Mrs. A. Klages
World History Honors
6 May 2013
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein was an outside-the-box thinker; he questioned the beliefs of people such as Isaac Newton. He barely talked until age three because he would analyze what he was planning to sat and decide not to say it anyway. He hated high school because he could not find the reasoning in their authority, and he did not respect the process of memorization because the knowledge was shallow. Einstein was not social, and he was not the best employee. Albert looked deeper and deeper into science to answer his own questions about physics. He was not given the credit he deserved during his lifetime, because most people did not have a good impression of him. Albert Einstein was an intellectual scientist who revolutionized physics by questioning the beliefs of people with his theories, such as the theory of relativity
Einstein started his profound thinking early in his life. He did not participate in the normal imaginary games like other people his age. Instead, Einstein would build elevated houses of cards. He claims his deep thinking originated with his first magnetic compass. He would contemplate whether or not there was something “bigger” controlling the compass, and if so, what was this thing.
Math and Science were Einstein’s best subjects in high school. At age sixteen, Albert explained that he loved science so much because he had a talent for it. After graduating high school, he took the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology entrance exam in 1895 and failed. Since he was unable to attend school there, he studied at a Swiss school in Aarau. There, he began pondering James Clark Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism. He was not a good student, but he found safety in his friend Marcel Grossmann. Grossmann took excellent notes in class and gave them to Einstein to study before the tests. He studied at the Institute of Technology in Zurich after he graduated from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. During his college years, he had access to writings of famous physicists through his friends.
Albert Einstein applied numerous times for a position at a university, but he was unsuccessful. He finally got a job at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern, which provided a regular salary. Einstein spent the spare time he had during work publishing papers. Michele Besso became his closest companion, and they met frequently to read and debate works on science and philosophy. Finally gaining a position at a university, Albert was selected associate professor at the University of Zurich in 1909. Soon after receiving this job, he was appointed full professor at the German University in Prague.
While attending Zurich Polytechnic, there was one woman in his class: Mileva Maric. He began to fall in love with her. She was not approved by his family, nor was talk of their marriage. The two married in 1903. Before Einstein and Mileva were married, she gave birth to a daughter. The fate of this daughter is still being debated. Some say she became sick and passed away, and some say she was put up for adoption. After marriage, Mileva and Albert had one son in 1904 and another in 1910. Their marriage soon became boring and dreadful in the eyes of Einstein; they separated in 1919.
Before Mileva and Albert separated, he had an affair with his cousin, Elsa Lowenthal. Elsa had two adult daughters from a previous relationship. Albert and Elsa settled with her two daughters. They married in 1919, the same year Mileva and he divorced.
1905 was considered to be Einstein’s annus mirabilis, or miracle year. One of his theories written in this year was the theory of light. At this time, all physicists knew that light traveled as an electromagnetic wave. Rather than agreeing with the other physicists, Einstein believed that light was comprised of localized particles that he called photons. In the introduction to his March paper, "According to the assumption to be contemplated