# Off-Topic Discussion > Extended Discussion >  >  Albert Einstein: Person Of The Century (20th of course....)

## bradybaker

Hey, Einstein is awesome. I hope some of you find this interesting?

Who do you think would've been a good candidate for Time Magazine's 'Person of the Century'?
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*Einstein's Legacy Keeps on Expanding*

By JOSEPH B. VERRENGIA, AP Science Writer

He stopped traffic on Fifth Avenue like the Beatles or Marilyn Monroe. He could've been president of Israel or played violin at Carnegie Hall, but he was too busy thinking. His musings on God, love and the meaning of life grace our greeting cards and day-timers. Fifty years after his death, his shock of white hair and droopy mustache still symbolize genius.

Who else could it be but Albert Einstein?

Einstein remains the foremost scientist of the modern era. Looking back 2,400 years, only Newton, Galileo and Aristotle were his equals.

Around the world, universities and academies are celebrating the 100th anniversary of Einstein's "miracle year" when he published five scientific papers in 1905 that fundamentally changed our grasp of space, time, light and matter. Only he could top himself about a decade later with his theory of general relativity.

Born in the era of horse-drawn carriages, his ideas launched a dazzling technological revolution that has generated more change in a century than in the previous two millennia.

Computers, satellites, telecommunication, lasers, television and nuclear power all owe their invention to ways in which Einstein peeled back the veneer of the observable world to expose a stranger and more complicated reality underneath.

And, he launched an intellectual quest for a single coherent law that governs the universe. Einstein said such a unified super-theory of everything, still unwritten, would enable us to "read the mind of God."

"We are a different race of people than we were a century ago," says astrophysicist Michael Shara of the American Museum of Natural History, "utterly and completely different, because of Einstein."

Yet there is more, and it is why Einstein transcends mere genius and has become our culture's grandfatherly icon.

He escaped Hitler's Germany and devoted the rest of his life to humanitarian and pacifist causes with an authority unmatched by any scientist today, or even most politicians and religious leaders.

He used his celebrity to speak out against fascism, racial prejudice and the McCarthy hearings. His FBI file ran 1,400 pages.

His letters reveal a tumultuous personal life  married twice and indifferent toward his children while obsessed with physics. Yet he charmed lovers and admirers with poetry and sailboat outings. Friends and neighbors fiercely protected his privacy.

And, yes, he was eccentric. With hair like that, how could he not be?

He famously stuck his tongue out at photographers  that is, when he wasn't wearing a Native American war bonnet or some other get-up. Cartoonists loved him.

He never learned to drive. He would walk home from his office at Princeton University, sockless and submerged in the pursuit of the "eternal riddle," letting his umbrella rattle against the bars of an iron fence. If his umbrella skipped a bar, he would go back to the beginning of the fence and start over.

In those solitary moments, he unconsciously demonstrated the traits  intense concentration, disregard for fashion and innate playfulness  that would rescue him when, inevitably, he would be interrupted by both presidents and passers-by to explain the universe.

"Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something," Einstein once said, "wearing stripes with plaid comes easy."
___

Today, there are curiously few statues of the man. The most notable is a 12-foot bronze at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington depicting the wrinkled old sage gazing at his famous Emc2 formula. Tourists climb into his lap for snapshots.

Rolf Sinclair despises it. "It's one of the worst pieces of public sculpture," says the retired National Science Foundation physics program officer. "It makes him look like one of the Three Stooges reading his horoscope."

The Einstein that Sinclair and others would prefer immortalized is circa 1905, when he was 26 and about to rock the world.

By day, he worked in the Swiss patent office in Bern. He called it his "cobbler's job," but for seven years he analyzed a stream of inventions dealing with railroad timekeeping and other matters of precision that raised cosmic possibilities in his fertile mind.

After hours, he would work furiously on his "thought experiments," that smashed through the limits of established physics.

"Imagination is more important than knowledge," Einstein said. "The important thing is to not stop questioning."

In 1905, he published five landmark papers without footnotes or citations. It marked the beginning of an unrivaled, two-decade intellectual burst.

Here is a brief chronology of his miracle year:

March, 1905: Conventional physics described light as a wave and could not explain how light can knock electrons off metal. Einstein showed that light is made of tiny packets of energy, or quanta, that can behave like individual particles, too.

This duality is the basis of quantum theory, a pillar of modern physics so paradoxical that even Einstein didn't entirely buy into it. His explanation of this "photoelectric effect" won him the Nobel prize in 1921.

April: Based on cafe conversations over tea, Einstein submits a paper that determined the size of sugar molecules by calculating their diffusion in the liquid.

May: He shows how particles (like pollen) that appear to be independently moving in water are being jostled by atoms in water that are moving chaotically. Known as Brownian motion, Einstein's calculations confirmed the atom's existence and by extension, the makeup of chemical elements.

June: Einstein's paper on "special relativity" separates him from the mainstream physics crowd. Newton considered gravity to be absolute  mass attracts mass. It's what makes gas and dust form stars and debris form planets.

But Einstein sought to explain anomalies in this rule. Scientists had concluded that light was just one of many kinds of electromagnetic waves moving through an unseen medium they called ether, and the speed of light is always the same.

Einstein recalled a teenage daydream of racing a light beam. According to the physics of his day, if he moved as fast as the light, then the beam would be stationary in space.

Einstein said the speed of light is constant at 186,282 miles per second. But it will appear different depending on where you are and how fast you are traveling.

For example, clocks on orbiting satellites run a bit slower because the satellites are orbiting at 17,000 mph. They have programs that help them align with clocks on Earth.

Or, suppose you were to "witness" a star exploding into a supernova. The explosion occurred thousands of years ago, but it has taken that long for the light to reach you here.

November: Einstein publishes an extension of special relativity regarding the conversion of mass into energy, noting that the "mass of a body is a measure of its energy content." In 1907, he abbreviated it to what would become science's most famous equation: The amount of energy equals mass times the speed of light squared, or Emc2.

C2 is such a huge number that even small amounts of mass pack big power.

This became the theoretical basis for both atomic explosions and atomic energy.

"Each of these papers is a landmark in physics," said University of Maryland physicist S. James Gates. "And yet all of his work in 1905 is a prelude to his greatest composition  the theory of general relativity."

Special relativity was incomplete because it did not deal with gravity. To Newton, gravity was a constant, absolute force. Drop an apple and it hits the ground. A planet traces a curved orbit because the sun's gravity tugs at the planet.

In Einstein's relative world, matter warps the time and space around it. So, the sun's mass dents and distorts the space-time fabric, curving the planet's trajectory.

He reasoned that even particles of light, which have very tiny mass, should be affected in this way.

In 1919, astronomers watching a solar eclipse observed the light from a distant star being deflected by the darkening sun's mass  by a few hundredths of a millimeter.

General relativity laid the foundation for all kinds of discoveries, such as the Big Bang, the expansion of the universe and black holes.

Yet relativity is both so profound and confounding that even other physicists have trouble grasping its nuances.

Einstein described relativity this way: "Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That's relativity."
___

In a lifetime that coincided with Rudolph Valentino and Clark Gable, it's hard to imagine Einstein as a lady's man. With that hair? And those rumpled clothes?

He had a passionate personality that drew admirers. But physics always was his first love and that was the trouble.

The young Einstein's indifferent, even ruthless, nature is evident in his dealings with his first wife, Mileva Maric. She and Einstein were students at the renowned Swiss National Polytechnic in Zurich.

In effusive letters and poetry, he called her Dollie and himself Johnny.

She gave birth to an out-of-wedlock daughter at her parents' home in Hungary. The baby either died or was adopted. Einstein never saw the child.

The episode ended Mileva's career before it began. She appears to have been a sounding board for his ideas, but historians doubt she was a true collaborator. They married in 1902 and Mileva bore two sons, but their passion soured as Einstein's reputation grew. He complained that he had no time for marital "chatter."

He and Mileva separated in 1914.

"You make sure ... that I receive my three meals regularly in my room," he wrote in his cold list of conditions. "You are neither to expect intimacy nor to reproach me in any way."

But eight years later, he gave her the $32,000 purse from his Nobel Prize for physics.

Einstein had an affair with his German cousin, Elsa Lowenthal, and she nursed him back to health when he collapsed from nervous exhaustion in 1917. They married two years later, but she soon found herself tolerating his girlfriends. They emigrated to Princeton, where she died in 1936.

Until his own death from heart disease on April 18, 1955, relatives and his secretary kept house for Einstein at 112 Mercer Street. He also developed attachments to several women who shared his love of music, sailing and world affairs.

One was an alleged Soviet spy, Margarita Konenkova, a Russian emigre married to a Greenwich Village sculptor.

Another was Johanna Fantova. She and her husband had met the scientist in Prague's intellectual circles that included the novelist Franz Kafka. She emigrated to Princeton alone in 1939. She cut Einstein's hair and he telephoned several times a week. In her diary, she included this charming line of verse from the physicist:

"Exhausted from a silence long/ This is to show you clear how strong/ The thoughts of you will always sit/ Up in my brain's little attic."

As an old man, he revealed to Fantova a melancholy side.

"The physicists say that I am a mathematician, and the mathematicians say that I am a physicist," he said. "I am a completely isolated man and though everybody knows me, there are very few people who really know me."

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## ElijahJones

I like Einstein.  I hope that in the next generation of Einsteins there will be someone to tackle the culture of big science.  Einstein by the way was not and atheist he was agnostic.  

"God does not play dice."  A. Einstein

 :wink2:

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## Peregrinus

> _Originally posted by ElijahJones_
> *\"God does not play dice.\"  A. Einstein*



I like that quote from Einstein, because it shows that even the most brilliant person can be wrong.  He insisted that QM was nonsense until the end.

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## ElijahJones

Actually, QM is accepted now because it works acceptably well, like the way Newtonian gravity was accepted for the same reasons until GM came along.  But I happen to have a physicist on my graduate committee and I assure you there is still healthy debate about the Copehagen Intepretation and whether there might be hidden variables.  The truth is it does not matter as long as QM continues to give meaningful results.  Anyways I am going to refrain from debates on these things because this is not really the place where such things are decided, that happens at professional conferences and in professional journals.  What we are doing here can only be grey literature on the subject at best.

Regards,

EJ

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## Peregrinus

> _Originally posted by ElijahJones_
> *Actually, QM is accepted now because it works acceptably well.*



Yeah, I know.  I've spent the last four years studying physics at university.  My comment was with regards to Einstein's personal beliefs about what he considered to be the philosophically unsatisfactory implications of quantum mechanics (namely the probabilistic Copenhagen Interpretation that you mentioned).

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## ElijahJones

Awesome.  Your are a physics major only?  What was your minor?  I like your demeanor.  Peaceable it seems to me.  I would love to talk math and physics with you anytime.

 8)

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## CT

> _Originally posted by ElijahJones_
> *Awesome.  Your are a physics major only?  What was your minor?  I like your demeanor.  Peaceable it seems to me.  I would love to talk math and physics with you anytime.
> 
>  8)*



oooh now there's a geeky come-on, how cute!  :tongue2:

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## Peregrinus

> _Originally posted by ElijahJones_
> *Awesome.  Your are a physics major only? *



_Only?_ Ouch.  Have I met someone who's an even greater overachiever than I am?  My minor is German and I almost had a second minor in sociology, but decided to value my personal time over that extra three credit hours.  What's your major?

I think you may be the first person who's ever called me peaceable.  There are a few people on this forum who might disagree with you, but you know, they were asking for it  :wink2:   I'd be glad to talk physics with you any time.  I'm in the chat every once in while, but feel free to PM.   :smiley:

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## Joseph_Stalin

> _Originally posted by CT_
> *
> 
> oooh now there's a geeky come-on, how cute!*



This is getting better with every post  ::-P:

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## Yume

I just finished reading Albert Einstien's Journal on time when he was young. It was very interesting. I would definetely agree him as the person of the century. He was one of the few who really considered all logical possibilities.

Imagination is more important than knowledge,
for knowledge is limited while imagination embraces the entire world. 
- Albert Einstein 

He used a mix of inductive and deductive reasoning perfectly.

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## Howie

> _Originally posted by bradybaker_
> *\"The physicists say that I am a mathematician, and the mathematicians say that I am a physicist,\" he said. \"I am a completely isolated man and though everybody knows me, there are very few people who really know me.\"*



It's loney at the top! 
It would be difficult to not really be able to talk to anybody that could be on the same plain.

A couple quotes I have read from Einstien.
Similar to one of yours, simply...\"Question Everthing.\"
\"Great minds will always incounter opposition by mediocre minds\"

June 1955. Einstiens Obituary comments.

_Niels Bohr:_:
\"With the death of Albert Einstien, a life in the service of science ans humanity which was rich and fruitful as aany in the whole history of our culture has come to an end. Mankind will always be indebted to Einstien for the removeal to the obstacles to our outlook which were involved in the primitive notions of absolute space and time.\"
_I.I. Rabbi:_
His real love was the theory of fields, wich he persued with unremitting vigor to the very end of his 50 years of active scientific life. This preocupation is to a large degee the key to his scientific personality. The theory of relitivity was constructed on the basis of physical observation of the equivelance of inertial and gravitationalunder certain simple circumstances.
Beyond that, his guiding principles were his estetic and philosophical urge for simplicity and symmetry.\"





> _Originally posted by bradybaker_
> *Einstein remains the foremost scientist of the modern era. Looking back 2,400 years, only Newton, Galileo and Aristotle were his equals.*



Would you not have to include Leanardo DaVinci in that list?
Maybe Because I think he is admired more for his art rather than his brillance in other areas as well.

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## issaiah1332

He did not really reject QM he merely did not like the idea that it was random.

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## Howie

> _Originally posted by issaiah1332_
> *He did not really reject QM he merely did not like the idea that it was random.*



That is a valid point.
This would be hard to swallow in a lifetime of relitivity!
But he was one to say...."Question everything". Albert Einstien

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## kimpossible

As much as I admire Einstein, it's had not to require the century be split in half and give half the nod to Einstein, the other half to Hawking.

Obviously, none of Hawking's work would be feasible without Einstein before him, but for advancement of modern mankind, Hawking would have to get the nod.

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## Ex Nine

The TIME selection is never about heroes. Just those who've had the greatest impact.

Given that, I think Einstein would come a close second behind Sigmund Freud.

Freud and his next of kin had an incredible impact on the way people view themselves, but especially on how government and businesses view and control the masses. And I use the word "control" here in the most realistic, least clinically paranoid sense.

For example, before Freud's impact, advertisements focused on the merits of the product. After Freud, they were designed to appeal to our emotions and irrational sensibilities - phallic cigarrettes for women and big cars as sex and status symbols for men. While Einstein left his mark on major historical events, people experienced Freud's impact every day, to this day.

Freud believed strongly that people were fundamentally irrational and could not govern themselves. Democracy, he thought, would be doomed to failure. Instead, people must be controlled, and for that they will always remain discontent, so the way to control them was satisfy their irrational desires in the most organized way possible. Decades later, Hitler was also convinced democracy was doomed on similar grounds - that it unleashed a selfish individual that made economies unstable and contributed to high unemployment and all that. Enter the vast German campaign to win its people's hearts for power, and not their minds. If Einstein helped end the war with the atomic bomb, Freud helped start it with an idea.

Politicians today don't just campaign by appealing to our emotions, they construct policy around them...

Freud also opened the doors for people to talk about their feelings to others, forever encouraging a medicinal disposition toward our own emotions.

What did Einstein do for people, really? He became a good photo to put on posters and inspire people. And you know what? That's because of Freud too. Einstein would never have become a byword for genius if the media didn't market him towards us that way. People want to be smart and powerful, but less then one percent of people know Einstein's actual theories. Boy can they ever recognize his face on a magazine, though. They can even recognize his face on the cover of TIME.

Cha-ching!

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## Genjyo

> What did Einstein do for people, really? He became a good photo to put on posters and inspire people. And you know what? That's because of Freud too. Einstein would never have become a byword for genius if the media didn't market him towards us that way. People want to be smart and powerful, but less then one percent of people know Einstein's actual theories. Boy can they ever recognize his face on a magazine, though. They can even recognize his face on the cover of TIME. [/b]



In the school library there is a bronze bust of ...you know who:  wild hair, lonely eyes yet pensive in design, a sophisticated brow, that singular mustache, a face ancient in time. 

My class and I were doing a project there and the librarian was congratulating for our serious studying.  I was the class rep so I thanked her and told her that it was with great pride that we worked so diligently.  I explained to her that by looking at Einstein's sculpture, it filled our hearts with joy.  He was perhaps the greatest genius of the twentieth century.  That work of art was our inspiration and hope to someday change the world like Albert Einstein did.

Her response?

"Ummm....that's actually Mark Twain".
 ::-P:   ::-P:   :Oops:   :Oops:   :Mad:   :Mad:   :Mad:   ::-P:   ::-P:

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## Ex Nine

You set that joke up perfectly, Genjyo! I'm still laughing at that one.   :smiley:

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## Genjyo

Hehehe, ja!  Two years of looking with fondness at that blasted sculpture thinking it was Mr. Einstein.  I'd go as far as saying it fooled the entire student body and majority of staff...

So for better or for worse, He is the poster child of genius in the 20th Century.

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