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1-Page Summary of Einstein

Overview

In Walter Isaacson’s book, Einstein (2007), the author provides an intricate account of Albert Einstein’s life. In this narrative, he explains how his personality and passions influenced his personal and scientific life.

Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879 in Ulm, Germany. He lived there with his parents and sister until he was three years old. When he turned four, the family moved to Munich in southern Germany. Two years later, a younger sister named Maja was born. Albert loved science as a child and developed an aversion to religion. His father’s business went bankrupt when he was 15 so his mother decided to move with her husband and two children back to Italy where they had come from originally. At age 16, Einstein left school for good and joined them in Italy where they had settled down after leaving Germany because of financial difficulties caused by the bankruptcy of his father’s firm that dealt in electrical equipment like dynamos (electric generators).

When he was 16, Einstein failed the exam to get into a college. He went to study at another school instead where students were encouraged to visualize their thinking and conduct thought experiments. These helped him develop his theories about relativity and light beams. When he retook the exam, he got accepted into that college.

Einstein was not happy with the curriculum that was taught at his college, and so he studied the work of other physicists. He befriended a math professor named Marcel Grossman who helped him pass his exams with better notes, and also met another woman in his class named Mileva Marić. They eventually started dating when they were both about to graduate from college.

In 1901, Einstein became a citizen of Switzerland. That same year he began to look for ways to unite different areas of physics like molecular forces in liquids with gases. Though his attempt at getting an assistant teaching position in Zurich failed, one of his friends helped him get a job as a technical expert at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern where he could think about science outside academia and remain informed on scientific developments from working on new patents.

In 1902, Einstein had an illegitimate child with Mileva. The child came down with scarlet fever and was given up for adoption. In 1903, he married Mileva in Bern. Their second son was born in 1904. In 1905 (known as his miracle year), Einstein published five papers that are now famous. His first paper argued that light is made of discrete particles rather than waves; it’s still widely cited today. In the second paper, he derived the number of molecules contained in a mole by analyzing data on viscosity in liquids—still used today to produce dairy products and aerosols. The third paper focused on a phenomenon involving suspended particles; this contributed to proving the existence of atoms and molecules about which physicists were skeptical at the time. Through his interest in philosophy, technical knowledge, and visual imagination, Einstein adopted relativity theory, proposed by Galileo centuries earlier: Relativity states that fundamental laws of physics do not change for someone who is inert or moving at a constant velocity relative to another observer. This concept led him to publish four papers—the most famous one being sent to Annalen der Physik summer 1905 : “Does the inertia of a body depend upon its energy content?” He suggested that mass could be related through an equation e=mc².

In fall 1905, he submitted another important paper “On Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” : An event or object observed from two different vantage points can be perceived differently depending on each observer’s location within spacetime fabric.