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 abut 14, 1879 in Ulm,Germany. I was not an inventor in the conventional sense. I was a physicistand theorist. My inventions were not tangible things, but ideas I put on report cardand may later on have led to inventions. I was not a good student in school. Idid not pay solicitude to teachers because I found their lectures and teachingsboring. Often I would skip class to go study physics on my own. By the age oftwelve I had taught myself euclidian Geometry, and slowly beginning to developemy own theories in physics.     My first theoretical paper was on Brownian motion. The paper discussedthe significant predictions I made about particles that are haphazard distributedin a fluid. My next paper was on the photoelectric effect, which contained arevolutionary hypothesis on the nature of light. I proposed that under certain destiny light can be consider ed as consisting of particles, and I alsohypothesized that energy carried by any light particle, called a photon, isproportional 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 Plancks constant,and v is the frequency of the radiation. This proposal, that the energycontained within a light beam is transferred by individual units, or quanta,contradicted the hundred year old tradition of considering light as amanifestation of continuous processes.     My third and most impotant paper, "On the Electrodynamics of lamentableBodies", contained what has become known as the special theory of relativity.Since the time of Sir Issac Newton, scientists had been trying to understandthe nature of matter and radiation, and how they interacted in some unifiedworld picture. The mail service that mechanical laws are fundamental has becomeknown as the mechanical world view, and the position that e lectrical laws arefundamental has become known as the electromagnetic world view. Neitherapproach, however, is capable of providing a consistent explanation for the wayradiation and matter interact when viewed from different inertial frames ofreference, that is, an interaction viewed concurrently by an observer at restand an observer moving at unifrom speed.     In the Spring of 1905 after considering these capers for ten years, Irealized that the crux of the problem lay not in a theory of matter but in atheory of measuerment. At the heart of my special theory of relativity was therealization thet all measurements of time and space depend on judgments as to