Albert Einstein
It all began with a boy imagining what it would be like to run alongside a beam of light. Albert Einstein, who was born in 1879, was 16 years old. Not long before this “thought experiment” he had run away from his boarding school in Germany, turning up on the doorstep of his parents’ house in Italy. Fortunately, Einstein’s parents realised how miserable he had been at boarding school and decided to send him to a Swiss school. However, to get into the new school, the young Einstein had to pass a set of exams – and he failed most of them. Luckily, he did well enough at maths and physics, so the school agreed to take him on the promise that he put in extra work in the other subjects.
An unwilling pupil: Einstein continued playing with the idea of riding on a light beam during his four years at university. However, he found many of the lectures boring, and he often missed classes to work by himself. An annoyed university teacher took revenge by writing a bad report on Einstein when he graduated in 1900. This meant that for nearly two years afterwards he struggled to find a job. In 1902, a friend recommended the 23-year-old Einstein for a job at the Swiss patent office. This is where people register their inventions to stop others copying them. Einstein’s father died shortly afterwards, and for many years Einstein felt sad that his dad had died before Einstein had a chance to be successful in the scientific world.
A year of miracles: Einstein often had spare time at his job, and he used it to work on scientific problems that interested him. In 1905 this work started to pay off. This is sometimes described as Einstein’s “miracle year”, when he published four major breakthroughs. The first explained why electrons were emitted when light hits a material. As well as being a wave, Einstein found that light consists of particles called photons. This work changed physics forever and years later won Einstein the Nobel Prize for Physics (a famous award) in 1921. The second piece of work analysed Brownian motion. This is the never-ending jiggle of small particles in a liquid. Einstein’s research provided evidence that atoms really existed, before there was any other proof. For his third big idea, Einstein laid out why the speed of light remains constant. The fourth breakthrough was perhaps the most famous equation in all of science: E = mc² (energy equals mass times the speed of light squared). This describes how matter is converted into energy inside stars.
Defying gravity: However, for Einstein there was always one thing missing in his theories, because they paid no attention to the most fundamental of all physical forces: gravity. For the next 10 years, Einstein studied gravity, and by 1915 he came up with his theory of general relativity. This explained how gravity affects space and time, and paved the way for a new way to understand the universe. The foundation of Einstein’s famous theory of relativity is that the speed of light remains constant at all times. Imagine a spaceship travelling at the speed of light shooting a laser at an enemy. You would think that the laser, which also travels at light speed, would take the boost from the spaceship firing it and travel at twice the speed of light. It should hit the enemy first, but it doesn’t. Spaceship and laser hit the enemy craft at the same moment. For the speed of light to remain constant, other things must change: time slows down as objects travel faster until, at the speed of light, time stops entirely.
Just for laughs: When cameramen turned up to Einstein’s 72nd birthday party uninvited, he stuck his tongue out at them.
