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Wanting to understand how Einstein learned physics may, at first, seem as pointless as trying to fly by watching birds and flapping your arms really hard. How do you emulate someone who is synonymous with genius? However, I think the investigation can still bear fruits, even if you or I might not have the intellectual gifts to revolutionize physics. Whatever Einstein did to learn, he clearly did something right, so there’s merit in trying to figure out what that was……..Continue reading…..

By: Scott Young

Source: Pocket

Einstein became an American citizen in 1940. Not long after settling into his career at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, he expressed his appreciation of the meritocracy in American culture compared to Europe. He recognized the “right of individuals to say and think what they pleased” without social barriers. As a result, individuals were encouraged, he said, to be more creative, a trait he valued from his early education.

Einstein joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Princeton, where he campaigned for the civil rights of African Americans. He considered racism America’s “worst disease”, seeing it as handed down from one generation to the next. As part of his involvement, he corresponded with civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois and was prepared to testify on his behalf during his trial as an alleged foreign agent in 1951.

When Einstein offered to be a character witness for Du Bois, the judge decided to drop the case. In 1946, Einstein visited Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, a historically black college, where he was awarded an honorary degree. Lincoln was the first university in the United States to grant college degrees to African Americans; alumni include Langston Hughes and Thurgood Marshall. Einstein gave a speech about racism in America, adding, I do not intend to be quiet about it.

A resident of Princeton recalls that Einstein had once paid the college tuition for a black student. Einstein has said, Being a Jew myself, perhaps I can understand and empathize with how black people feel as victims of discrimination. Isaacson writes that “When Marian Anderson, the black contralto, came to Princeton for a concert in 1937, the Nassau Inn refused her a room. So Einstein invited her to stay at his house on Main Street, in what was a deeply personal as well as symbolic gesture …

Whenever she returned to Princeton, she stayed with Einstein, her last visit coming just two months before he died. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. General relativity (GR) is a theory of gravitation that was developed by Einstein between 1907 and 1915.

According to it, the observed gravitational attraction between masses results from the warping of spacetime by those masses. General relativity has developed into an essential tool in modern astrophysics; it provides the foundation for the current understanding of black holes, regions of space where gravitational attraction is so strong that not even light can escape.

As Einstein later said, the reason for the development of general relativity was that the preference of inertial motions within special relativity was unsatisfactory, while a theory which from the outset prefers no state of motion (even accelerated ones) should appear more satisfactory. Consequently, in 1907 he published an article on acceleration under special relativity.

In that article titled “On the Relativity Principle and the Conclusions Drawn from It”, he argued that free fall is really inertial motion, and that for a free-falling observer the rules of special relativity must apply. This argument is called the equivalence principle. In the same article, Einstein also predicted the phenomena of gravitational time dilation, gravitational redshift and gravitational lensing.

In 1911, Einstein published another article “On the Influence of Gravitation on the Propagation of Light” expanding on the 1907 article, in which he estimated the amount of deflection of light by massive bodies. Thus, the theoretical prediction of general relativity could for the first time be tested experimentally. Einstein’s decision to tour the eastern hemisphere in 1922 meant that he 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 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.)

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