Simplicity And Truth: Albert Einstein

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Albert Einstein was born March 14,1879 in Ulm, Germany.

He is considered to be one of the greatest theoretical physicists of all time. He is best known as the creator of the special and general theories of relativity. He contributed much to the kinetic theory of matter and the theory of specific heats and played a major role in the Manhattan Project.

At age ten, Einstein set into a program of self education and read as much as he could about science. His uncle recognized his mathematical talent and introduced him to algebra and geometry. Albert found pleasure in solving challenging algebraic and geometric problems. He was not a very good student in school. He often skipped class, which caused him to fail. In 1895, Albert attempted to skip high school by taking an entrance exam to the Swiss Polytechnic University, but he failed the arts portion. He then decided to go back to high school and he graduated in 1896 at age seventeen.

Six years later, Einstein fell in love with an old classmate, Mileva Maric, and got married.

In 1905 Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity was born. This paper, which had taken him five weeks to write, arose from a question which had puzzled him for years: "If one were to travel through space with the same velocity as a beam of light, how would one describe the beam?" Einstein began to think that the laws of physics must remain the same for all observers however fast they move to one another.

Einstein's conclusion to his theory was that mass and energy are different.

In 1919 Einstein published his general theory of relativity. One of the predictions of this theory concerned the bending of light rays from a distant star if they passed close to the sun on...