Quotes About Einstein

So Einstein rejected the emission theory in favor of postulating that the speed of a light beam was constant no matter how fast its source was moving. "I came to the conviction that all light should be defined by frequency and intensity alone, completely independently of whether it comes from a moving or from a stationary light source," he told Ehrenfest.

Back in 1917, when Einstein had analyzed the "cosmological considerations" arising from his general theory of relativity, most astronomers thought that the universe consisted only of our Milky Way, floating with its 100 billion or so stars in a void of empty space.

It was by all accounts a pleasant Atlantic crossing, during which Einstein tried to explain relativity to Weissmann. Asked upon their arrival whether he understood the theory, Weissmann gave a delightful reply. During the crossing, Einstein explained his theory to me every day, and by the time we arrived I was fully convinced that he really understands it.

But by 1912, Einstein had come to appreciate that math could be a tool for discovering—and not merely describing—nature's laws. Math was nature's playbook. "The central idea of general relativity is that gravity arises from the curvature of spacetime," says physicist James Hartle. "Gravity is geometry.

At the behest of Princeton's President, all of Einstein's lectures were very technical. They included more than one hundred and twenty-five complex equations that he scribbled on the blackboard while speaking in German. As one student admitted to a reporter, I sat in the balcony but he talked right over my head anyway.

The genius of Albert Einstein, who added a 'cosmological constant' to his equation for the expansion of the universe but then retracted it, may be vindicated by new research."58

Over the ensuing years, researchers would discover new forces in nature, besides electromagnetism and gravity, and also new particles. These would make Einstein's attempts at unification all the more complex. But he would find himself less familiar with the latest data in experimental physics, and he thus would no longer have the same intuitive feel for how to wrest from nature her fundamental principles.

His new idea was published that month in what became yet another seminal Einstein paper, "Cosmological Considerations in the General Theory of Relativity." On the surface, it did indeed seem to be based on a crazy notion: space has no borders because gravity bends it back on itself.

There was a simple set of formulas that defined Einstein's outlook. Creativity required being willing not to conform. That required nurturing free minds and free spirits, which in turn required a spirit of tolerance. And the underpinning of tolerance was humility - the belief that no one had the right to impose ideas and beliefs on others.

Einstein's 1905 burst of creativity was astonishing. He had devised a revolutionary quantum theory of light, helped prove the existence of atoms, explained Brownian motion, upended the concept of space and time, and produced what would become science's best known equation.

Being a Jew was a disadvantage; being a nonbeliever who claimed no religion was a disqualifier. The empire required that all of its servants, including professors, be a member of some religion. On his official forms, Einstein had written that he had none. "Einstein is as unpractical as a child in cases like this," Friedrich Adler's wife noted.

As the evening droned on, Einstein turned to a Dutch diplomat seated next to him and said, "I've just developed a new theory of eternity.

De hecho, fue precisamente por descubrir la ley del efecto fotoeléctrico por lo que se concedería a Einstein su único premio Nobel.

Einstein creía que existía una realidad armónica tras las leyes del universo y que el objetivo de la ciencia era descubrirla.

Einstein's theory produced a law of the photoelectric effect that was experimentally testable: the energy of emitted electrons would depend on the frequency of the light according to a simple mathematical formula involving Planck's constant.

His head-snapping insight was that gravity could be defined as the curvature of spacetime, and thus it could be represented by a metric tensor.

While others continued to develop quantum mechanics, undaunted by the uncertainties at its core, Einstein persevered in his lonelier quest for a more complete explanation of the universe—a unified field theory that would tie together electricity and magnetism and gravity and quantum mechanics.

Among the many surprising things about the life of Albert Einstein was the trouble he had getting an academic job.

A century after his great triumphs, we are still living in Einstein's universe, one defined on the macro scale by his theory of relativity and on the micro scale by a quantum mechanics that has proven durable even as it remains disconcerting.

Einstein's pacifism, world federalism, and aversion to nationalism were part of a political outlook that also included a passion for social justice, a sympathy for underdogs, an antipathy toward racism, and a predilection toward socialism.

Einstein's goal as he pursued his general theory of relativity was to find the mathematical equations describing two complementary processes: 1. How a gravitational field acts on matter, telling it how to move. 2. And in turn, how matter generates gravitational fields in spacetime, telling it how to curve. His head-snapping insight was that gravity could be defined as the curvature of spacetime, and thus it could be represented by a metric tensor. For more than three years he

Talmud brought him science books, including a popular illustrated series called People's Books on Natural Science, "a work which I read with breathless attention," said Einstein.

In fact, it was specifically for discovering the law of the photoelectric effect that Einstein would win his only Nobel Prize.

At the end of the 1940s, when it was becoming clear to him that the effort to control nuclear weaponry would fail, Einstein was asked what the next war would look like. "I do not know how the Third World War will be fought," he answered, "but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth—rocks."20