ALBERT EINSTEIN (1879-1955)
In 1979 many countries celebrated the centenary of Einstein's birth. To mark the occasion, a large bronze statue of Einstein was sculpted and placed on the grounds of the National Academy of Sciences. The second High Energy Astronomy Observatory (HEAO-2), launched November, 1978, was renamed the Einstein Observatory.
As a child Einstein developed slowly. During his early years he showed no special aptitude in elementary and secondary school, whose rigid methods of instruction he disliked. He was fascinated by mathematics and science, subjects that he studied on his own. He became a high-school dropout, and he left school to join his family in Milan.
Two years later he was able to en· roll at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich after making up a number of subject deficiencies. At the institute the academic fare did not suit him either; so he continued to follow his own inclinations. He managed, however, to pass the required examinations for his degree by cramming from the excellent lecture notes supplied by a close friend. In the 2 years following his graduation in 1900 he subsisted on odd teaching jobs. In 1902 he secured a position as patent examiner at the Swiss patent office in Bern.
During the next years he worked at the patent office, and without any academic connections he found time to publish, at the age of 26, three trailblazing papers. One dealt with the random thermal motions of molecules in colloidal solutions, called Brownian motion. In 1827 Robert Brown, an English botanist, had observed through a microscope the zigzag paths of tiny pollen particles in a drop of water being buffeted by the much smaller, invisible atoms and molecules in the fluid. Einstein worked out the correct mathematical expression for this action on the basis of the random thermal motions of the atomic and molecular constituents, and he did that at about the time the structure of the atom was first being probed. His second paper reinforced the quantum theory of light developed by Max Planck in 1900. Einstein established the photon nature of light in accounting for the recently discovered photoelectric phenomenon. For this contribution Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1921. His third and most famous paper dealt with the special theory of relativity.
Einstein's last years were mostly spent in a vain search for a unified field theory, for a universal force that would link gravitation with the electromagnetic and subatomic forces. Others who have tried since have not been successful either. Einstein was filled with reverence for the works of nature and said: "The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible." He thought of himself more as a philosopher than as a scientist. I n a way he followed the Greek philosophers, who tried to account for natural phenomena by logical deductions instead of experimentation. He succeeded where the ancients had failed because he could draw on the insight of his predecessors and the powerful analytical tools of mathematics developed in the 2000 years since Plato and Aristotle, combining them with his unerring cosmic intuition.
