Inventor Project April 1, 1996 Albert Einstein :: essays research papers fc

Inventor Project April 1, 1996 Albert Einstein My name is Albert Einstein. I was born on March 14, 1879 in Ulm, Germany. I was not an inventor in the conventional sense. I was a physicist and theorist. My inventions were not tangible things, but ideas I put on paper and may later on have led to inventions. I was not a good student in school. I did not pay attention to teachers because I found their lectures and teachings boring. Often I would skip class to go study physics on my own. By the age of twelve I had taught myself Euclidean Geometry, and slowly beginning to develope my own theories in physics. My first theoretical paper was on Brownian motion. The paper discussed the significant predictions I made about particles that are randomly distributed in a fluid. My next paper was on the photoelectric effect, which contained a revolutionary hypothesis on the nature of light. I proposed that under certain circumstances light can be considered as consisting of particles, and I also hypothesized that energy carried by any light particle, called a photon, is proportional to the frequency of the radiation. The formula for this is E=hv, where E is the radiation, h is a universal constant known as Planck's constant, and v is the frequency of the radiation. This proposal, that the energy contained within a light beam is transferred by individual units, or quanta, contradicted the hundred year old tradition of considering light as a manifestation of continuous processes. My third and most impotant paper, "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies", contained what has become known as the special theory of relativity. Since the time of Sir Issac Newton, scientists had been trying to understand the nature of matter and radiation, and how they interacted in some unified world picture. The position that mechanical laws are fundamental has become known as the mechanical world view, and the position that electrical laws are fundamental has become known as the electromagnetic world view. Neither approach, however, is capable of providing a consistent explanation for the way radiation and matter interact when viewed from different inertial frames of reference, that is, an interaction viewed simultaneously by an observer at rest and an observer moving at unifrom speed. In the Spring of 1905 after considering these problems for ten years, I realized that the crux of the problem lay not in a theory of matter but in a theory of measuerment. At the heart of my special theory of relativity was the realization thet all measurements of time and space depend on judgments as to