On March 14, 1879, a hundred-and-forty-one
years ago, a son was born to Hermann Einstein, an engineer and salesman, and
Pauline Koch, in the kingdom of Wurttemberg, in present-day Germany. Pauline
was well-educated and showed a passion for music. It was on her insistence that
Albert Einstein took up violin lessons at the age of five, which developed into
a life-long passion.
The young Einstein was
slow in learning to speak. In fact, his condition prompted his parents to seek
medical help. But this disorder affected his learning in positive ways. His
imagination was astounding: he tended to think in terms of images rather than
words. When his father gifted him a compass at age five, he puzzled constantly over
the nature of magnetism.
He tended to be rebellious,
questioning conventional wisdom, which resulted in his being expelled from one
school and for another headmaster to famously declare that the child would
never amount to much.
Despite his struggles in
speech, Einstein showed his genius quite early, especially in mathematics. In
primary school, his gift for this subject became apparent and he obtained the
highest marks in his class, performing far above the school requirements. By
age twelve, he had mastered applied arithmetic and decided to learn algebra and
geometry on his own, which he did over a summer vacation.
His great breakthroughs
in physics came directly from his thinking in images. He conducted a series of
mental experiments, which he named Gedankenexperiment,
or thought experiments. At age sixteen, he imagined what it would be like to
ride alongside a beam of light. But the dictates of the physics of the day didn’t
correspond to his imagination. He wrestled with that mind experiment until, ten
years later, he arrived at his Special Theory of Relativity, a ground breaking
theory that shattered the conclusions of Newtonian physics.
In 1905, at the age of
twenty-six, Einstein worked at a patent office in Switzerland, as he was neither
able to get a doctoral dissertation accepted nor obtain an academic job.
Despite working six days a week, he produced four papers in his spare time that
changed the course of history. The first showed that light could be described
as waves as well as particles, leading to the field of quantum physics. The
second proved the existence of atoms and molecules. The third, the Special
Theory of Relativity, said that there was no absolute time or space. And
finally the fourth propounded and equivalence between light and mass,
represented by the famous equation E=mc2.
Much of what we take for
granted today comes from the work of this great physicist. Among these are cell-phones,
satellite communications, lasers, semiconductors and atomic power. And many
future discoveries still await unfolding, such as space travel and quantum
computing. Rarely has one man’s work entirely changed the course of history.
Einstein is one such man.
Mohan Ashtakala is the author of "The Yoga Zapper," a fantasy and "Karma Nation," a literary romance. www.mohanashtakala.com, www.bookswelove.net.
