Exploring the Genius and Legacy of Albert Einstein: From Revolutionary Discoveries to Immortal Influence

Dive into the life and mind of one of history's most brilliant scientists, Albert Einstein, as we explore his journey from a young prodigy to a towering figure in the world of modern science. This podcast episode offers a comprehensive look at Einstein's groundbreaking contributions, starting from his formative years in Germany, where his early exposure to mathematics and physics laid the foundation for his revolutionary discoveries. We'll introduce you to Mileva Maric, an important figure in Einstein's academic life, whose partnership was pivotal during his transformative "Annus Mirabilis" in 1905.

Join us as we unravel the profound impact of Einstein's seminal works on the photoelectric effect, special relativity, and the iconic equation E=mc². These insights not only reshaped our understanding of the universe but also influenced countless technological advancements. As we traverse the early 20th century, you'll learn how Einstein's theories on gravitational waves and general relativity brought him international acclaim and a Nobel Prize.

Explore Einstein's later years, marked by his intellectual debates with Niels Bohr and reflections on the expanding universe. Discover his immigration to the United States amidst the rise of Nazi Germany and his enduring influence on the scientific community at Princeton University. Reflect on his personal and philosophical legacy, examining how his humanitarian ideals and visionary intellect continue to inspire and challenge us to rethink the world.

This episode is a tribute to the timeless influence of Albert Einstein, a man whose quest for knowledge and humanity left an indelible mark on both science and society. Join us as we delve into the life of this remarkable individual and his lasting legacy in modern science.

Episode Transcript

(00:04):
The man known to history as Albert Einstein was born on the
14th of March 1879 in the city of Ulm, in the South of what was
then the German Empire. Ulm was a major urban centre of
the Kingdom of Wehrtenberg, a major constituent part of the
German state in the late 19th century.

(00:24):
His father was Hermann Einstein,an Ashkenazi Jew from Buchau in
Wertenberg. Hermann had been academically
gifted and showed a strong ability in the field of applied
mathematics when studying in Stuttgart, the capital of
Wertenberg in his youth. However, the Einstein family
were not wealthy and he was forced to abandon his studies

(00:45):
and went to work in the feather bed shop run by his cousins
Moses and Hermann Levy in Urum in the 1870s.
Albert's mother was Paulino Koch, a member of a family of
German Jews who had developed extensive connections as Pervez
and merchants in Wertenberg. She married Herman Einstein in
1876 and Albert was their first child.

(01:07):
A daughter, Maya or Maria Einstein, was born two years
later in 1881. Albert's youth was dictated to a
considerable extent by his father's business dealings.
When he was still an infant, Helman Einstein, following the
business advice of his brother Jacob, decided to move the
family to Munich, the largest city in southern Germany, lying

(01:29):
some 170 kilometers to the east of Ulm.
This occurred in 1880 as Jacob and Helman sought to establish
Einstein and Co as an electricalengineering company in Munich.
Just as the great. Age of electrification was about
to begin sweeping the Western world.
There, Albert was enrolled in a Catholic elementary school

(01:50):
before being transferred to the Lewitpolt Gymnasium in Munich in
1887. Albert remained there until
1894, but at that stage the Einsteins were once again
uprooted when Hellman and Jacob failed to secure a contract to
begin the electrification of Munich.
Instead they headed for northernItaly, settling first in Milan

(02:12):
and then in Pavia. Albert briefly remained in
Munich to continue his studies, but after several months became
disillusioned with the strict rote learning on offer at the
gymnasium and convinced both hisparents and the school
authorities to let him leave to join them in Italy.
Albert continued his education in Italy from 1894 onwards.

(02:34):
He was already showing distinct signs of a precocious ability as
a scientist and mathematician, although his father desired for
him to take a more keen interestin applied engineering and so
follow him into the family business in Munich in the summer
of 1891. He had taught himself algebra
and the advanced geometry of theancient Greek mathematician

(02:55):
Euclid. A family tutor by the name of
Max Talmud, who excelled himselfin the fields of optometry and
ophthalmology, was employed by the Einsteins to teach young
Albert advanced mathematics and scientific principles.
But he soon found his charge wasbecoming more knowledgeable than
he himself was when it came to subjects such as calculus,

(03:16):
algebra, and geometry. Nor was he a prodigy who was
solely interested in scientific and mathematical topics.
As he entered his teenage years,he was also reading widely of
some of the most advanced philosophical writers of the
18th and 19th centuries, notablythe German Enlightenment
philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason,

(03:38):
first published in 1781 and offering one of the most
analytical discussions of metaphysics, the study of the
nature of reality, is one of thedensest philosophical tracts
ever written. Yet Albert seemed to understand
it clearly at age 14, something which bewildered his tutor.
Young Einstein's abilities did not go unnoticed by his

(04:01):
teachers, tutor and parents. Thus, shortly after he arrived
in Bavia and following his 16th birthday, he was sent to take
the entrance exams at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in
the city of Zurich, an advanced school of science, mathematics
and engineering. Although he scored high on the
technical exams, Albert was not admitted at this time, in part

(04:23):
owing to his youth. The following year, he passed
the Swiss Matura, an equivalencyexam in the country for those
who had not gone through the formal schooling process within
Switzerland but wished to complete the secondary.
Education curriculum there. Earlier that year he had also
renounced his German citizenshipto avoid being called up for the

(04:44):
required military service expected of all young men in the
country. Thus it was that, as a stateless
individual, he finally entered the Polytechnic School in Zurich
in the autumn of 1896, age 17. There he would study physics and
mathematics, the two subjects which he had demonstrated A

(05:04):
prodigious ability in since he was a child.
He would remain there for four years, eventually acquiring a
diploma in 1900. Einstein's years in Zurich were
those in which his research interests began to emerge in a
fully formed state. He was becoming an eclectic
scientist, one who might broadlybe categorized as a physicist,

(05:26):
but whose area of expertise covered a wide range of topics,
such as the discovery of an accurate way to measure the
dimensions of tiny molecules, a field of endeavour belonging to
quantum mechanics, the broad science of describing the
physical properties of nature atthe atomic and subatomic level.
Additionally, he was concerned to measure how light moves.

(05:48):
At the time, he was beginning toconduct complex.
Research into this subject in turn of the century Tsuri the
prevailing view amongst Europeanand North American scientists
was that light travelled exclusively in wave patterns.
As would become clear in the years that followed, Einstein
doubted this theory and believeda further layer of complexity

(06:09):
existed within the mechanism whereby light travelled.
These and other aspects of advanced physics were at the
heart of Einstein's research in his mid 20s.
They formed the core of his doctoral thesis, which he was
studying for part time throughout the early 1900s and
which he completed in 19 O 5 in Zurich, entitled A New

(06:30):
Determination of Molecular Dimensions.
His research in the early 1900s was evidently aided by Mileva
Marich, a young Serbian mathematician and physicist who
had begun attending the Polytechnic School in Zurich
around the same time that Einstein had first been granted
teaching hours there. After finishing top of the class

(06:51):
in 1899, Maurice was one of onlytwo female students attending
there at the time. She and Einstein were soon
involved in a relationship with each other, and it is now
assumed that she contributed to his research, though the exact
degree to which she did so is unclear.
In any event, her own research was interrupted in the summer of

(07:12):
1901 when she fell pregnant. Maurice and Einstein were not
yet married by then, and this was a time when having a child
out of wedlock was still considered a social scandal.
It appears that Timileva returned to her native Serbia to
have the child, who was called Liesel in their correspondence
after her birth. What happened to her thereafter

(07:33):
is unclear. Some sources believe she died
from scarlet fever in 1903, but others suggest she was put up
for adoption in Serbia. It seems more likely that she
died as Maurice and Einstein hadmarried in January 19 O3.
They would go on to have two further children, a boy, Hans
Albert, born in the summer of 19O four, and another son, Edward

(07:56):
in 1910. It may seem peculiar in
retrospect, but Albert did not immediately find it easy to find
a teaching position. Upon completing his diploma in
Zurich in 1900, he spent the next year and a half trying in
vain to acquire a junior level lecturing and research position
in a Central European university, but to no avail.

(08:18):
In the meantime, he acquired Swiss citizenship in 1901,
finally acquiring statehood after half a decade of
theoretically being without a national affiliation.
With Swiss citizenship in hand, a family friend and associate
from the Polytechnic in Zurich, Max Grossman, enlisted the aid
of his father to get Einstein a post at the Swiss Patent Office

(08:41):
in the capital Ban. Here, Einstein worked as a
patent assistant examiner. What this effectively meant was
that Albert was tasked with assessing the merits of various
inventions and devices which were brought before the Patent
Office by individuals who wantedto have their intellectual
ownership, their invention, recognized to ensure credit for

(09:01):
the device was given to them andthey could benefit financially.
Einstein worked there for the next several years.
Beyond serving to support his young family, his work focused
on many different devices involving electrical conduction
and mechanics, and it has been posited that this impacted on
Einstein's own research during his formative years.

(09:24):
The manner in which Einstein burst forth from almost complete
obscurity within the developed world's scientific community to
become one of Europe's paramountphysicists in the mid 19.
Hundreds is one of the strangeststories in the history of
science. While he was completing his
doctoral studies and working in the Patent Office in Behn in the
first half of the 1900s, Einstein was working on a series

(09:46):
of papers for publication in thepages of Annaland de Physique,
one of the world's leading academic journals for the study
of physics, which had been published in Germany from 1799
onwards. This eventually resulted in four
separate research papers. Which were all published in the
journal in 19 O 5. Individually, they made major
contributions to various fields within the study of physics.

(10:09):
Collectively, they have been deemed to represent a
revolutionizing of humanity's conception of the molecular and
atomic dimensions of the naturalworld and the development of
modern physics. Consequently, 19 O 5 is usually
referred to by biographers of Einstein and historians of
Western science as the Annis Mirabelis, or medical year of

(10:32):
Einstein's career. The first of Einstein's four
papers of 19 O 5 was entitled Ona Heuristic Viewpoint concerning
the Production and Transformation of Light and was
published on the 9th of June. This explained what is known as
the photoelectric effect for thefirst time.
The photoelectric effect is where electrons are emitted when

(10:54):
electromagnetic radiation, such as light, hits off a material or
substance. The electrons which are emitted
during such a process are calledphotoelectrons.
Up until 19 O 5, when Einstein described this photoelectric
effect, the prevailing view amongst physicists was that
light travelled much like a wavein the ocean.

(11:15):
But Einstein explained that the photoelectric effect meant that
light also travelled in what he termed to be a finite number of
energy quanta, which moved without dividing and which could
only be absorbed or generated asentities.
This not only explained much that was previously unknown
about the nature of light and electrons, but had fundamental

(11:37):
implications for understanding how light of a certain frequency
could bring sufficient energy into play to liberate an
electron. This built on work conducted by
physicists such as Max Planck inprevious years, but Einstein's
paper added extensive new details on how energy and light
interacted through the photoelectric effect.

(11:59):
This had major implications for practical applied physics, and
many years later this discovery would be directly cited when
Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics, although it
was not until the mid 1920s thathis findings were fully accepted
amongst physicists. Just six weeks after this first

(12:20):
paper appeared Einstein's secondpaper of 19 O 5, entitled On the
Motion of Small Particles suspended in a Stationary liquid
as required by the Molecular kinetic Theory of Heat.
It was published in Annalander Physique on the 18th of July.
Prior to Einstein's paper, therewas no accurate way of measuring
the dimensions of molecules, butseveral scientists in the 19th

(12:43):
centuries, such as John Dalton, had noted that chemical
substances tended to combine together or breakdown in
weighted proportions, which suggested that they were all
made from an as yet unidentifiedphysical molecule that was
common to all things. These unitary molecules are
known as atoms today, after a word which had been coined by

(13:07):
ancient Greek philosophers of the 6th century BC who were
themselves seeking to understandthe nature of existence 2 1/2
millennia before Einstein's time.
Einstein's second nineteen O 5 paper showed how these atoms
could be measured more comprehensively by using what
was termed Brownian motion, whereby particles, in this case

(13:30):
pollen, was suspended in a watersolution.
Einstein's paper, along with a corroborating study produced by
the French physicist Jean Perrinin 19 O 8, demonstrated
unequivocally that atoms and molecules were real entities
which were the building blocks of existence.
Thus, this second paper of 19 O 5 was a major contribution to

(13:54):
humanity's acceptance of the existence of atoms and molecules
and the emergence of atomic theory as the basis of much of
20th century physics. Einstein's third paper was
published just over two months later, on the 26th of September
19 O 5. This was entitled On the

(14:14):
Electrodynamics of Moving Bodiesand focused on the issue of
special relativity. This sought to reconcile an
equation which the Scottish mathematician and scientist
James Clark Maxwell had devised in the early 1860s regarding
electricity and magnetism. Maxwell's equations led to
difficulties in how physicists should understand mechanics

(14:36):
which occurred close to the speed of light.
In response to this problem, Einstein outlined his special
theory of relativity or special relativity in his nineteen O 5
paper. This stated that the speed of
light is the same for all observers, regardless of the
motion of the light source or the observer of the light

(14:57):
source. This opposed the idea postulated
over 2 centuries earlier by Isaac Newton, which held that
the speed of light is not fixed.Moreover, Einstein's special
theory of relativity correctly assumed that when 2 objects are
involved concerning light, thereis no true way of knowing which
is in motion and which is not. Einstein had come to this

(15:20):
realization while travelling in a streetcar in Down in the early
summer of 19 O 5, and looking atthe clock tower in the center of
the city, he realized that if his car suddenly started
travelling at the speed of light, the clock arms on the
clock tower would suddenly appear as though they had
stopped, but the clock inside the streetcar would continue to

(15:43):
move around as though nothing had happened.
Because both Einstein and the clock in the streetcar were
travelling at the same velocity,therefore the speed of movement
was relative. If the streetcar had suddenly
accelerated to the speed of light, it would not mean that
the clock tower had stopped, only that it appeared to have
done so relative to the speed which the streetcar was now

(16:07):
travelling at. This was the.
Special Theory of Relativity at Work, Einstein's 4th and final
paper of his Annes Mirabilis, was published on the 21st of
November and was entitled Does the inertia of a body depend
upon its Energy Context? Few have heard of that title

(16:27):
today, but a great many are. Familiar with the equation which
Einstein pioneered in the paper,E equals MC squared.
In brief, what this means is that the energy of a body at
rest, defined as E, is equal to its mass or M multiplied by the
speed of light, the C of the equation squared.

(16:48):
This equivalency equation showedthat a massive particle
possesses an energy or rest energy which is distinct from
the kinetic energy of a particle.
This would come to be known as the mass energy equivalence and
highlights how the rest energy of a particle, such as the
nucleus of an atom, could be so massive as to result in an

(17:11):
enormous amount of light and thermal energy being released if
the particle was disturbed sufficiently.
As we will see, the practical application of this equation was
to have devastating consequencesin later decades, and Einstein
later grew to regret this aspect.
Of his research. Einstein's 4.

(17:32):
Papers published during nineteenO 5 did not simply constitute
breakthroughs in the confined world of academic theoretical
physics his research shaped the.Application of science to the
modern world in the decades thatfollowed.
For instance, when you walk up to an automatic door today and
it opens in front of you. This is because the sensors used

(17:53):
in the doorway react when the photons in the light beams they
emit are obstructed, in this case by a moving person.
The sensor then tells the door to open.
Einstein first explained how photons work.
Solar powered calculators and St. lights that automatically
turn on when it gets dark, amongst other innovations also

(18:14):
emerged from his work on light. The special theory of relativity
help lead to the development of global positioning systems, or
GPS over time. Thus, when you switch on Google
Maps, it is effectively functioning, based partly on
research which Einstein published in his Annas Mirabilis
papers and. When a nuclear power plant

(18:36):
creates massive amounts of energy by harnessing the energy
in the nucleus of an atom, they are doing so based on Einstein's
discoveries concerning energy and mass equivalents as
contained in the equation E equals MC squared.
Einstein's groundbreaking research findings, published in
19 O 5 soon came to the attention of the European

(18:59):
scientific community, though at a time when people were still
reliant on the circulation of hard copies of academic journals
and word of mouth for research to be disseminated, it took a
few years for the import of his findings to become clear across
Europe. As they did, they transformed
his career. By 19 O 8 he gained a teaching

(19:21):
post at the University of Ban and was able to leave his
position at the Patent Office. The following year he was
appointed to a new chair of Theoretical Physics, which had
been created at the University of Zurich.
He remained there for the next two years.
During this time, he continued to refine some of the points he

(19:41):
had made in his nineteen O 5 papers, while also moving on to
begin developing the theory of general relativity as an
offshoot of his work on special relativity.
The theory of general relativityholds that the observable
gravitational attraction betweentwo masses results from the
warping of space-time by those two masses.

(20:05):
This research made major initialcontributions to the science of
black holes and other mass objects within the universe.
In 1911, Einstein left Switzerland after over 15 years
there to take up a new position which had been offered to him at
the Charles Ferdinand Universityin Prague, the oldest university

(20:26):
in what is now Czechia, but which was then a constituent
part of the Austro Hungarian Empire.
In tandem, he was offered Austrian citizenship.
Although he spent just over a year there, he published upwards
of a dozen papers on topics suchas the mathematics of radiation,
quantum theory and gravitation. Before long, a new offer pulled

(20:48):
him back to Switzerland. This was an invitation to teach
at his old alma mater, the Polytechnic School in Zurich.
He was there by the summer of 1912 and would spend the next
year lecturing to classes who were increasingly familiar with
the growing fame of the German physicist, while also
researching problems on gravitation and molecular heat.

(21:10):
How much of this latter work wasundertaken in conjunction with
Marcel Grossman, the Swiss colleague who had attended the
Polytechnic with Einstein in thelate 1890s and whose family had
aided him in acquiring his earlier position at the Ban
Patent Office in the spring of 1913?
Less than a. Year after taking up his
position in Zurich, Einstein wasvisited in Switzerland by Max

(21:34):
Planck and Vault announced 2 of the foremost scientists of the
age. Both worked in Berlin and had
come to Zurich to convince Einstein to return to the land
of his birth to take up a position at the University of
Berlin. The post came with automatic
membership of the Prussian Academy of Sciences as well as
his appointment as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for

(21:57):
Physics. This would allow Einstein to
concentrate on his research and build a team of researchers
around him. It was an offer he couldn't
refuse and was made more attractive by the prospect.
Being close to his cousin Elsa, who lived in Germany and whom
Einstein had begun correspondingwith frequently since the spring
of 1912, thus early in 1914. Albert made the move to the

(22:22):
German capital. His first wife, Mileva, agreed
to move at first with their two sons, but she was immediately
unhappy in Berlin and sensed Albert was growing closer to his
cousin and soon decided to return to Zurich with their
children. They remained separated until
1919, when they finally divorced, at which time Einstein

(22:43):
married Elsa. By then, both she and Albert
were in their 40s, and this second marriage of Einstein's
did not result in any further children.
Though Albert became stepfather to Elsa's two daughters from her
previous marriage. Einstein's arrival in Berlin was
immediately interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War.

(23:04):
For years, tensions have been building between the major
European powers over issues as disparate as colonial rivalry in
Africa, the vacuum left by the collapse of Ottoman power in the
Balkans and the naval race between Britain and Germany.
These all coalesced in the summer of 1914 into the outbreak
of a pan European war, which soon became a worldwide

(23:27):
conflict. When it erupted and Germany's
invasion of neutral Belgium as ameans of striking quickly at
northeastern France drew widespread international
condemnation, a document entitled Manifesto of the 93 and
Addressed to the Civilized Worldwas soon being circulated in
Germany. The move was led by figures like

(23:49):
Adolf von Bayer, the Nineteen O 5 recipient of the Nobel Prize
in Chemistry, and Paul Ehrlich, the nineteen O 8 recipient of
the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his pioneering work in
chemotherapy, and was effectively a letter from dozens
of prominent German academics sounding their support for
Germany's war effort. Einstein, who was a lifelong

(24:10):
pacifist, refused to sign it andinstead, with several other
German academics, drew up the manifesto to the Europeans.
This expressed the idea that Europe's sense of common culture
could be harnessed to bring the war to a swift end.
Unfortunately, their hopes were not met and the war was to drag
on for four more years of interminable conflict, followed

(24:33):
by years more of revolution and civil.
War across much of the continentDespite the ongoing war,
Einstein was able to commence new research in a concerted
manner in Berlin from 1915 onwards.
As the initial shock of the outbreak of the war lessened.
However, it was not until 1917 that the Kaiser Wilhelm

(24:54):
Institute was finally established in Berlin, with
Einstein as its first director, funding and administrative.
Delays wrought by the war efforthad delayed its inception.
He would serve as head of the institute for the next 16 years.
Meanwhile, in 1916, he was admitted as a member of the
German Physical Society, which had been established in 1845 and

(25:18):
is the world's oldest major academic body of physicists.
Foreign honors would also followin the years ahead, including
membership of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and
Sciences in 1920 and admittance as a foreign member in 1921 to
the Royal Society, arguably the world's most prestigious
scientific society and one whichdated back to 1660 when it was

(25:42):
founded in London. Such honors aside, Einstein
continued to break new ground inhis research in the mid 1910s.
For instance, in 1916, he hypothesized the existence of
gravitational waves, which are effectively ripples in the
curvature of space-time. These could not be detected
using the instrumentation available in the early 20th

(26:05):
century, but in 2016, a century after Einstein predicted their
existence, they were finally confirmed by American
scientists. He was also beginning to
theorize the existence of what we now know to be black holes,
points in space where gravity isso strong that neither light nor
particles can effectively escapefrom them, and which distort

(26:27):
space and time. As with so much else, his work
on black holes was pioneering and paved the way for many of
his successors to produce detailed accounts of the
building blocks of the universe later in the 20th century.
He could, however, be mistaken too.
In 1917, he began working on what he termed the cosmological

(26:49):
constant, a theory which supposed the existence of a
static universe. Many years later, when the
American astronomer Edwin Hubblediscovered the recession of
nebulae in the universe, Einstein realized his earlier
theory of the cosmological constant was incorrect and
referred to it as his quote biggest blunder throughout his

(27:12):
career. His other great research project
of the war years, though, was far from a blunder.
Einstein had been working on theconcept of relativity for over a
decade, and special relativity was the subject of one of his
acclaimed papers of 19 O 5. Yet it was not until the mid
1910s that he began finalizing his research on the subject of

(27:34):
general relativity. The general theory of relativity
outlined the geometric theory ofgravitation.
This moved far beyond Newtonian ideas concerning gravity to
explain gravitational pull and the full complexity of geometric
gravity as it applies to the universe and not just individual

(27:54):
planets. There is an ongoing debate as to
who actually arrived at the general theory of relativity
first, as his contemporary, the German mathematician David
Hilbert essentially arrived at an early identical conclusions
as Einstein did in the mid 1910s, as with Charles Darwin
and Alfred Russell Wallace, who both broadly developed the

(28:16):
theory of natural selection at the same time in the mid 19th
century, both Einstein and Hilbert were in communication
with each other, and Einstein had visited the University of
Gottingen, where Hilbert was working in 1915 to present
lectures on his own findings. What seems relatively clear is
that Einstein and Hilbert influenced each other

(28:39):
sufficiently that they both arrived at the same conclusions
concerning general relativity within.
Days of each other. In the winter of 1915, in late
1918, Europe and the wider worldbegan to emerge from the grip of
the First World War. Although in some countries, such
as Russia, Hungary, Turkey and Ireland, the end of the war saw

(29:01):
the commencement of bitter civilwars which eclipsed anything
that those countries had seen during the war itself, yet with
the resumption of some form of normal life, academic discourse
resumed fully and research beganto be disseminated widely again.
Thus, Einstein and Hilbert's work on the general theory of
relativity reached a wider audience within the community of

(29:23):
Europe and America's physicists.As it did, there was an
increasing appreciation of how groundbreaking their studies
were. Then, in the summer of 1919, the
theory was confirmed as being accurate by Sir Arthur
Eddington, an English astronomerand mathematician, during a
solar eclipse. This time, the popular

(29:44):
newspapers picked up the story, proclaiming that Einstein's
theory had overthrown the model of the universe developed by
Isaac Newton nearly 250 years earlier.
Given all of this, it is perhapsunsurprising that in 1921 The
Nobel Foundation in Stockholm decided to award Einstein the
Nobel Prize for Physics. They specifically cited his work

(30:08):
in discovering the photoelectriceffect in his paper from 1905 in
the award designation. But it could just as easily have
been awarded for a wide range ofresearch findings over the
previous 15 or so years. The receipt of the Nobel Prize
in 1921 and the opening up of the world during the boom time

(30:29):
years of the 1920s after years of war and social discord, saw
Einstein and Elsa, whom he had just recently married, decide to
travel internationally. In early April 1921, they sailed
into New York City, where the couple were greeted by the
mayor, John Francis Highland, and the delegation of some of
the most senior members of the city's Jewish community.

(30:52):
Weeks of lectures and receptionsfollowed, notably at Columbia
University in New York and Princeton University in New
Jersey. Later that month, Einstein met
President Warren Harding in the White House.
Afterwards, they left for a Pacific voyage to the Empire of
Japan and then onwards to Singapore and India before

(31:12):
reaching the Middle East. There, Einstein visited
Palestine, which had become subject to a British mandate
following the end of the First World War, and where the Jewish
Zionist movement was attempting to establish a new state for the
world's Jews after centuries of being scattered around the
globe. Afterwards, he returned to
Germany, but the 1921 to 1922 trip was the beginning of a

(31:36):
pattern of significant trips to different parts of the world.
For instance, in 1925 he visitedSouth America, spending weeks in
Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil, countries which were booming
economically and socially in theearly 20th century and where
Einstein was revered within the academic community.

(31:57):
In the mid 1920s, Einstein became involved in a scientific
debate which was widely reportedon at the time.
This was between himself and Niels Bohr, a Danish physicist
who had won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1922, twelve months
after Einstein had been awarded the same honor.
A dispute had been building between Einstein and Boer

(32:19):
throughout the mid 1920s over their differing interpretations
of quantum theory. Much of this centered on Boers
refusal to believe that photons,which Einstein had first
theorized the existence of in 1905, were real.
He did not accept that they did exist until 1925, and even then

(32:41):
the debates raged on over other elements of their respective
views on quantum mechanics. Debates were held in London and
elsewhere between 1922 and 1925,but culminated in a famous
academic disputation in 1927 at the 5th Solvay Conference at the
International Solvay Institutes of Physics and Chemistry in

(33:03):
Brussels. Here, Boer and Einstein
continued their debate, with both figures arguing points
which eventually proved to be accurate.
However, beyond the theoretical arguments, the conference is
noteworthy for the number of theworld's most accomplished
physicists. It drew together 17 of the 29
attendees had already or later received Nobel Prize awards,

(33:27):
while Einstein and Boer were joined by figures including
Marie Curie, Verna Heisenberg and Alvin Schrodinger.
It. Points to the sheer level of
brilliance of the scientific community in the interwar
period. The late 1920s also saw Einstein
reconceptualizing his own theories of the universe.

(33:49):
This was in response to the discovery by the American
astronomer Edwin Hubble of the recession of the nebulae, or
what is now termed Hubble's law.This states that galaxies are
moving away from Earth at speedswhich are proportionate to the
distance they are from the MilkyWay.
These speeds are always faster, meaning that the further a

(34:10):
cosmic body is from the Earth, the faster it will move away
from the Earth. These findings, which were made
public in 1929, required Einstein to abandon his current
theory of the universe at that time, which was known as the
cosmological constant. Which suppose.
That the universe was largely static in the way that it

(34:31):
expanded. That is, that the cosmos had
been expanding since The Big Bang at a relatively constant
speed. Hubble's discoveries forced
Einstein to re evaluate his hypothesis, as it was now clear
that the universe was expanding at an ever greater speed.
Hubble's discovery was also partly responsible for

(34:52):
Einstein's decision to embark ona new journey to the United
States in December 1930. He wanted to meet Hubble.
And thank him for his research, which he duly did in 1931.
However, the trip is generally more remembered for Einstein's
visit to California, where the ostensible purpose of the voyage
was to take up a 2 month visiting fellowship at the

(35:15):
California Institute of Technology, better known as
Caltech today. During this sojourn, Einstein
ominously noted that science hadas much and perhaps a greater
capacity to do harm than to do good within human society, a
reference, no doubt, to the increasing use of technology in
warfare, an issue the pacifist Einstein found abhorrent.

(35:37):
This same aversion to the growing militarism of the 1930s
LED Einstein to have an affinitywith the novelist Upton Sinclair
and the actor Charlie Chaplin, both of whom he met in Los
Angeles during his visit and whowere both publicly affirmed
pacifists themselves. Einsteins growing friendship
with Chaplin led him to attend the premiere of his new film

(35:59):
City Lights, a silent film whichwas significant in establishing
the romantic comedy genre in American movies.
When Albert and Elsa Einstein entered the cinema with Chaplin,
Einstein was cheered with the same regard a Hollywood icon
could obtain. It was also the beginnings of a
long friendship with Chaplin, which saw the actor visit

(36:21):
Einstein's Berlin apartment shortly afterwards, and Einstein
renewed their acquaintance when he himself returned again to
America early in 1933. While Einstein had been holding
his positions in Germany and traveling widely in the 1920s
and early 1930s, as his fame andaccomplishments increased, the

(36:42):
political environment back in his native Germany was changing
for the worse. Germany had been mired in
political chaos in the aftermathof the First World War, but from
1923 onwards had entered into a period of pronounced prosperity
and instability that was shattered late in 1929 when the
stock markets on Wall Street in New York City crashed and a

(37:05):
massive economic depression set in across the developed world.
In Germany, as millions lost their jobs and their economic
security, a huge proportion of the population turned in
national elections to the rabidly anti-Semitic National
Socialist German Workers Party or Nazis under their leader
Adolf Hitler. In weishstag elections in 1932

(37:27):
they became the largest political party in Germany and
in the first months of 1933 Hitler became chancellor of the
country. Within weeks the party
effectively turned Germany into a one party fascist state.
This was extremely namely ominous for the country's Jewish
population and individuals. Like Einstein in the United

(37:47):
States, he decided not to returnto Germany, and instead the
Einsteins settled in America After a brief visit to Antwerp
in Belgium, where Albert handed his German passport into the
German embassy and renounced hiscitizenship.
In Berlin, the Nazis had alreadysearched his apartment twice on
account of his Jewish heritage, and over the next year or so,

(38:08):
Jewish academics such as himselfwere forced out of their
positions across Germany in the United States.
Following his decision to seek permanent residence there in
1933, Einstein quickly acquired a position at the Institute for
Advanced Studies at Princeton University in New Jersey.
It was the institution which he would spend the longest portion

(38:30):
of his career at, and barring A directorship at Brandeis
University in Massachusetts in the mid 1940s, Einstein was
primarily associated with Princeton for the remainder of
his life. In the mid to late 1930s,
Einstein undertook some further notable work here on the East
Coast of America. A particularly significant

(38:51):
engagement resulted from collaboration with Nathan Rosen,
a Jewish American physicist. Together, Einstein and Rosen
produced a model of what a wormhole might look like.
Wormholes are theoretical structures which might connect
disparate points in space-time together.
At the time that Einstein and Rosen produced their theoretical

(39:12):
wormhole bridge, they were a relatively novel concept, but
they have latterly come to form a fundamental aspect of
theoretical writings on space travel.
In due course, they became a mainstay of science fiction
writing from the middle. Of the 20th century onwards.
While Einstein was teaching in the United States in the 1930s,

(39:34):
developments were occurring backin his homeland of Germany which
would soon have global implications.
Following their initial rise to power in 1933, the Nazis had
made clear their intent to overturn the terms of the Treaty
of Versailles. Which had brought the first
world. War to an end In the mid 1930s,
they began rearming Germany, recruiting hundreds of thousands

(39:57):
of soldiers into the military and building thousands of tanks,
fighter planes and bombers. Then, beginning in the spring of
1938, the Nazis used diplomatic coercion to annex Austria into a
Greater Germany and to seize territory from its other
neighbors, such as Czechoslovakia and Lithuania.
When Hitler then invaded Poland in September 1939, Britain and

(40:20):
France determined that they could no longer appease the
Nazis and declared war on Germany.
In the immediate term, the government of President Franklin
Delano Roosevelt did not have public support for American
involvement in what was deemed within the US to be a European
war, which it should not involveitself in.
However, when Germany's ally, the Empire of Japan, attacked

(40:42):
the US Pacific Fleet at rest in Pearl Harbor in Hawaii in
December 1941, the United Statesalso entered the Second World
War. More than any war in human
history, it was one which will be shaped by scientific
innovation. Despite his pacifism, Einstein
was soon involved in correspondence with the US

(41:03):
government concerning the growing conflict.
Indeed, this had commenced weeksbefore the war erupted in
Europe. Early in 1939, European
physicists had discovered nuclear fission using uranium.
With this discovery, the theoretical possibility of
developing a nuclear bomb of some kind moved ever closer.
A number of European physicists,foremost amongst which was the

(41:26):
Hungarian Leo Silad, realized, realized exactly how possible it
now was that a dedicated research team could develop a
nuclear warhead. This deeply worried many
European scientists as many of the continent's leading
physicists worked in Germany andcould be Co opted into helping
the Nazis develop a nuclear weapon, one which Hitler and his

(41:47):
accomplices would have little compunctions about using as a
conventional weapon of war despite it's absolutely
cataclysmic capacity for the loss of human life.
Consequently, Sillard and two fellow Hungarian physicists,
Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner,composed a letter to the US
government warning of the risks of the Nazis developing a

(42:08):
nuclear weapon before any other state.
They sent this to America, whereEinstein appended his signature
to it before it was sent to the administration of President
Roosevelt. What has become known as the
Einstein Sillard Letter was influential in the months that
followed in the US initiating its own program to develop a

(42:30):
nuclear weapon. The Manhattan Project.
The US governments program to develop a nuclear weapon was
initiated on a piece meal basis late in 1939, just weeks after
the receipt of the Einstein Sillard Letter.
This ran enormously against Einstein's own pacifist
inclinations, though the possibility of the Nazis

(42:51):
acquiring such a weapon before the US had forced him into
warning the government of the dangers of this occurring.
This aside, he viewed war of anykind as a disease which should
be resisted by all of civil society in the modern world.
Accordingly, he did not play a role in the Manhattan Project
itself. Rather, it was led by Robert

(43:12):
Oppenheimer, an American theoretical physicist, though
its activities were limited between 1939 and 1941.
Once the United States entered the war in December 1941,
funding and resources increased enormously, particularly so as
it became increasingly apparent that the Nazis were in fact
trying to develop super weapons such as a nuclear bomb and

(43:36):
various installations in Europe,notably in Norway, where what is
known as heavy water was being produced a form of hydrogen with
different nuclear properties which could conceivably be used
to manufacture a nuclear weapon.The research here though was
slow and was scuppered on numerous occasions by sabotage
missions launched by British special forces and free

(43:59):
Norwegian fighters. By that time, the Manhattan
Project was employing upwards of130,000 people in the United
States, and a nuclear reactor had been demonstrated in Chicago
as early as 1942. Eventually, in mid-july 1945,
the world's first nuclear devicewas detonated in the desert of

(44:20):
New Mexico. By the time the first nuclear
weapon was detonated, the SecondWorld War had already been over
in Europe for several weeks. However, because of the agreed
Allied policy of leaving the conclusion of the war in the
Pacific against the Empire of Japan until after Nazi Germany
had been defeated, the conflict was still raging there by the

(44:41):
summer of 1945. Accordingly, the administration
of President Harry Truman quickly decided to use the new
weapon against Japan in the belief that doing so would
ultimately save over a million lives if it forced Japan to
surrender quickly. Thus, on the 6th of August 1945,
the first nuclear weapon used inwarfare was dropped on the city

(45:03):
of Hiroshima, killing upwards of75,000 people on the first day,
and a further 60,000 or so in the months that followed from
radiation sickness. 3 days later, a second nuclear device
of a slightly different kind wasdropped on the city of Nagasaki,
killing upwards of 80,000 peopleacross the initial destruction

(45:25):
zone. And as a result of the after
effects, Japan did quickly surrender.
But Einstein was appalled by theferocity of the attacks and the
fallout from them. Shortly after the bombings, he
declared that the time has come now when man must give up war.
It is no longer rational to solve international problems by

(45:45):
resorting to war. He subsequently expressed his
regret that his research on the molecular structure of the world
and the concept of mass, energy and equivalents, which he had
first published in 19 O Five, had contributed towards the
development of nuclear weapons. The post war years saw Einstein
continue to research and publish, though by then he was

(46:08):
nearing his 70s and the pressures of his public profile
and some health concerns restricted how much he could
accomplish. Nevertheless, at Princeton in
the late 1940s, he developed what he referred to as his
Unified Field Theory, findings which he published in Scientific
American in 1950. As On the Generalized Theory of

(46:30):
Gravitation, this unified field theory sought to develop a
single unified theoretical framework which could be used to
understand the fundamental forces of nature and the
universe. Efforts had been undertaken by
many physicists throughout the first half of the 20th century
to develop such a unified theory, but none had met with

(46:51):
acceptance across the academic community.
Einstein's theory attempted to incorporate elements of his work
on general relativity, electromagnetism, and gravity,
and proposed a single origin forthe entire set of physical laws,
one which could unify forces such as gravitation,
electromagnetic forces, and eventhe curvature of space-time,

(47:13):
with which much of Einstein's work in the 1930s had been
concerned. Ultimately, his work and that of
others in developing such a unified theory were
unsuccessful, but his research in this respect is nevertheless
regarded as being consequential in the further development of
differential geometry. The study of the geometry.

(47:34):
Of smooth shapes. And surfaces, particularly as
they apply to space. For years following the end of
the Second World War in America also saw Einstein acquire a form
of celebrity within mainstream society, which was largely
unprecedented for a theoretical physicist.
In many ways, this went back allthe way to the early 1920s and

(47:57):
Einstein's first arrival in New York City.
His theory of relativity had just been confirmed by other
scientists, changing our fundamental understanding of the
universe. While Einstein was the recipient
of the Nobel Prize, The New YorkTimes had run a story in
December 1919 proclaiming that Einstein had, quote, destroyed

(48:19):
space and time through his research findings.
Here was the most fundamental overhaul of human thoughts since
Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection 1/2 a century
earlier. But Einstein's work?
Was greeted with. Applause.
Whereas Darwin's had been viewedas sacrilegious, his
associations with figures like Charlie Chaplin in Hollywood and

(48:41):
his increasingly iconic physicalappearance all made him a more
identifiable figure in the yearsthat followed.
Most tellingly. By the 1940s, it was becoming
apparent how Einstein's revolutionary ideas were
changing society and the world in practical ways, not just from
the perspective of theoretical physics.

(49:01):
As all of this occurred, he became a figure as fated within
American Society as Stephen Hawking later would be in the
second-half of the 20th century,or figures like James Lovelock
and Richard Dawkings in the early 21st century.
By the time his working life came to an end, Einstein's
written and published output wasenormous.

(49:23):
Though it may seem unusual to many, Einstein's primary
academic output was in the shapeof papers in academic journals,
of which there were nearly 300 /a span of 55 years, rather than
books. This was and remains the primary
means of communicating research for academics working in the
hard sciences. Such books as Einstein authored,

(49:46):
of which there were over a dozen, would generally
reproductions of work he had already published as academic
papers. The idea being to tie together
his existing work on general relativity and other topics, or
to try to make the material moreaccessible to a general
audience. Some of these were used as
advanced undergraduate and postgraduate textbooks for

(50:08):
students of theoretical physics for years to come in
universities. Additionally, translations were
made into multiple languages, ensuring that Einstein's work
was accessible in dozens of countries by the middle of the
20th century. Beyond this academic output,
Einstein was a voracious correspondent, and at the Albert

(50:30):
Einstein Archives at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, there
are over 3500 pages of his private correspondence dating
from 1912 to 1955. He also wrote widely on various
political, philosophical, religious, and humanitarian
issues. Unsurprisingly, collected
editions of Einstein's work, correspondence and other

(50:52):
writings, such as those published since the late 1980s
by the Academic Press of Princeton University, the
university where Albert spent nearly all of his career in the
United States, have stretched into dozens of lengthy volumes.
The individual who produced thisenormous body of work was,
despite his brilliance and celebrity, a resoundingly modest

(51:14):
individual. He once proclaimed of himself,
quote, I have no special talents.
I'm only passionately curious. He never acquired the trappings
of wealth or fame, and indeed visitors to his home in Berlin
in the 1920s or America in the post 1933 period were generally
struck by the modesty of the abode, where the most lavish

(51:37):
adornment was usually a piano sothat Einstein could play the
classical music he loved. His family life, it must be
admitted, was difficult. His two biological sons went to
live with their mother after sheand Albert separated in 1914,
and thereafter their relationship was somewhat
distant. Hans later immigrated to the

(51:58):
United States in 1938, where they reconnected, but Edward
remained in Europe and, despite maintaining a correspondence
with his father, never saw him again after Albert left for
America in the early 1930s, Edward later developed
psychiatric problems and was institutionalized in Zurich.
Albert's marriage to Elsa was also strained long before her

(52:20):
death in New Jersey in 1936, andit has been widely speculated
that Einstein retreated into hisscientific inquiries at times as
a substitute for his own weaknesses when it came to
emotional relationships. Politically, he was humane,
holding a lifelong aversion to violence and war.
He deeply admired Mahatma Gandhiand of his nonviolent opposition

(52:43):
to British rule in India, and the two became correspondents.
Over time, his political views moved towards a criticism of
capitalism and advocacy of socialism, while he also wrote
on numerous occasions about the desire for a system of global
government and an end to competition between nation
states. He held positive views of the

(53:04):
United States, deeming the country to be a meritocracy, but
the FBI had developed a dossier on him before he he ever fully
relocated to America from Europe, and by the mid 1950s it
ran to over 1400 pages, a not wholly unusual development for a
former German and an academic inpost war America.

(53:27):
An intrinsic part of Einstein's character was his Jewish
heritage. Though he himself was a
professed agnostic and viewed the Bible as a collection of
primitive legends. His Jewish heritage also shaped
his life from the 1930s onwards,as it saw him relocate to the
United States in the face of theNazi threat.
Einstein also became noted in his later years for his support

(53:51):
for Zionism and the state of Israel.
He had visited Palestine back inthe 1920s when it was being
governed as a British mandate inthe aftermath of the First World
War. At that time, hundreds of
thousands of Jews were already living in or migrating to the
region, with the goal of reforming a Jewish state after
nearly 2000 years of being dispersed around the world in

(54:14):
19. 25 Einstein agreed to be listed amongst the first Board
of Governors of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem when it
was established that year. And then, in the aftermath of
the Second World War, hundreds of thousands of Europe's Jews
who had survived the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis during
the Second World War, headed forthe Holy Land.

(54:35):
When the British Mandate there expired in March 1948, the
Jewish people declared a new State of Israel for the Jewish
people in the Levant. In 1952, Einstein was offered
the ceremonial position of president of the country, though
he declined on account of his age and inability to leave the
United States at that stage. Einstein remained supportive of

(54:57):
the Zionist movement until his death, but one wonders what the
pacifist in him would have made of the Israeli state as it
descended into interminable warfare with its Muslim
neighbors from the Suez Crisis of 1956 onwards.
By the time Israel entered into the Suez Crisis, or the second
Arab Israeli war against its southern neighbor Egypt in 1956,

(55:22):
Einstein had died. Shortly after the end of the
Second World War, he had begun to suffer from an abdominal
aortic aneurysm, an enlargement of the abdominal aorta, the
largest artery in the abdomen. It can become blocked much like
any other part of the circulatory system, owing to
high blood pressure, high cholesterol and smoking.

(55:43):
Einstein had the issue operated on successfully in 1948 by
reinforcing the aorta wall. But despite improving his
lifestyle, including adopting a vegetarian diet, the problem
resurfaced again early in 1955 when the aorta ruptured, causing
internal bleeding. He was admitted to hospital on
the 17th of April but refused emergency surgery to try to

(56:06):
intervene to stop the bleeding, proclaiming philosophically that
it was best to meet death with dignity when one's time had
come. He died the following day on the
18th of April 1955, at 76 years of age.
The surgeon who carried out his autopsy afterwards removed
Einstein's brain for scientific study, though this was done

(56:28):
without the permission of his family.
It was subsequently dissected and the remains of it are today
found in the National Museum of Health and Medicine in
Washington, DC, while some sections were put on display in
the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia in 2013.
It has been suggested that the abnormal number of glial cells

(56:49):
in his brain might account for Einstein's inordinate aptitude
for mathematical equations. His body was cremated shortly
after his death in New Jersey, and his ashes were modestly
scattered at an undisclosed location.
Albert Einstein was one of the most influential thinkers in the
history of science. So significant were his findings

(57:10):
in his research over a span of half a century that his surname
has become synonymous with elevated intelligence.
Perhaps what is most unusual about this is that it all sprang
from relatively humble beginnings in the 1890s.
He was effectively an international nomad when he was
still a teenager and young man, moving between his native

(57:32):
Germany, Italy and Switzerland as his parents tried to balance
their financial and business situation with their awareness
of their sonny's precocious abilities as a mathematician and
physicist. His time at the Polytechnic
School in Zurich provided some stability, but Central Europe's
universities saw fit not to hirehim when he completed his

(57:52):
initial studies there, and instead he spent several years
working in the Swiss Patent Office in Bown.
It was here, while evaluating inventions during the day and
starting a young family, that hebegan working on some of the
most significant research in thefield of physics ever
undertaken. The result in the Anas Mirabelis
of 19 O five were four ground breaking studies which

(58:16):
revolutionized humanities understanding of the nature of
the universe, at once revealing the existence of photons and the
nuclear and atomic building blocks of existence. 1905
changed everything. In the years that followed,
Einstein was promoted year on year to ever more significant
academic positions, until he eventually reached the peak of

(58:39):
European academia in Berlin justas the First World War broke
out. In the midst of that calamitous
conflict, he developed the general theory of relativity.
In 1921, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his
work, though more accolades followed in the decades ahead.
What is perhaps most notable about Einstein's career,

(59:00):
however, from the 1920s onwards,is the public profile he
developed. Visits to the United States,
South America, across Europe andthe Middle East allowed him to
advocate on behalf of a number of causes.
The most significant was his ringing of the alarm bells.
About the threat posed. By Nazi Germany from 1933

(59:21):
onwards. Indeed, he immediately renounced
his German citizenship when Hitler seized power and moved to
the United States. There he continued to note the
dangers posed by the possibilityof the Nazis acquiring a nuclear
weapon. However, it was a double edged
sword for Einstein the pacifist.For the cost of seeing Nazi
Germany defeated in the nuclear race was seeing the US drop its

(59:45):
own atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
In the aftermath of the war, he used his position to advocate on
behalf of a state for the Jewishpeople in the Middle East
following the Holocaust. When he died in 1955, he was the
most acclaimed scientist in the world, one who ultimately

(01:00:05):
influenced the entire fields of physics, mathematics, and
cosmology in the modern era. The history of the 20th century
might well have been significantly different had it
not been for Einstein. What do you think of Albert
Einstein? Was he the most revolutionary
intellectual in modern history? And what might explain his

(01:00:26):
inordinate intellect? Please let us know in the
comments section and in the meantime, thank you.
Very much for watching.