved lots of problems from the 1800s and planted a stepping stone for some of the important things we use every day. Einstein was definitely a genius, his discoveries are actually under simplified as few people truly understand what the Theory of Relativity is.
The Great Achievements of Albert Einstien. (2021, Dec 21). Retrieved from https://paperap.com/the-great-achievements-of-albert-einstien/