Happy Friday the 13th!! I know many people are cautious on this day, but I have not had a bad Friday, the 13th, yet. And with some new movies my brother sent me and a free pizza coupon, we are looking set to have another good one this evening. And that warm (by German Alps standards), sunny weather is still predicted to arrive for this weekend. It will be nice to get the windows open.
Tomorrow happens to be a very important day for more than just the weather, though. If you use the American date system of mm/dd/yyyy, then tomorrow is also Pi Day - 3.14. I think it is a little ironic that our genius of the day was also born on this date back in 1879. Tomorrow is Albert Einstein's 130th birthday.
Following is a dry, but necessary, look at this early life before he became THE Albert Einstein. He was born just up the road in Ulm, about 45 minutes away from us. When he was just one year old, he and his family moved to Munich where his father owned an electronics shop based on DC-current items. Although he was born into a Jewish family, his family did not practice their faith. As a child he attended a Catholic elementary school. He struggled with a speech impediment but was able to make good marks in school. He got his first real taste of forces that would shape his thinking for the rest of his life with a magnetic compass his father showed him at age five. His favorite way to use his free time was with building mechanical gadgets and making models.
At age 10, he was given access to college level math books like Euclid's Elements. By age 12, he was teaching himself beginning calculus. He progressed on to Gymnasium, but it was here that his learning style didn't match the teaching style of the day. By age 15, the family had to move again, to Italy, when AC-current became the winning form of electricity. He dropped out of school and tried to enroll directly into college in Switzerland, but because he didn't have a high school certificate, nor did he pass the entrance exam, he was not accepted.
It was during these turbulent years for him that he began to write papers and ponder the forces and physics of the world in depth. His first paper was finished at age 15, "The Investigation of the State of Aether in Magnetic Fields". At age 16, he was mentally investigating the speed of light and what it would mean to travel with it. He and his family decided he must finish high school, so he went to study in Switzerland while the family remained in Italy. At age 17, he studied electromagnetic theory and obtained his high school certificate. He changed his citizenship to Swiss in order to avoid the German military and began his college education in earnest at the Polytechnic in Zurich where he graduated in 1900. It was a full two years of searching, though, before he found a job as an assistant examiner at the Federal Office for Intellectual Property in Bern, Switzerland. Here, he formed a science and philosophy club with friends to review the publications of the day.
In 1903, he married his college girl friend, with whom he had already had a child and about whom little is known. Together, they had two more children. But the relationship would not last. They divorced on Valentine's Day in 1919. By 1905, Einstein had published 4 more major papers while working at the patent office, which today are regarded with great honor but at the time were dismissed, and he finally received his PhD from the University of Zurich.
In 1911, he finally got his long sought-after teaching job as an associate professor at the University of Zurich, followed shortly later, in 1912, by a full professorship at the Polytechnic in Zurich. Many papers ensued, including his general relativity theory, gaining him some notoriety. In 1914, he moved on to Berlin as a professor of Humboldt University in a primarily research position and as the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics. In 1919, his theories began to take the world by storm with a headline in a British newspaper that Newton's ideas had been overthrown. This began the Science Superstar portion of Einstein's life that still surrounds his persona today. Although he continued to live in Germany during this increased time of fame, it would not last. He began his stay in earnest in 1932 in the US to escape the anti-Jewish sentiments that were growing among the Nazi-controlled government. By 1940, he had acquired his US citizenship (he still maintained his Swiss citizenship, though) and remained in the US until his death on April 17th, 1955.
Now, here are some things you may have not known about him: Einstein was a particularly fat baby with a large head leading some to believe he was deformed and perhaps mentally challenged. This was exacerbated by his aforementioned speech impediment. He had issues with authority, which plagued him in younger life. He often conflicted with his oldest son, and was never able to resolve the relationship problems. Through this bitterness, he basically cut this son out of the will upon his death. Although he strongly objected to the recent science discoveries from being used for weapons, he was not against building the atom bomb to stop the Nazis, and he wrote to the president urging him to begin this work. But because Einstein was considered a security risk to the US government, he was not asked to help with the Manhattan project which eventually succeeded in building the bomb. Einstein's brain was "stolen" by the pathologist who conducted the autopsy. The pathologist felt that this genius needed to be studied further. He kept Einstein's brain in a jar at his home and was fired from his job for not giving it back. But through the studies of his brain, many enlightening discoveries were made over the years. In 1990, Harvey and a journalist travelled across the country to meet Einstein's granddaughter with the remaining portion of Einstein's brain, still in the jar, carried in the trunk of the car. This trip later was recorded in the book Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein’s Brain. Harvey finally relinquished the brain in 1998 at the age of 85 to Princeton University for safe keeping and further scientific study.
Einstein was never happy about the theories he came up with and where they eventually led scientists. To this day, there are still in the physics community those that stick fervently to his theories and those that embraced the enhanced and competitive theories of String Theory and the Multiverse. But regardless, there is no question about the importance of his ideas and how they changed people's view of all that we know around us and our place within the universe as well as all of the gadgets we take for granted in our every day lives that could not have happened without those discoveries. So, I take my hat off to this great German, and I wish him a Happy Birthday.
(Thanks goes to, as always, wikipedia and the web site: http://www.neatorama.com/2007/03/26/10-strange-facts-about-einstein/.)
The word for the day is gravity: die Schwerkraft (shvair krahft).
The question for Monday is "Does spring ever come to the Allgäu?"
Auf Wiedersehen,
Frau Spitzer
