Albert Einstein
“Einstein showed his remarkable talents from an early age, mastering tricky mathematical fields”
Born in Ulm, southern Germany, in 1879, Albert Einstein would become the most famous physicist of the 20th century, introducing revolutionary ideas that transformed all of science – and astronomy in particular.
Einstein showed his remarkable talents from an early age, reading widely and mastering tricky mathematical fields such as algebra and Euclidean geometry before he was a teenager. However, the young Albert grew restless with the dull curriculum and regimented teaching methods, and eventually ditched school entirely, completing his education in Switzerland some time later.
After graduating from the Federal Polytechnic School in Zürich, Einstein was frustrated in his search for a teaching post of his own. Eventually, after taking Swiss citizenship – also a way of avoiding German military service – he found employment at the Bern patent office, in a job that left him with plenty of spare time to work on his
PhD and consider the questions that he was really interested in.
In 1905, Einstein stepped into the limelight with the publication of not one, but four groundbreaking scientific papers. One provided long-sought-after direct proof of the existence of atoms. Another laid the foundations for what would become known as quantum physics, but it was the other two that transformed our view of the universe itself.
Einstein’s breakthrough came from confronting questions about the speed of light, which always seemed to be the same regardless of the relative motions of the light source and the measuring device. Physicists had put forward many possible explanations for this troubling phenomenon, but all relied on it being a kind of illusion, and none of them were satisfactory.
Einstein, however, dared to ask if the speed of light really is constant, regardless of relative motion. He showed that the consequences for everyday life would be unnoticeable, but that in ‘relativistic’ situations, with an observer and an object or light source moving at near-light speed relative to each other, strange effects would occur. From the observer’s point of view, objects at near light speed appear to become shorter and to experience time more slowly.
Further consideration led Einstein to conclude that accelerating objects already at relativistic
speeds will tend to increase their mass rather than their speed – since the speed of light itself is unreachable – and this led in turn to the famous equation E=mc2.
Einstein’s ideas were hugely influential, but Albert himself was already pondering the next big question. So far he had only formulated a ‘special theory of relativity’ where the observer and object moved at high relative speed, but did not accelerate or decelerate. He now realised that acceleration was effectively the same as being in a gravitational field, so a description of ‘general relativity’ would also automatically be a description of gravity itself.
Einstein’s theory of general relativity, when it emerged, showed that the presence of large masses can have effects similar to those seen in special relativity, distorting our measurements of time and space. However, its publication in 1916, as Europe tore itself apart in the First World War, meant it was widely overlooked.
It was only in 1919, following the return of peace, that astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington was able to journey to Africa and make crucial observations of stars around the Sun during a solar eclipse. These revealed the effect we now call gravitational lensing in the form of a slight distortion in the measured positions of the stars as light is deflected due to the Sun’s distortion of nearby space and time. Einstein was proved right, opening the way for a new era in physics, and eventually for powerful new astronomical techniques that make use of his discoveries and predictions.