Albert Einstein

Essay by Anonymous UserHigh School, 12th gradeA, January 1996

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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...