Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein was a child born to Jewish parents Pauline and Hermann Einstein in Ulm, Germany in the year 1897 on March 14. Some weeks later after his birth, his family moved to Munich where he would later begin his schooling life. At a young age, he was curious and shy and did not show a lot of aptitude for anything. While he was in elementary school, he did not perform well in a lot of the subjects apart from mathematics and science and this led his parents to believe that he might be retarded Little did they know that he would turn out to be one of the greatest minds in the history of the world. He failed in his attempt to skip high school and attend the Swiss Polytechnic University. He went to Aarau, Switzerland where he graduated from high school aged 17years and went on to the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich. There, he graduated with a degree in Physics and in the same year gained Swiss citizenship. He worked as a technical assistant in the Swiss Patent office and managed to obtain a doctors degree in 1905. While working at the patent office, he got to work on a lot of remarkable things mostly during his spare time and for the years that followed, he would become a Professor in Zurich, Berlin and Prague and a Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Physical Institute. Later on, he went back to Germany where he remained a German citizen till 1933. In that year, due to political reasons (a time during which Hitler led Germany), he moved to America where he accepted a position as a Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Princeton. It was at Princeton that Albert Einstein began to work on unifying the laws of physics and the problems he dealt with were of great depths. He tried to comprehend the laws that controlled the universe and it is this kind of thinking that would lead him to making great scientific discoveries that would not only change America, but the rest of the world as well.
Albert Einstein officially gained American citizenship in 1940 and this would later prove to be a great benefit to America. At the time, America and the then President, Franklin Roosevelt had accepted him with open arms. In 1939, he and a fellow scientist, Eugene Wigner with whom he had fled the Nazi execution in Germany, wrote a letter to the president warning him of the plans that Germany had and were in the process of developing an atomic bomb using Einsteins own work. This device he claimed could lead to the destruction of mankind. At the time, the Second World War was just about to begin (Katz). The US government then began work on a project that was referred to as The Manhattan Project. It was basically a project whose main aim was research on the viability of production of an atomic bomb. Einstein was not directly involved and was not made aware of the main aim of the project though he helped the scientists working directly on the project in the understanding of theories that were vital in the project. A massive laboratory was built in Tennessee, Oak Bridge and over the next six years (1939-1945) roughly 2 billion dollars would be pumped into the project. The atomic bomb was code named The Gadget. Robert Oppenheimer directed the scientific research and was under the administration of General Leslie R. Groves (Vujovic).
On July 16, 1945, the gadget was ready for testing and was tested in the Jemez Mountains in New Mexico. The results were catastrophic There was debate on whether it should be continued or not but the building of the bomb had been a top priority for the United States. Albert wrote a third letter to Roosevelt and in it he stated his concerns about the use of atomic research for warfare. According to him, the research on nuclear energy was not to be used against people (Vujovic).
On August 6, 1945, the first atomic bomb was used in warfare. It was code named Little Boy and the US military dropped it on the city of Hiroshima in Japan. This came as a shock on Albert after getting news of the bombing. On August 9, another atomic bomb code named Fat Boy was dropped this time on the city of Nagasaki (Vujovic). Although Albert did not build the atomic bomb, nor directly participate in its invention, he was very important in its development. The atomic bomb did serve its purpose in Japan as the Japanese surrendered. The price paid was indeed a dear one.
After the war, Albert was among the first people to protest on McCarthyism and promoted the control of nuclear and atomic weapons. He chaired the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists and through it, pushed for the banning of hydrogen and atomic bombs. A contribution that he had on peace was in 1944 when he rewrote his 1905 paper on Special Relativity by hand and placed it for auction to raise funds. Six million dollars was raised out of this (OConnor and Robertson). In 1946, he stood before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine where he made a compelling plea for a Jewish Homeland. The State of Israel was eventually established and he, a Jew himself, praised it as a historical event that fulfilled the ancient dream. He was offered presidency of the State of Israel by Ben Gurion after the death of the then President, Ezer Weizman in 1952. However, he kindly declined citing that although he was deeply touched, he was not suited for the job... (Kupper). He also had a hand in the founding of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Before his death in 1954, he regretted his role in what led to the creation of the atomic bomb. He termed his signing of the first letter to President Roosevelt as the greatest mistake in his life though his justification was that there was a chance that the Germans would make it first. Another thing Albert Einstein did before he died was to put his signature the last letter he would ever write to Bertrand Russell and in the letter, he agreed on his name appearing on a manifesto that seemed to urge all nations to give up their nuclear weapons. Just as he had always done all his life, it was fitting that the last act he did was to continue in the promotion of international peace and this solidified his stand on the issue (OConnor and Robertson).
Einstein did a lot of work in the field of science though he begun much of his scientific work before he came to America. He advanced his previous scientific theories in America. His contribution to the field of science included Special Theory of Relativity, final proof on the particulate nature of light, photoelectric effect (for which he received a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921), the Unified Field Theory and the General Theory of Relativity (Vujovic).
Albert Einstein has also had an effect on popular culture in America and around the world in the arts and has been an inspiration for numerous novels, movies and plays. He is often used in the depiction of mad scientists and genius professors in cartoons and films. He has continued to receive numerous honors even after his death. In 1999, a magazine in Germany, Der Spiegel, honored him by having a several paged article on him and named him the Genius of the Century while in the same year, he was named Person of the Century by Time Magazine beating the likes of Mahatma Gandhi and Roosevelt Franklin. In 1973, an asteroid belt discovered was named after him (Kupper).
Albert Einstein died as a Swiss and American citizen on April 18, 1955 (OConnor and Robertson). His contribution to science and politics while in America would make any American proud and it is for that reason that he is part of the great American History.
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