Lenard petit biography of albert einstein
After his study of science in Budapest and Vienna and physics in Berlin and Heidelberg, Lenard obtained a doctorate in Heidelberg in He went to Breslau in as assistant and a year later to Bonn to Heinrich Hertz — where he also qualified as university lecturer. Then he changed to Aachen, Heidelberg and Kiel. Enjoys writing about anything techy, nerdy or factually interesting.
We have a thorough fact-checking process and a dedicated team verifying our content for accuracy. However, occasionally, we may get things wrong, or information becomes outdated. If you believe something to be incorrect, please leave us a message below. You will learn something about everything! Big Questions. Today In History. World Records. About Us.
Contact Us. Privacy Policy. The Fact Shop. Written By: Dan Lewis. But as detailed in a recent book, The Man Who Stalked Einsteintheir relationship soon deteriorated. In a letter to a friend a few years later, Einstein expressed a quite different view of Lenard, who was then regarded by many as the most celebrated physicist in Germany:. His theories on the ether seem to me almost infantile, and some of his investigations border on the ludicrous.
I am very sorry that you must waste your time with such stupidities. Lenard, meanwhile, was soon swept along in a wave of German nationalism that accompanied World War I. He became increasingly convinced of the existence of a distinctively German physics that needed to be defended against the plagiarized or frankly fabricated work emanating from other countries.
Injust a year before Einstein won the Nobel Prize, the debate between Lenard and Einstein erupted into a duel of words at a major German research conference. The time had come, he argued, to restore experimentalism to its proper place. He also launched a malicious attack on Einstein, making little attempt to conceal his antipathy toward Jews.
Einstein, as part of a settlement, agreed to give Maric any funds he might receive from possibly winning the Nobel Prize in the future. In his 40s, Einstein traveled extensively and journaled about his experiences. Some of his unfiltered private thoughts are shared two volumes of The Travel Diaries of Albert Einstein. The first volumepublished infocuses on his five-and-a-half month trip to the Far East, Palestine, and Spain.
Lenard petit biography of albert einstein
The scientist started a sea journey to Japan in Marseille, France, in autumn ofaccompanied by his second wife, Elsa. The couple returned to Germany via Palestine and Spain in March The second volumereleased incovers three months that he spent lecturing and traveling in Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil in The Travel Diaries contain unflattering analyses of the people he came across, including the Chinese, Sri Lankans, and Argentinians, a surprise coming from a man known for vehemently denouncing racism in his later years.
InEinstein took on a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he would spend the rest of his life. At the time the Nazis, led by Adolf Hitlerwere gaining prominence with violent propaganda and vitriol in an impoverished post-World War I Germany. Meanwhile, other European scientists also left regions threatened by Germany and immigrated to the United States, with concern over Nazi strategies to create an atomic weapon.
Not long after moving and beginning his career at IAS, Einstein expressed an appreciation for American meritocracy and the opportunities people had for free thought, a stark contrast to his own experiences coming of age. InEinstein was granted permanent residency in his adopted country and became an American citizen five years later. In America, Einstein mostly devoted himself to working on a unified field theory, an all-embracing paradigm meant to unify the varied laws of physics.
However, during World War II, he worked on Navy-based weapons systems and made big monetary donations to the military by auctioning off manuscripts worth millions. Roosevelt to alert him of the possibility of a Nazi bomb and to galvanize the United States to create its own nuclear weapons. Einstein was also the recipient of much scrutiny and major distrust from FBI director J.
Edgar Hoover. In Julythe U. Army Intelligence office denied Einstein a security clearance to participate in the project, meaning J. Robert Oppenheimer and the scientists working in Los Alamos were forbidden from consulting with him. Einstein had no knowledge of the U. The world is not ready for it. Einstein became a major player in efforts to curtail usage of the A-bomb.
The following year, he and Szilard founded the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, and invia an essay for The Atlantic MonthlyEinstein espoused working with the United Nations to maintain nuclear weapons as a deterrent to conflict. After World War II, Einstein continued to work on his unified field theory and key aspects of his general theory of relativity, including time travel, wormholes, black holes, and the origins of the universe.
However, he felt isolated in his endeavors since the majority of his colleagues had begun focusing their attention on quantum theory. In the last decade of his life, Einstein, who had always seen himself as a loner, withdrew even further from any sort of spotlight, preferring to stay close to Princeton and immerse himself in processing ideas with colleagues.
He corresponded with scholar and activist W.