Berlin, Munich, Zurich, Geneva… Einstein was here
Berlin, Munich, Zurich, Geneva… Einstein was here
Without Einstein, it is certain, we couldn’t have even begun to understand black holes or the Big Bang theory. And without his general theory of relativity, the world would tick-tock very different indeed. A man of brilliance, his brains even led him to receive an invitation to be the president of a country. He was asked to be the president of Israel, which he dearly declined; an episode that unfolded after Chaim Weizmann, the first president of the newly-formed country of Israel, died in 1952, hence the job was offered to the scientist.
Head for a U-Bahn in Berlin, and thinking of which are some of the famous people who have been part of this city, one name to ring a bell, exactly, Albert Einstein. For his brilliance also found a suitable place here, though the apartment building he used to live in, has been, as a great many other buildings in Berlin, battered by bomb showers and replaced with a new block during the 1950s.
However, Einstein was not originally a Berliner, in a sense, he was not born there. He lived for a period and moved to another city, to another continent, as Hitler took a grip of power in a country deeply divided ahead of World War Two. He was born on March 14, Pi Day, now the distant 1879, in the German city of Ulm, a city which can also brag itself for inventing the Graf Zeppelin, the first aircraft in human history that flew over a million miles, made over 500 flights and 144 crossings over our oceans.
Einstein at his office, University of Berlin, 1920
Einstein passed away at the University Medical Center at Princeton early on the morning April 18, 1955. He was aged 76 by this point, and in between the time of his birth and death, he swapped cities regularly. He attended elementary school in Munich, in a gymnasium where he honestly struggled, finding himself alienated in a school system reputed for its rigidness.
Since his early years, Albert became passioned about classical music and learned to play the violin. Around this time, Max Talmud, a family friend who often dined with the Einsteins, eventually became Albert’s tutor. Talmud is to be blamed for giving young Einstein texts of science to ponder upon, pushing him to develop investigative skills, how to go deep and profound in various topics, more importantly how to muse things from the physical world, such as light and its nature.
Around 1895, Hermann Einstein, Albert’s father relocated with the rest of the family, except Albert–he didn’t take Albert–to Milan. The Einsteins moved to another city as their family business succumbed to significant losses at this point. For a period, at least until he was to finish his school year in the notorious gymnasium he so much detested, Albert remained to live in Munich and was shared a bed at a family relatives house. He eventually rejoined his family in Italy, but later on, after he evaded enrolling for military service.
Photo of Albert Einstein and Charlie Chaplin at the Los Angeles premiere of the film City Lights (1931)
Much praised for his astounding scores in maths and physics, Einstein was admitted into the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich. Here, he angered many of his professors because he was regularly absent from many of their classes. And here, he also started to work in a Swiss patent office, an environment that served him well as he was able to master some of his theorems on what would be known as the principle of relativity. By 1905, he published four papers in Annalen der Physik one of the most prominent journals for physics of the day. Two of these papers outlined MC2 and the specific theory of relativity.
In 1911, Einstein also lived in Prague where he taught at the Charles-Ferdinand University, now accepting Austrian citizenship. By the next year, he was already back to Zurich, where, he started teaching theoretical physics. Sooner than later, the road led him to Berlin after he was voted a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. That happened in early July 1913. Max Plank, among others, personally came to visit Einstein in Zurich, to invite him to Berlin. He also offered him a leading role at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, yet to be established.
To move to the capital of the German Empire was something of a prospect to Einstein, for two reasons: he would get to teach in a Humboldt institution, as well as he would be close to Elsa, a cousin of his, he also fancied and later married. The world was changed by 1914, and many of Einstein’s original plans for Berlin were put to a halt. World War One broke, the new physics institute did not open. Things had to wait for a while.
International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (League of Nations). Plenary session in the Palais Wilson, Genève, Switzerland between 1924 and 1927. United Nations Archives in Geneva, League of Nations Pictures, File CM 067. Uploaded by Martin Grandjean with permission, CC BY-SA 4.0
In the time span between the two world wars, Einstein became a world-recognized scientist and was honored different awards, including the Noble Prize. After 1933, and after his and his wife Elsa residency was raided by the Germans, the pair permanently moved to the United States. Einstein started working at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey and he remained affiliated with this institute until his death in 1955.
In this latter part of his life, the genius helped the production of the atomic bomb. On the eve of World War Two, Einstein did alert President Franklin D Roosevelt that Germany could be developing a nuclear weapon of unprecedented destructive powers. Therefore, following the recommendations of Einstien, the U.S. began similar research, which eventually resulted in the Manhattan Project.
To be clear, Einstein pledged for defending the Allied forces, but he much denounced the usage of the newly discovered nuclear fission as a weapon of mass destruction.
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