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162-409: However, a duality of the fields is combined into a single physical field. For over a century, unified field theory has remained an open line of research. The term was coined by Albert Einstein , who attempted to unify his general theory of relativity with electromagnetism . The " Theory of Everything " and Grand Unified Theory are closely related to unified field theory, but differ by not requiring

324-600: A Hanukkah celebration. Einstein next traveled to California, where he met Caltech president and Nobel laureate Robert A. Millikan . His friendship with Millikan was "awkward", as Millikan "had a penchant for patriotic militarism", where Einstein was a pronounced pacifist . During an address to Caltech's students, Einstein noted that science was often inclined to do more harm than good. This aversion to war also led Einstein to befriend author Upton Sinclair and film star Charlie Chaplin , both noted for their pacifism. Carl Laemmle , head of Universal Studios , gave Einstein

486-637: A Neutrality Pact in April 1941, and Japan adopted the doctrine of Nanshin-ron , promoted by the Navy, which took its focus southward and eventually led to war with the United States and the Western Allies. In Europe, Germany and Italy were becoming more aggressive. In March 1938, Germany annexed Austria , again provoking little response from other European powers. Encouraged, Hitler began pressing German claims on

648-564: A cautious French probe into the Saarland . The Western Allies also began a naval blockade of Germany , which aimed to damage the country's economy and war effort. Germany responded by ordering U-boat warfare against Allied merchant and warships, which would later escalate into the Battle of the Atlantic . On 8 September, German troops reached the suburbs of Warsaw . The Polish counter-offensive to

810-562: A unified field theory by generalizing his geometric theory of gravitation to include electromagnetism . As a result, he became increasingly isolated from the mainstream modern physics . His intellectual achievements and originality made Einstein broadly synonymous with genius . In 1999, he was named Time 's Person of the Century . Albert Einstein was born in Ulm , in the Kingdom of Württemberg in

972-657: A "citizen of the world" who should be offered a temporary shelter in the UK. Both bills failed, however, and Einstein then accepted an earlier offer from the Institute for Advanced Study , in Princeton, New Jersey , US, to become a resident scholar. World War II Asia-Pacific Mediterranean and Middle East Other campaigns Coups World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945)

1134-512: A bill to parliament to extend British citizenship to Einstein, during which period Einstein made a number of public appearances describing the crisis brewing in Europe. In one of his speeches he denounced Germany's treatment of Jews, while at the same time he introduced a bill promoting Jewish citizenship in Palestine, as they were being denied citizenship elsewhere. In his speech he described Einstein as

1296-728: A contract to install electric lighting in Munich, but without success—they lacked the capital that would have been required to update their technology from direct current to the more efficient, alternating current alternative. The failure of their bid forced them to sell their Munich factory and search for new opportunities elsewhere. The Einstein family moved to Italy, first to Milan and a few months later to Pavia , where they settled in Palazzo Cornazzani . Einstein, then fifteen, stayed behind in Munich in order to finish his schooling. His father wanted him to study electrical engineering , but he

1458-655: A diploma handed to him by King Alfonso XIII . (His Spanish trip also gave him a chance to meet a fellow Nobel laureate, the neuroanatomist Santiago Ramón y Cajal .) From 1922 until 1932, with the exception of a few months in 1923 and 1924, Einstein was a member of the Geneva-based International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations , a group set up by the League to encourage scientists, artists, scholars, teachers and other people engaged in

1620-428: A force mediated by four particles: the photon for the electromagnetic aspect, a neutral Z particle, and two charged W particles for the weak aspect. As a result of the spontaneous symmetry breaking, the weak force becomes short-range and the W and Z bosons acquire masses of 80.4 and 91.2 GeV/c , respectively. Their theory was first given experimental support by the discovery of weak neutral currents in 1973. In 1983,

1782-572: A formative event from his youth, when he was sick in bed and his father brought him a compass . This sparked his lifelong fascination with electromagnetism . He realized that "Something deeply hidden had to be behind things." Albert attended St. Peter's Catholic elementary school in Munich from the age of five. When he was eight, he was transferred to the Luitpold Gymnasium , where he received advanced primary and then secondary school education. In 1894, Hermann and Jakob's company tendered for

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1944-463: A gravel sorter and an electric typewriter. His employers were pleased enough with his work to make his position permanent in 1903, although they did not think that he should be promoted until he had "fully mastered machine technology". It is conceivable that his labors at the patent office had a bearing on his development of his special theory of relativity. He arrived at his revolutionary ideas about space, time and light through thought experiments about

2106-461: A man can be." In 1912, Einstein entered into a relationship with Elsa Löwenthal , who was both his first cousin on his mother's side and his second cousin on his father's. When Marić learned of his infidelity soon after moving to Berlin with him in April 1914, she returned to Zürich, taking Hans Albert and Eduard with her. Einstein and Marić were granted a divorce on 14 February 1919 on the grounds of having lived apart for five years. As part of

2268-446: A paper which laid the foundations for the concepts of both laser and maser , and contained a trove of information that would be beneficial to developments in physics later on. In the middle part of his career, Einstein made important contributions to statistical mechanics and quantum theory. Especially notable was his work on the quantum physics of radiation , in which light consists of particles, subsequently called photons . With

2430-646: A platform from which to promote traditional Catholic doctrine. Einstein's former physics professor Hendrik Lorentz and the Polish chemist Marie Curie were also members of the committee. In March and April 1925, Einstein and his wife visited South America, where they spent about a week in Brazil, a week in Uruguay and a month in Argentina. Their tour was suggested by Jorge Duclout (1856–1927) and Mauricio Nirenstein (1877–1935) with

2592-514: A pretext to initiate the invasion. The first German attack of the war came against the Polish defences at Westerplatte . The United Kingdom responded with an ultimatum for Germany to cease military operations, and on 3 September, after the ultimatum was ignored, Britain and France declared war on Germany. During the Phoney War period, the alliance provided no direct military support to Poland, outside of

2754-765: A pretext to worsen relations. On 29 August, Hitler demanded that a Polish plenipotentiary immediately travel to Berlin to negotiate the handover of Danzig , and to allow a plebiscite in the Polish Corridor in which the German minority would vote on secession. The Poles refused to comply with the German demands, and on the night of 30–31 August in a confrontational meeting with the British ambassador Nevile Henderson , Ribbentrop declared that Germany considered its claims rejected. On 1 September 1939, Germany invaded Poland after having staged several false flag border incidents as

2916-515: A professorial salary but with no teaching duties to burden him. Their invitation was all the more appealing to him because Berlin happened to be the home of his latest girlfriend, Elsa Löwenthal. He duly joined the Academy on 24 July 1913, and moved into an apartment in the Berlin district of Dahlem on 1 April 1914. He was installed in his Humboldt University position shortly thereafter. The outbreak of

3078-635: A result of Germany having driven the Jews out, they had lowered their "technical standards" and put the Allies ' technology ahead of theirs. Einstein later contacted leaders of other nations, including Turkey's Prime Minister, İsmet İnönü , to whom he wrote in September 1933, requesting placement of unemployed German-Jewish scientists. As a result of Einstein's letter, Jewish invitees to Turkey eventually totaled over "1,000 saved individuals". Locker-Lampson also submitted

3240-469: A secret protocol that defined German and Soviet "spheres of influence" (western Poland and Lithuania for Germany; eastern Poland , Finland, Estonia , Latvia and Bessarabia for the Soviet Union), and raised the question of continuing Polish independence. The pact neutralised the possibility of Soviet opposition to a campaign against Poland and assured that Germany would not have to face the prospect of

3402-403: A short time after he had given the twelve year old Einstein a geometry textbook, the boy "had worked through the whole book. He thereupon devoted himself to higher mathematics ... Soon the flight of his mathematical genius was so high I could not follow." Einstein recorded that he had "mastered integral and differential calculus " while still just fourteen. His love of algebra and geometry

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3564-695: A similar pact and rejected ceding part of its territory to the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union invaded Finland in November 1939, and was subsequently expelled from the League of Nations for this crime of aggression. Despite overwhelming numerical superiority, Soviet military success during the Winter War was modest, and the Finno-Soviet war ended in March 1940 with some Finnish concessions of territory . In June 1940,

3726-444: A subsequent letter to physicist and friend Max Born , who had already emigrated from Germany to England, Einstein wrote, "... I must confess that the degree of their brutality and cowardice came as something of a surprise." After moving to the US, he described the book burnings as a "spontaneous emotional outburst" by those who "shun popular enlightenment", and "more than anything else in

3888-596: A tour of his studio and introduced him to Chaplin. They had an instant rapport, with Chaplin inviting Einstein and his wife, Elsa, to his home for dinner. Chaplin said Einstein's outward persona, calm and gentle, seemed to conceal a "highly emotional temperament", from which came his "extraordinary intellectual energy". Chaplin's film City Lights was to premiere a few days later in Hollywood, and Chaplin invited Einstein and Elsa to join him as his special guests. Walter Isaacson , Einstein's biographer, described this as "one of

4050-478: A twenty year old Serbian , Mileva Marić . Over the next few years, the pair spent many hours discussing their shared interests and learning about topics in physics that the polytechnic school's lectures did not cover. In his letters to Marić, Einstein confessed that exploring science with her by his side was much more enjoyable than reading a textbook in solitude. Eventually the two students became not only friends but also lovers. Historians of physics are divided on

4212-519: A two-front war, as it had in World War   I. Immediately afterwards, Hitler ordered the attack to proceed on 26 August, but upon hearing that the United Kingdom had concluded a formal mutual assistance pact with Poland and that Italy would maintain neutrality, he decided to delay it. In response to British requests for direct negotiations to avoid war, Germany made demands on Poland, which served as

4374-457: A unifying theory of electromagnetism. By 1905, Albert Einstein had used the constancy of the speed-of-light in Maxwell's theory to unify our notions of space and time into an entity we now call spacetime . In 1915, he expanded this theory of special relativity to a description of gravity, general relativity , using a field to describe the curving geometry of four-dimensional (4D) spacetime. In

4536-503: A visitor is the joyous, positive attitude to life ... The American is friendly, self-confident, optimistic, and without envy." In 1922, Einstein's travels were to the old world rather than the new. He devoted six months to a tour of Asia that saw him speaking in Japan, Singapore and Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon ). After his first public lecture in Tokyo, he met Emperor Yoshihito and his wife at

4698-434: Is well beyond the reach of current accelerators . Grand Unified Theories make predictions for the relative strengths of the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces, and in 1991 LEP determined that supersymmetric theories have the correct ratio of couplings for a Georgi–Glashow Grand Unified Theory. Many Grand Unified Theories (but not Pati–Salam) predict that the proton can decay , and if this were to be seen, details of

4860-539: The Anglo-German Naval Agreement and the German–Polish declaration of non-aggression . The situation became a crisis in late August as German troops continued to mobilise against the Polish border. On 23 August the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact with Germany, after tripartite negotiations for a military alliance between France, the United Kingdom, and Soviet Union had stalled. This pact had

5022-662: The British Empire , with fighting in the Balkans , Mediterranean, and Middle East , the aerial Battle of Britain and the Blitz , and naval Battle of the Atlantic . Through a series of campaigns and treaties, Germany took control of much of continental Europe and formed the Axis alliance with Italy , Japan , and other countries. In June 1941, Germany led the European Axis in an invasion of

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5184-479: The ETH Zurich , to take up a chair in theoretical physics. His teaching activities there centred on thermodynamics and analytical mechanics, and his research interests included the molecular theory of heat, continuum mechanics and the development of a relativistic theory of gravitation. In his work on the latter topic, he was assisted by his friend, Marcel Grossmann, whose knowledge of the kind of mathematics required

5346-623: The First World War in July 1914 marked the beginning of Einstein's gradual estrangement from the nation of his birth. When the " Manifesto of the Ninety-Three " was published in October 1914—a document signed by a host of prominent German thinkers that justified Germany's belligerence—Einstein was one of the few German intellectuals to distance himself from it and sign the alternative, eirenic " Manifesto to

5508-703: The German Empire , Einstein moved to Switzerland in 1895, and at the age of seventeen he enrolled in the mathematics and physics teaching diploma program at the Swiss federal polytechnic school . In 1903, he secured a permanent position at the Swiss Patent Office . In 1905, he submitted a successful PhD dissertation to the University of Zurich . In 1914, he moved to Berlin to join the Prussian Academy of Sciences and

5670-566: The German Revolution of 1918–1919 , and a democratic government, later known as the Weimar Republic , was created. The interwar period saw strife between supporters of the new republic and hardline opponents on both the political right and left. Italy, as an Entente ally, had made some post-war territorial gains; however, Italian nationalists were angered that the promises made by the United Kingdom and France to secure Italian entrance into

5832-765: The German invasion of Poland and the United Kingdom and France 's declaration of war on Germany two days later on 3 September 1939. Dates for the beginning of the Pacific War include the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War on 7 July 1937, or the earlier Japanese invasion of Manchuria , on 19 September 1931. Others follow the British historian A. J. P. Taylor , who stated that the Sino-Japanese War and war in Europe and its colonies occurred simultaneously, and

5994-631: The Humboldt University of Berlin , becoming director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in 1917. In 1933, while Einstein was visiting the United States, Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. Horrified by the Nazi persecution of his fellow Jews, Einstein decided to remain in the US. On the eve of World War II , he endorsed a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt alerting him to

6156-620: The Imperial Palace , with thousands of spectators thronging the streets in the hope of catching a glimpse of him. (In a letter to his sons, he wrote that Japanese people seemed to him to be generally modest, intelligent and considerate, and to have a true appreciation of art. But his picture of them in his diary was less flattering: "[the] intellectual needs of this nation seem to be weaker than their artistic ones – natural disposition?" His journal also contains views of China and India which were uncomplimentary. Of Chinese people, he wrote that "even

6318-518: The Italian mainland , and Allied offensives in the Pacific—cost the Axis powers their initiative and forced them into strategic retreat on all fronts. In 1944, the Western Allies invaded German-occupied France at Normandy , while the Soviet Union regained its territorial losses and pushed Germany and its allies westward. At the same time, Japan suffered reversals in mainland Asia, while the Allies crippled

6480-537: The Japanese Navy and captured key islands . The war in Europe concluded with the liberation of German-occupied territories ; the invasion of Germany by the Western Allies and the Soviet Union, culminating in the fall of Berlin to Soviet troops; Hitler's suicide ; and the German unconditional surrender on 8 May 1945 . Following the refusal of Japan to surrender on the terms of the Potsdam Declaration ,

6642-633: The League of Nations as a force to preserve peace. Both Italy and Ethiopia were member nations, but the League did little when the former clearly violated Article X of the League's Covenant . The United Kingdom and France supported imposing sanctions on Italy for the invasion, but the sanctions were not fully enforced and failed to end the Italian invasion. Italy subsequently dropped its objections to Germany's goal of absorbing Austria . When civil war broke out in Spain, Hitler and Mussolini lent military support to

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6804-693: The Nationalist rebels , led by General Francisco Franco . Italy supported the Nationalists to a greater extent than the Nazis: Mussolini sent more than 70,000 ground troops, 6,000 aviation personnel, and 720 aircraft to Spain. The Soviet Union supported the existing government of the Spanish Republic . More than 30,000 foreign volunteers, known as the International Brigades , also fought against

6966-677: The Rome–Berlin Axis . A month later, Germany and Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact , which Italy joined the following year. The Kuomintang (KMT) party in China launched a unification campaign against regional warlords and nominally unified China in the mid-1920s, but was soon embroiled in a civil war against its former Chinese Communist Party (CCP) allies and new regional warlords . In 1931, an increasingly militaristic Empire of Japan , which had long sought influence in China as

7128-581: The Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact in April 1941. By contrast, the Germans were steadily making preparations for an attack on the Soviet Union, massing forces on the Soviet border. Hitler believed that the United Kingdom's refusal to end the war was based on the hope that the United States and the Soviet Union would enter the war against Germany sooner or later. On 31 July 1940, Hitler decided that

7290-551: The Standard Model of particle physics result from the exchange of gauge bosons . Specifically, the four fundamental interactions to be unified are: Modern unified field theory attempts to bring these four forces and matter together into a single framework. The first successful classical unified field theory was developed by James Clerk Maxwell . In 1820, Hans Christian Ørsted discovered that electric currents exerted forces on magnets , while in 1831, Michael Faraday made

7452-530: The Stresa Front in April 1935 in order to contain Germany, a key step towards military globalisation ; however, that June, the United Kingdom made an independent naval agreement with Germany, easing prior restrictions. The Soviet Union, concerned by Germany's goals of capturing vast areas of Eastern Europe , drafted a treaty of mutual assistance with France. Before taking effect, though, the Franco-Soviet pact

7614-689: The Sudetenland , an area of Czechoslovakia with a predominantly ethnic German population. Soon the United Kingdom and France followed the appeasement policy of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and conceded this territory to Germany in the Munich Agreement , which was made against the wishes of the Czechoslovak government, in exchange for a promise of no further territorial demands. Soon afterwards, Germany and Italy forced Czechoslovakia to cede additional territory to Hungary, and Poland annexed

7776-428: The Tanggu Truce was signed in 1933. Thereafter, Chinese volunteer forces continued the resistance to Japanese aggression in Manchuria , and Chahar and Suiyuan . After the 1936 Xi'an Incident , the Kuomintang and CCP forces agreed on a ceasefire to present a united front to oppose Japan. The Second Italo-Ethiopian War was a brief colonial war that began in October 1935 and ended in May 1936. The war began with

7938-466: The Trans-Olza region of Czechoslovakia. Although all of Germany's stated demands had been satisfied by the agreement, privately Hitler was furious that British interference had prevented him from seizing all of Czechoslovakia in one operation. In subsequent speeches Hitler attacked British and Jewish "war-mongers" and in January 1939 secretly ordered a major build-up of the German navy to challenge British naval supremacy. In March 1939, Germany invaded

8100-506: The Treaty of Craiova . The loss of one-third of Romania's 1939 territory caused a coup against King Carol II, turning Romania into a fascist dictatorship under Marshal Ion Antonescu , with a course set towards the Axis in the hopes of a German guarantee. Meanwhile, German-Soviet political relations and economic co-operation gradually stalled, and both states began preparations for war. In April 1940, Germany invaded Denmark and Norway to protect shipments of iron ore from Sweden , which

8262-401: The United Kingdom and France to declare war on Germany. Poland was divided between Germany and the Soviet Union under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact , in which they had agreed on " spheres of influence " in Eastern Europe. In 1940, the Soviets annexed the Baltic states and parts of Finland and Romania . After the fall of France in June 1940, the war continued mainly between Germany and

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8424-426: The Wehrmacht rapidly advanced to the Channel and cut off the Allied forces in Belgium, trapping the bulk of the Allied armies in a cauldron on the Franco-Belgian border near Lille. The United Kingdom was able to evacuate a significant number of Allied troops from the continent by early June, although they had to abandon almost all their equipment. On 10 June, Italy invaded France , declaring war on both France and

8586-451: The aftermath of World War I and the rise of fascism in Europe and militarism in Japan . Key events leading up to the war included Japan's invasion of Manchuria , the Spanish Civil War , the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War , and Germany's annexations of Austria and the Sudetenland . World War II is generally considered to have begun on 1 September 1939, when Nazi Germany , under Adolf Hitler , invaded Poland , prompting

8748-427: The graviton with the strong and electroweak interactions leads to fundamental difficulties and the resulting theory is not renormalizable . The incompatibility of the two theories remains an outstanding problem in the field of physics. Albert Einstein Albert Einstein ( / ˈ aɪ n s t aɪ n / , EYEN -styne ; German: [ˈalbɛʁt ˈʔaɪnʃtaɪn] ; 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955)

8910-404: The reunification of East and West Germany to take place and resolved most post–World War   II issues. No formal peace treaty between Japan and the Soviet Union was ever signed, although the state of war between the two countries was terminated by the Soviet–Japanese Joint Declaration of 1956 , which also restored full diplomatic relations between them. World War I had radically altered

9072-605: The strategic bombing of population centres and delivery of the only two nuclear weapons ever used in war. World War II was the deadliest conflict in history, resulting in 70 to 85 million deaths , more than half being civilians. Millions died in genocides , including the Holocaust of European Jews, as well as from massacres, starvation, and disease. Following the Allied powers' victory, Germany , Austria , Japan , and Korea were occupied, and war crimes tribunals were conducted against German and Japanese leaders . The causes of World War II included unresolved tensions in

9234-412: The weak nuclear force , electricity, and magnetism could arise from a partially unified electroweak theory . In 1967, Pakistani Abdus Salam and American Steven Weinberg independently revised Glashow's theory by having the masses for the W particle and Z particle arise through spontaneous symmetry breaking with the Higgs mechanism . This unified theory modelled the electroweak interaction as

9396-409: The Allies were attempting to cut off . Denmark capitulated after six hours , and despite Allied support , Norway was conquered within two months. British discontent over the Norwegian campaign led to the resignation of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain , who was replaced by Winston Churchill on 10   May 1940. On the same day, Germany launched an offensive against France . To circumvent

9558-400: The Axis war against the Soviet Union, in Romania's case partially to recapture territory ceded to the Soviet Union . In early June 1940, the Italian Regia Aeronautica attacked and besieged Malta , a British possession. From late summer to early autumn, Italy conquered British Somaliland and made an incursion into British-held Egypt . In October, Italy attacked Greece , but the attack

9720-421: The Blitz , but largely ended in May 1941 after failing to significantly disrupt the British war effort. Using newly captured French ports, the German Navy enjoyed success against an over-extended Royal Navy , using U-boats against British shipping in the Atlantic . The British Home Fleet scored a significant victory on 27   May 1941 by sinking the German battleship Bismarck . In November 1939,

9882-406: The British High Commissioner, welcomed him with a degree of ceremony normally only accorded to a visiting head of state, including a cannon salute. One reception held in his honor was stormed by people determined to hear him speak: he told them that he was happy that Jews were beginning to be recognized as a force in the world. Einstein's decision to tour the eastern hemisphere in 1922 meant that he

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10044-432: The British capital to meet several people prominent in British scientific, political or intellectual life, and to deliver a lecture at King's College . In July 1921, he published an essay, "My First Impression of the U.S.A.", in which he sought to sketch the American character, much as had Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America (1835). He wrote of his transatlantic hosts in highly approving terms: "What strikes

10206-429: The Einstein-Maxwell–Dirac System [Dongen]. This system is (heuristically) the super-classical [Varadarajan] limit of (the not mathematically well-defined) quantum electrodynamics . One can extend this system to include the weak and strong nuclear forces to get the Einstein–Yang-Mills–Dirac System. The French physicist Marie-Antoinette Tonnelat published a paper in the early 1940s on the standard commutation relations for

10368-405: The European Axis declaring war on the US. Japan conquered much of coastal China and Southeast Asia , but its advances in the Pacific were halted in mid-1942 after its defeat in the naval Battle of Midway ; Germany and Italy were defeated in North Africa and at Stalingrad in the Soviet Union. Key setbacks in 1943—including German defeats on the Eastern Front, the Allied invasions of Sicily and

10530-418: The Europeans " instead. However, this expression of his doubts about German policy did not prevent him from being elected to a two-year term as president of the German Physical Society in 1916. When the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics opened its doors the following year—its foundation delayed because of the war—Einstein was appointed its first director, just as Planck and Nernst had promised. Einstein

10692-410: The French possessions of Syria and Lebanon , assisted by the Free French . With the situation in Europe and Asia relatively stable, Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union made preparations for war. With the Soviets wary of mounting tensions with Germany, and the Japanese planning to take advantage of the European War by seizing resource-rich European possessions in Southeast Asia , the two powers signed

10854-423: The German Empire, on 14 March 1879. His parents, secular Ashkenazi Jews , were Hermann Einstein , a salesman and engineer, and Pauline Koch . In 1880, the family moved to Munich 's borough of Ludwigsvorstadt-Isarvorstadt , where Einstein's father and his uncle Jakob founded Elektrotechnische Fabrik J. Einstein & Cie, a company that manufactured electrical equipment based on direct current . He often related

11016-588: The German consulate and surrendered his passport, formally renouncing his German citizenship. The Nazis later sold his boat and converted his cottage into a Hitler Youth camp. In April 1933, Einstein discovered that the new German government had passed laws barring Jews from holding any official positions , including teaching at universities. Historian Gerald Holton describes how, with "virtually no audible protest being raised by their colleagues", thousands of Jewish scientists were suddenly forced to give up their university positions and their names were removed from

11178-426: The Germans, and the last large operational unit of the Polish Army surrendered on 6   October . Despite the military defeat, Poland never surrendered; instead, it formed the Polish government-in-exile and a clandestine state apparatus remained in occupied Poland. A significant part of Polish military personnel evacuated to Romania and Latvia; many of them later fought against the Axis in other theatres of

11340-411: The Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose , he laid the groundwork for Bose-Einstein statistics . For much of the last phase of his academic life, Einstein worked on two endeavors that proved ultimately unsuccessful. First, he advocated against quantum theory's introduction of fundamental randomness into science's picture of the world, objecting that "God does not play dice". Second, he attempted to devise

11502-500: The Investigation of the State of the Ether in a Magnetic Field". Einstein excelled at physics and mathematics from an early age, and soon acquired the mathematical expertise normally only found in a child several years his senior. He began teaching himself algebra, calculus and Euclidean geometry when he was twelve; he made such rapid progress that he discovered an original proof of the Pythagorean theorem before his thirteenth birthday. A family tutor, Max Talmud , said that only

11664-505: The Nationalists. Both Germany and the Soviet Union used this proxy war as an opportunity to test in combat their most advanced weapons and tactics. The Nationalists won the civil war in April 1939; Franco, now dictator, remained officially neutral during World War   II but generally favoured the Axis . His greatest collaboration with Germany was the sending of volunteers to fight on the Eastern Front . In July 1937, Japan captured

11826-695: The Nobel award, the Royal Society 's Copley Medal , was not hung around Einstein's neck until 1925. He was elected an International Member of the American Philosophical Society in 1930. Einstein resigned from the Prussian Academy in March 1933. His accomplishments in Berlin had included the completion of the general theory of relativity, proving the Einstein–de Haas effect , contributing to

11988-549: The Nobel citation displayed a degree of doubt even about the work on photoelectricity that it acknowledged: it did not assent to Einstein's notion of the particulate nature of light, which only won over the entire scientific community when S. N. Bose derived the Planck spectrum in 1924. That same year, Einstein was elected an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . Britain's closest equivalent of

12150-832: The Parish of Roughton, Norfolk . To protect Einstein, Locker-Lampson had two bodyguards watch over him; a photo of them carrying shotguns and guarding Einstein was published in the Daily Herald on 24 July 1933. Locker-Lampson took Einstein to meet Winston Churchill at his home, and later, Austen Chamberlain and former Prime Minister Lloyd George . Einstein asked them to help bring Jewish scientists out of Germany. British historian Martin Gilbert notes that Churchill responded immediately, and sent his friend, physicist Frederick Lindemann , to Germany to seek out Jewish scientists and place them in British universities. Churchill later observed that as

12312-505: The Royal Navy putting three Italian battleships out of commission after a carrier attack at Taranto , and neutralising several more warships at the Battle of Cape Matapan . Italian defeats prompted Germany to deploy an expeditionary force to North Africa; at the end of March 1941, Rommel 's Afrika Korps launched an offensive which drove back Commonwealth forces. In less than a month, Axis forces advanced to western Egypt and besieged

12474-584: The Soviet Union occupied the entire territories of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, as well as the Romanian regions of Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina, and the Hertsa region . In August 1940, Hitler imposed the Second Vienna Award on Romania which led to the transfer of Northern Transylvania to Hungary. In September 1940, Bulgaria demanded Southern Dobruja from Romania with German and Italian support, leading to

12636-690: The Soviet Union , opening the Eastern Front and initially making large territorial gains. Japan aimed to dominate East Asia and the Asia-Pacific , and by 1937 was at war with the Republic of China . In December 1941, Japan attacked American and British territories in Southeast Asia and the Central Pacific , including Pearl Harbor in Hawaii , which resulted in the US and the UK declaring war against Japan, and

12798-621: The Soviet Union and Mongolia . The Japanese doctrine of Hokushin-ron , which emphasised Japan's expansion northward, was favoured by the Imperial Army during this time. This policy would prove difficult to maintain in light of the Japanese defeat at Khalkin Gol in 1939, the ongoing Second Sino-Japanese War and ally Nazi Germany pursuing neutrality with the Soviets. Japan and the Soviet Union eventually signed

12960-738: The Soviet Union should be eliminated and aimed for the conquest of Ukraine , the Baltic states and Byelorussia . However, other senior German officials like Ribbentrop saw an opportunity to create a Euro-Asian bloc against the British Empire by inviting the Soviet Union into the Tripartite Pact. In November 1940, negotiations took place to determine if the Soviet Union would join the pact. The Soviets showed some interest but asked for concessions from Finland, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Japan that Germany considered unacceptable. On 18 December 1940, Hitler issued

13122-565: The Sun that took place on 29 May 1919 provided an opportunity to put his theory of gravitational lensing to the test, and observations performed by Sir Arthur Eddington yielded results that were consistent with his calculations. Eddington's work was reported at length in newspapers around the world. On 7 November 1919, for example, the leading British newspaper, The Times , printed a banner headline that read: "Revolution in Science ;– New Theory of

13284-546: The Swiss authorities deemed him medically unfit for military service. He found that Swiss schools too appeared to have no use for him, failing to offer him a teaching position despite the almost two years that he spent applying for one. Eventually it was with the help of Marcel Grossmann 's father that he secured a post in Bern at the Swiss Patent Office , as an assistant examiner – level III . Patent applications that landed on Einstein's desk for his evaluation included ideas for

13446-402: The US dropped the first atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August. Faced with an imminent invasion of the Japanese archipelago , the possibility of further atomic bombings, and the Soviet declaration of war against Japan and its invasion of Manchuria , Japan announced its unconditional surrender on 15 August and signed a surrender document on 2 September 1945 , marking

13608-568: The United Kingdom and France guaranteed their support for Polish independence ; when Italy conquered Albania in April 1939, the same guarantee was extended to the Kingdoms of Romania and Greece . Shortly after the Franco - British pledge to Poland, Germany and Italy formalised their own alliance with the Pact of Steel . Hitler accused the United Kingdom and Poland of trying to "encircle" Germany and renounced

13770-538: The United Kingdom attacked on 3   July in an attempt to prevent its seizure by Germany. The air Battle of Britain began in early July with Luftwaffe attacks on shipping and harbours . The German campaign for air superiority started in August but its failure to defeat RAF Fighter Command forced the indefinite postponement of the proposed German invasion of Britain . The German strategic bombing offensive intensified with night attacks on London and other cities in

13932-455: The United Kingdom. The Germans turned south against the weakened French army, and Paris fell to them on 14   June. Eight days later France signed an armistice with Germany ; it was divided into German and Italian occupation zones , and an unoccupied rump state under the Vichy Regime , which, though officially neutral, was generally aligned with Germany. France kept its fleet, which

14094-651: The United States in 1933. In 1935, she was diagnosed with heart and kidney problems. She died in December 1936. A volume of Einstein's letters released by Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2006 added further names to the catalog of women with whom he was romantically involved. They included Margarete Lebach (a married Austrian), Estella Katzenellenbogen (the rich owner of a florist business), Toni Mendel (a wealthy Jewish widow) and Ethel Michanowski (a Berlin socialite), with whom he spent time and from whom he accepted gifts while married to Löwenthal. After being widowed, Einstein

14256-640: The United States was assisting China and the Western Allies, and had amended the Neutrality Act to allow "cash and carry" purchases by the Allies. In 1940, following the German capture of Paris, the size of the United States Navy was significantly increased . In September the United States further agreed to a trade of American destroyers for British bases . Still, a large majority of the American public continued to oppose any direct military intervention in

14418-532: The United States, drawn back to the US by the offer of a two month research fellowship at the California Institute of Technology . Caltech supported him in his wish that he should not be exposed to quite as much attention from the media as he had experienced when visiting the US in 1921, and he therefore declined all the invitations to receive prizes or make speeches that his admirers poured down upon him. But he remained willing to allow his fans at least some of

14580-578: The Universe ;– Newtonian Ideas Overthrown". With Eddington's eclipse observations widely reported not just in academic journals but by the popular press as well, Einstein became "perhaps the world's first celebrity scientist", a genius who had shattered a paradigm that had been basic to physicists' understanding of the universe since the seventeenth century. Einstein began his new life as an intellectual icon in America, where he arrived on 2 April 1921. He

14742-735: The University of Zurich, much admired by Alfred Kleiner, led to Zürich's luring him away from Bern with a newly created associate professorship. Promotion to a full professorship followed in April 1911, when he accepted a chair at the German Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague, a move which required him to become an Austrian citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire . His time in Prague saw him producing eleven research papers. In July 1912, he returned to his alma mater ,

14904-590: The Yellow River ; this manoeuvre bought time for the Chinese to prepare their defences at Wuhan , but the city was taken by October. Japanese military victories did not bring about the collapse of Chinese resistance that Japan had hoped to achieve; instead, the Chinese government relocated inland to Chongqing and continued the war. In the mid-to-late 1930s, Japanese forces in Manchukuo had sporadic border clashes with

15066-721: The Z and W bosons were first produced at CERN by Carlo Rubbia 's team. For their insights, Glashow, Salam, and Weinberg were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979. Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer received the Prize in 1984. After Gerardus 't Hooft showed the Glashow–Weinberg–Salam electroweak interactions to be mathematically consistent, the electroweak theory became a template for further attempts at unifying forces. In 1974, Sheldon Glashow and Howard Georgi proposed unifying

15228-789: The age of sixteen, Einstein sat the entrance examination for the federal polytechnic school (later the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, ETH) in Zürich, Switzerland. He failed to reach the required standard in the general part of the test, but performed with distinction in physics and mathematics. On the advice of the polytechnic's principal, he completed his secondary education at the Argovian cantonal school (a gymnasium ) in Aarau , Switzerland, graduating in 1896. While lodging in Aarau with

15390-419: The basis of nature to be fields, and often by attempting to explain physical constants of nature . Earlier attempts based on classical physics are described in the article on classical unified field theories . The goal of a unified field theory has led to a great deal of progress for future theoretical physics , and progress continues. All four of the known fundamental forces are mediated by fields, which in

15552-451: The capital Nanking in December 1937. After the fall of Nanking, tens or hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians and disarmed combatants were murdered by the Japanese . In March 1938, Nationalist Chinese forces won their first major victory at Taierzhuang , but then the city of Xuzhou was taken by the Japanese in May. In June 1938, Chinese forces stalled the Japanese advance by flooding

15714-551: The care of his mother or in temporary confinement in an asylum. After her death, he was committed permanently to Burghölzli , the Psychiatric University Hospital in Zürich. Einstein graduated from the federal polytechnic school in 1900, duly certified as competent to teach mathematics and physics. His successful acquisition of Swiss citizenship in February 1901 was not followed by the usual sequel of conscription ;

15876-542: The children are spiritless and look obtuse... It would be a pity if these Chinese supplant all other races. For the likes of us the mere thought is unspeakably dreary". ) He was greeted with even greater enthusiasm on the last leg of his tour, in which he spent twelve days in Mandatory Palestine , newly entrusted to British rule by the League of Nations in the aftermath of the First World War. Sir Herbert Samuel ,

16038-403: The conflict well into 1941. In December 1940, Roosevelt accused Hitler of planning world conquest and ruled out any negotiations as useless, calling for the United States to become an " arsenal of democracy " and promoting Lend-Lease programmes of military and humanitarian aid to support the British war effort; Lend-Lease was later extended to the other Allies, including the Soviet Union after it

16200-515: The creation of a " New Roman Empire ". Adolf Hitler , after an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the German government in 1923, eventually became the Chancellor of Germany in 1933 when Paul von Hindenburg and the Reichstag appointed him. Following Hindenburg's death in 1934, Hitler proclaimed himself Führer of Germany and abolished democracy, espousing a radical, racially motivated revision of

16362-491: The curriculum, allotting him a top grade of 6 for history, physics, algebra, geometry, and descriptive geometry. At seventeen, he enrolled in the four-year mathematics and physics teaching diploma program at the federal polytechnic school. Marie Winteler, a year older than him, took up a teaching post in Olsberg , Switzerland. The five other polytechnic school freshmen following the same course as Einstein included just one woman,

16524-471: The decay products could give hints at more aspects of the Grand Unified Theory. It is at present unknown if the proton can decay, although experiments have determined a lower bound of 10 years for its lifetime. Theoretical physicists have not yet formulated a widely accepted, consistent theory that combines general relativity and quantum mechanics to form a theory of everything . Trying to combine

16686-739: The dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian Empires. To prevent a future world war, the League of Nations was established in 1920 by the Paris Peace Conference . The organisation's primary goals were to prevent armed conflict through collective security, military, and naval disarmament , as well as settling international disputes through peaceful negotiations and arbitration. Despite strong pacifist sentiment after World War   I , irredentist and revanchist nationalism had emerged in several European states. These sentiments were especially marked in Germany because of

16848-405: The divorce settlement, Einstein agreed that if he were to win a Nobel Prize, he would give the money that he received to Marić; he won the prize two years later. Einstein married Löwenthal in 1919. In 1923, he began a relationship with a secretary named Betty Neumann, the niece of his close friend Hans Mühsam. Löwenthal nevertheless remained loyal to him, accompanying him when he emigrated to

17010-683: The end of May completed the German conquest of the Balkans. Partisan warfare subsequently broke out against the Axis occupation of Yugoslavia , which continued until the end of the war. In the Middle East in May, Commonwealth forces quashed an uprising in Iraq which had been supported by German aircraft from bases within Vichy-controlled Syria . Between June and July, British-led forces invaded and occupied

17172-463: The end of the war. World War II changed the political alignment and social structure of the world, and it set the foundation of international relations for the rest of the 20th century and into the 21st century. The United Nations was established to foster international cooperation and prevent conflicts, with the victorious great powers—China, France, the Soviet Union, the UK, and the US—becoming

17334-469: The fall of 1915, his reimagining of the mathematics of gravitation in terms of Riemannian geometry was complete, and he applied his new theory not just to the behavior of the Sun as a gravitational lens but also to another astronomical phenomenon, the precession of the perihelion of Mercury (a slow drift in the point in Mercury's elliptical orbit at which it approaches the Sun most closely). A total eclipse of

17496-550: The family of Jost Winteler , he fell in love with Winteler's daughter, Marie. (His sister, Maja , later married Winteler's son Paul. ) In January 1896, with his father's approval, Einstein renounced his citizenship of the German Kingdom of Württemberg in order to avoid conscription into military service . The Matura (graduation for the successful completion of higher secondary schooling), awarded to him in September 1896, acknowledged him to have performed well across most of

17658-471: The field exists. In 1911, he used the principle to estimate the amount by which a ray of light from a distant star would be bent by the gravitational pull of the Sun as it passed close to the Sun's photosphere (that is, the Sun's apparent surface). He reworked his calculation in 1913, having now found a way to model gravitation with the Riemann curvature tensor of a non-Euclidean four-dimensional spacetime . By

17820-566: The first step of what its government saw as the country's right to rule Asia , staged the Mukden incident as a pretext to invade Manchuria and establish the puppet state of Manchukuo . China appealed to the League of Nations to stop the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. Japan withdrew from the League of Nations after being condemned for its incursion into Manchuria. The two nations then fought several battles, in Shanghai , Rehe and Hebei , until

17982-843: The former Chinese imperial capital of Peking after instigating the Marco Polo Bridge incident , which culminated in the Japanese campaign to invade all of China. The Soviets quickly signed a non-aggression pact with China to lend materiel support, effectively ending China's prior cooperation with Germany . From September to November, the Japanese attacked Taiyuan , engaged the Kuomintang Army around Xinkou , and fought Communist forces in Pingxingguan . Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek deployed his best army to defend Shanghai , but after three months of fighting, Shanghai fell. The Japanese continued to push Chinese forces back, capturing

18144-403: The fourth spatial dimension be curled up into a small, unobserved circle. In Kaluza–Klein theory , the gravitational curvature of the extra spatial direction behaves as an additional force similar to electromagnetism. These and other models of electromagnetism and gravity were pursued by Albert Einstein in his attempts at a classical unified field theory . By 1930 Einstein had already considered

18306-512: The invasion of the Ethiopian Empire (also known as Abyssinia ) by the armed forces of the Kingdom of Italy ( Regno d'Italia ), which was launched from Italian Somaliland and Eritrea . The war resulted in the military occupation of Ethiopia and its annexation into the newly created colony of Italian East Africa ( Africa Orientale Italiana , or AOI); in addition it exposed the weakness of

18468-481: The life of the mind to work more closely with their counterparts in other countries. He was appointed as a German delegate rather than as a representative of Switzerland because of the machinations of two Catholic activists, Oskar Halecki and Giuseppe Motta . By persuading Secretary General Eric Drummond to deny Einstein the place on the committee reserved for a Swiss thinker, they created an opening for Gonzague de Reynold , who used his League of Nations position as

18630-449: The most memorable scenes in the new era of celebrity". Chaplin visited Einstein at his home on a later trip to Berlin and recalled his "modest little flat" and the piano at which he had begun writing his theory. Chaplin speculated that it was "possibly used as kindling wood by the Nazis". In February 1933, while on a visit to the United States, Einstein knew he could not return to Germany with

18792-410: The observation that time-varying magnetic fields could induce electric currents. Until then, electricity and magnetism had been thought of as unrelated phenomena. In 1864, Maxwell published his famous paper on a dynamical theory of the electromagnetic field . This was the first example of a theory that was able to encompass previously separate field theories (namely electricity and magnetism) to provide

18954-497: The permanent members of its security council . The Soviet Union and the United States emerged as rival superpowers , setting the stage for the Cold War . In the wake of European devastation, the influence of its great powers waned, triggering the decolonisation of Africa and Asia . Most countries whose industries had been damaged moved towards economic recovery and expansion . World War II began in Europe on 1 September 1939 with

19116-424: The phenomena of capillarity"), in which he proposed a model of intermolecular attraction that he afterwards disavowed as worthless, was published in the journal Annalen der Physik in 1901. His 24-page doctoral dissertation also addressed a topic in molecular physics. Titled "Eine neue Bestimmung der Moleküldimensionen" ("A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions") and dedicated to his friend Marcel Grossman, it

19278-571: The political European map with the defeat of the Central Powers —including Austria-Hungary , Germany , Bulgaria , and the Ottoman Empire —and the 1917 Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia , which led to the founding of the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the victorious Allies of World War I , such as France, Belgium, Italy, Romania, and Greece, gained territory, and new nation-states were created out of

19440-583: The port of Tobruk . By late March 1941, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia signed the Tripartite Pact ; however, the Yugoslav government was overthrown two days later by pro-British nationalists. Germany and Italy responded with simultaneous invasions of both Yugoslavia and Greece , commencing on 6 April 1941; both nations were forced to surrender within the month. The airborne invasion of the Greek island of Crete at

19602-454: The potential German nuclear weapons program and recommended that the US begin similar research , though he generally viewed the idea of nuclear weapons with great dismay. In 1905, he published four groundbreaking papers , sometimes described as his annus mirabilis (miracle year). These papers outlined a theory of the photoelectric effect, explained Brownian motion , introduced his special theory of relativity, and demonstrated that if

19764-450: The president of Columbia University , who described Einstein as "the ruling monarch of the mind". Harry Emerson Fosdick , pastor at New York's Riverside Church , gave Einstein a tour of the church and showed him a full-size statue that the church made of Einstein, standing at the entrance. Also during his stay in New York, he joined a crowd of 15,000 people at Madison Square Garden during

19926-463: The quantized spin-2 field. She continued this work in collaboration with Erwin Schrödinger after World War II . In the 1960s Mendel Sachs proposed a generally covariant field theory that did not require recourse to renormalization or perturbation theory. In 1965, Tonnelat published a book on the state of research on unified field theories. In 1963, American physicist Sheldon Glashow proposed that

20088-409: The quantum theory of radiation, and the development of Bose–Einstein statistics . In 1907, Einstein reached a milestone on his long journey from his special theory of relativity to a new idea of gravitation with the formulation of his equivalence principle , which asserts that an observer in an infinitesimally small box falling freely in a gravitational field would be unable to find any evidence that

20250-427: The question of the extent to which Marić contributed to the insights of Einstein's annus mirabilis publications. There is at least some evidence that he was influenced by her scientific ideas, but there are scholars who doubt whether her impact on his thought was of any great significance at all. Correspondence between Einstein and Marić, discovered and published in 1987, revealed that in early 1902, while Marić

20412-693: The remainder of Czechoslovakia and subsequently split it into the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and a pro-German client state , the Slovak Republic . Hitler also delivered an ultimatum to Lithuania on 20 March 1939, forcing the concession of the Klaipėda Region , formerly the German Memelland . Greatly alarmed and with Hitler making further demands on the Free City of Danzig ,

20574-399: The rise to power of the Nazis under Germany's new chancellor, Adolf Hitler . While at American universities in early 1933, he undertook his third two-month visiting professorship at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. In February and March 1933, the Gestapo repeatedly raided his family's apartment in Berlin. He and his wife Elsa returned to Europe in March, and during

20736-420: The rolls of institutions where they were employed. A month later, Einstein's works were among those targeted by the German Student Union in the Nazi book burnings , with Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels proclaiming, "Jewish intellectualism is dead." One German magazine included him in a list of enemies of the German regime with the phrase, "not yet hanged", offering a $ 5,000 bounty on his head. In

20898-410: The significant territorial, colonial, and financial losses imposed by the Treaty of Versailles . Under the treaty, Germany lost around 13 percent of its home territory and all its overseas possessions , while German annexation of other states was prohibited, reparations were imposed, and limits were placed on the size and capability of the country's armed forces . The German Empire was dissolved in

21060-402: The special theory is correct, mass and energy are equivalent to each other. In 1915, he proposed a general theory of relativity that extended his system of mechanics to incorporate gravitation . A cosmological paper that he published the following year laid out the implications of general relativity for the modeling of the structure and evolution of the universe as a whole. In 1917, he wrote

21222-447: The start or prelude to World War II. The exact date of the war's end also is not universally agreed upon. It was generally accepted at the time that the war ended with the armistice of 15 August 1945 ( V-J Day ), rather than with the formal surrender of Japan on 2 September 1945, which officially ended the war in Asia . A peace treaty between Japan and the Allies was signed in 1951. A 1990 treaty regarding Germany's future allowed

21384-415: The strong Maginot Line fortifications on the Franco-German border, Germany directed its attack at the neutral nations of Belgium , the Netherlands , and Luxembourg . The Germans carried out a flanking manoeuvre through the Ardennes region, which was mistakenly perceived by the Allies as an impenetrable natural barrier against armoured vehicles. By successfully implementing new Blitzkrieg tactics,

21546-420: The strong and electroweak interactions into the Georgi–Glashow model , the first Grand Unified Theory , which would have observable effects for energies much above 100 GeV. Since then there have been several proposals for Grand Unified Theories, e.g. the Pati–Salam model , although none is currently universally accepted. A major problem for experimental tests of such theories is the energy scale involved, which

21708-405: The support of several Argentine scholars, including Julio Rey Pastor , Jakob Laub , and Leopoldo Lugones . and was financed primarily by the Council of the University of Buenos Aires and the Asociación Hebraica Argentina (Argentine Hebraic Association) with a smaller contribution from the Argentine-Germanic Cultural Institution. In December 1930, Einstein began another significant sojourn in

21870-427: The time with him that they requested. After arriving in New York City, Einstein was taken to various places and events, including Chinatown , a lunch with the editors of The New York Times , and a performance of Carmen at the Metropolitan Opera , where he was cheered by the audience on his arrival. During the days following, he was given the keys to the city by Mayor Jimmy Walker and met Nicholas Murray Butler ,

22032-805: The transmission of signals and the synchronization of clocks, matters which also figured in some of the inventions submitted to him for assessment. In 1902, Einstein and some friends whom he had met in Bern formed a group that held regular meetings to discuss science and philosophy. Their choice of a name for their club, the Olympia Academy , was an ironic comment upon its far from Olympian status. Sometimes they were joined by Marić, who limited her participation in their proceedings to careful listening. The thinkers whose works they reflected upon included Henri Poincaré , Ernst Mach and David Hume , all of whom significantly influenced Einstein's own subsequent ideas and beliefs. Einstein's first paper, "Folgerungen aus den Capillaritätserscheinungen" ("Conclusions drawn from

22194-408: The trip, they learned that the German Reichstag had passed the Enabling Act on 23 March, transforming Hitler's government into a de facto legal dictatorship, and that they would not be able to proceed to Berlin. Later on, they heard that their cottage had been raided by the Nazis and Einstein's personal sailboat confiscated. Upon landing in Antwerp , Belgium on 28 March, Einstein immediately went to

22356-415: The two wars became World War II in 1941. Other proposed starting dates for World War II include the Italian invasion of Abyssinia on 3 October 1935. The British historian Antony Beevor views the beginning of World War   II as the Battles of Khalkhin Gol fought between Japan and the forces of Mongolia and the Soviet Union from May to September 1939. Others view the Spanish Civil War as

22518-407: The war were not fulfilled in the peace settlement. From 1922 to 1925, the Fascist movement led by Benito Mussolini seized power in Italy with a nationalist, totalitarian , and class collaborationist agenda that abolished representative democracy, repressed socialist, left-wing, and liberal forces, and pursued an aggressive expansionist foreign policy aimed at making Italy a world power, promising

22680-475: The war. Germany annexed western Poland and occupied central Poland ; the Soviet Union annexed eastern Poland ; small shares of Polish territory were transferred to Lithuania and Slovakia . On 6 October, Hitler made a public peace overture to the United Kingdom and France but said that the future of Poland was to be determined exclusively by Germany and the Soviet Union. The proposal was rejected and Hitler ordered an immediate offensive against France, which

22842-404: The west halted the German advance for several days, but it was outflanked and encircled by the Wehrmacht . Remnants of the Polish army broke through to besieged Warsaw . On 17 September 1939, two days after signing a cease-fire with Japan , the Soviet Union invaded Poland under the supposed pretext that the Polish state had ceased to exist. On 27 September, the Warsaw garrison surrendered to

23004-483: The world order , and soon began a massive rearmament campaign . France, seeking to secure its alliance with Italy, allowed Italy a free hand in Ethiopia , which Italy desired as a colonial possession. The situation was aggravated in early 1935 when the Territory of the Saar Basin was legally reunited with Germany, and Hitler repudiated the Treaty of Versailles, accelerated his rearmament programme, and introduced conscription. The United Kingdom, France and Italy formed

23166-401: The world, fear the influence of men of intellectual independence". Einstein was now without a permanent home, unsure where he would live and work, and equally worried about the fate of countless other scientists still in Germany. Aided by the Academic Assistance Council , founded in April 1933 by British Liberal politician William Beveridge to help academics escape Nazi persecution, Einstein

23328-420: The year being celebrated as an annus mirabilis for physics akin to 1666 (the year in which Isaac Newton experienced his greatest epiphanies). The publications deeply impressed Einstein's contemporaries. Einstein's sabbatical as a civil servant approached its end in 1908, when he secured a junior teaching position at the University of Bern . In 1909, a lecture on relativistic electrodynamics that he gave at

23490-572: The years following the creation of the general theory, a large number of physicists and mathematicians enthusiastically participated in the attempt to unify the then-known fundamental interactions. Given later developments in this domain, of particular interest are the theories of Hermann Weyl of 1919, who introduced the concept of an (electromagnetic) gauge field in a classical field theory and, two years later, that of Theodor Kaluza , who extended General Relativity to five dimensions . Continuing in this latter direction, Oscar Klein proposed in 1926 that

23652-554: Was invaded by Germany. The United States started strategic planning to prepare for a full-scale offensive against Germany. At the end of September 1940, the Tripartite Pact formally united Japan, Italy, and Germany as the Axis powers . The Tripartite Pact stipulated that any country—with the exception of the Soviet Union—that attacked any Axis Power would be forced to go to war against all three. The Axis expanded in November 1940 when Hungary , Slovakia , and Romania joined. Romania and Hungary later made major contributions to

23814-410: Was a global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies and the Axis powers . Nearly all the world's countries —including all the great powers —participated, with many investing all available economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities in pursuit of total war , blurring the distinction between military and civilian resources. Tanks and aircraft played major roles , with the latter enabling

23976-434: Was a German-born theoretical physicist who is widely held as one of the most influential scientists . Best known for developing the theory of relativity , Einstein also made important contributions to quantum mechanics . His mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc , which arises from special relativity , has been called "the world's most famous equation". He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics . Born in

24138-405: Was a fractious pupil who found the Gymnasium's regimen and teaching methods far from congenial. He later wrote that the school's policy of strict rote learning was harmful to creativity. At the end of December 1894, a letter from a doctor persuaded the Luitpold's authorities to release him from its care, and he joined his family in Pavia. While in Italy as a teenager, he wrote an essay entitled "On

24300-409: Was able to leave Germany. He rented a house in De Haan, Belgium, where he lived for a few months. In late July 1933, he visited England for about six weeks at the invitation of the British Member of Parliament Commander Oliver Locker-Lampson , who had become friends with him in the preceding years. Locker-Lampson invited him to stay near his Cromer home in a secluded wooden cabin on Roughton Heath in

24462-406: Was born in Bern , Switzerland. Their son Eduard was born in Zürich in July 1910. In letters that Einstein wrote to Marie Winteler in the months before Eduard's arrival, he described his love for his wife as "misguided" and mourned the "missed life" that he imagined he would have enjoyed if he had married Winteler instead: "I think of you in heartfelt love every spare minute and am so unhappy as only

24624-414: Was briefly in a relationship with Margarita Konenkova, thought by some to be a Russian spy; her husband, the Russian sculptor Sergei Konenkov , created the bronze bust of Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Following an episode of acute mental illness at about the age of twenty, Einstein's son Eduard was diagnosed with schizophrenia . He spent the remainder of his life either in

24786-401: Was completed on 30 April 1905 and approved by Professor Alfred Kleiner of the University of Zurich three months later. (Einstein was formally awarded his PhD on 15 January 1906.) Four other pieces of work that Einstein completed in 1905— his famous papers on the photoelectric effect , Brownian motion , his special theory of relativity and the equivalence of mass and energy —have led to

24948-417: Was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1920, and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1921 . In 1922, he was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect". At this point some physicists still regarded the general theory of relativity skeptically, and

25110-438: Was greater than his own. In the spring of 1913, two German visitors, Max Planck and Walther Nernst , called upon Einstein in Zürich in the hope of persuading him to relocate to Berlin. They offered him membership of the Prussian Academy of Sciences , the directorship of the planned Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics and a chair at the Humboldt University of Berlin that would allow him to pursue his research supported by

25272-403: Was postponed until the spring of 1940 due to bad weather. After the outbreak of war in Poland, Stalin threatened Estonia , Latvia , and Lithuania with military invasion, forcing the three Baltic countries to sign pacts allowing the creation of Soviet military bases in these countries; in October 1939, significant Soviet military contingents were moved there. Finland refused to sign

25434-657: Was repulsed with heavy Italian casualties; the campaign ended within months with minor territorial changes. To assist Italy and prevent Britain from gaining a foothold, Germany prepared to invade the Balkans, which would threaten Romanian oil fields and strike against British dominance of the Mediterranean. In December 1940, British Empire forces began counter-offensives against Italian forces in Egypt and Italian East Africa . The offensives were successful; by early February 1941, Italy had lost control of eastern Libya, and large numbers of Italian troops had been taken prisoner. The Italian Navy also suffered significant defeats, with

25596-441: Was required to go through the bureaucracy of the League of Nations, which rendered it essentially toothless. The United States, concerned with events in Europe and Asia, passed the Neutrality Act in August of the same year. Hitler defied the Versailles and Locarno Treaties by remilitarising the Rhineland in March 1936, encountering little opposition due to the policy of appeasement . In October 1936, Germany and Italy formed

25758-496: Was so great that at twelve, he was already confident that nature could be understood as a "mathematical structure". At thirteen, when his range of enthusiasms had broadened to include music and philosophy, Talmud introduced Einstein to Kant 's Critique of Pure Reason . Kant became his favorite philosopher; according to Talmud, "At the time he was still a child, only thirteen years old, yet Kant's works, incomprehensible to ordinary mortals, seemed to be clear to him." In 1895, at

25920-418: Was unable to go to Stockholm in the December of that year to participate in the Nobel prize ceremony. His place at the traditional Nobel banquet was taken by a German diplomat, who gave a speech praising him not only as a physicist but also as a campaigner for peace. A two-week visit to Spain that he undertook in 1923 saw him collecting another award, a membership of the Spanish Academy of Sciences signified by

26082-400: Was visiting her parents in Novi Sad , she gave birth to a daughter, Lieserl . When Marić returned to Switzerland it was without the child, whose fate is uncertain. A letter of Einstein's that he wrote in September 1903 suggests that the girl was either given up for adoption or died of scarlet fever in infancy. Einstein and Marić married in January 1903. In May 1904, their son Hans Albert

26244-433: Was welcomed to New York City by Mayor John Francis Hylan , and then spent three weeks giving lectures and attending receptions. He spoke several times at Columbia University and Princeton , and in Washington, he visited the White House with representatives of the National Academy of Sciences . He returned to Europe via London, where he was the guest of the philosopher and statesman Viscount Haldane . He used his time in

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