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Foto del escritorWALTER ALFONSO CABALLERO VARGAS

The life and thoughts of Albert Einstein, Alan Chateloin, May 2021



Getting to know him.

In the present article you are going to find some curiosities about the life of Albert Einstein and about a part of his thoughts of general relativity. Throughout his life Albert Einstein was recognized for his great's contributions to physics. The 20th-century Time Magazine character formulated the theory of relativity, discovered the fourth dimension, and won a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921. Nevertheless, few know the other face of the coin about the life of the great genius. Then some curious data about Albert Einstein:



A bit about his live

1. He Married with his cousin, the letters published by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in whose foundation Einstein was a participant, they hinted that his marriage in 1903 to his first wife Mileva Maric, mother of his two children, was miserable: “don’t expect any displays of affection and respond immediately when I speak to you” Einstein wrote in one of his letters. After 16 years he could not live with her and he was so anxious for a divorce that he offered him the money for the Nobel Prize in Physics if he would grant it. At the end of 1919, his research on the curvature of light positioned him worldwide. Two years later he won the award. They divorced in 1919 and shortly after he married his cousin, Elsa Loewenthal, with whom he had no children. It is rumored that he married her after her niece (Elsa's daughter) rejected him.



His Well-know projects

2. He offered himself for the construction of the atomic bomb and he regretted it, on august 2nd of 1939, through a letter alarmed the president of the United States of that moment, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, about the Germans intentions to create an atomic bomb. He himself offered to build for the United States. Roosevelt answered after two months, when Germany had already invaded Poland starting the second world war in Europe. The President ordered the analysis of the information, and as a consequence the atomic bomb was created.

3. He was born in Germany, but he was a physicist of Jewish origin, later nationalized Swiss, and American. At the end of his life, a journalist asked him what possible repercussions his multiple nationalities had had on his fame. Einstein replied, “If my theories had turned out to be false, the Americans would say that I was a Swiss physicist; the Swiss, would say I was a German scientist; and the Germans would say that I was a Jewish astronomer”. Being Jewish, Einstein had to endure countless attempts to discredit his research.


Gravity hole

But why was Albert Einstein so recognized? The reason is his theory about general relativity. This talks about the fact that gravity is everywhere and in all moments in the universe and it is linked to space and time (which are obviously also everywhere in the universe at all the times). He proposed that the nexus of union was geometry: what happens, says Einstein, is that, in presence of mass, space-time is “deformed”, so that any other mass notices that deformed space, and it is forced to follow different trajectories than when space was undeformed (Without presence of mass). What does the deformation of space mean? It means that the space acquires a different geometry than the one we are used to (the so-called flat or Euclidean space). However, what is space-time? Space-time is the mathematical model that combines space and time in a single continuum as two inseparably related concepts because they have the same nature. According to that it is said that the space had 4 dimensions (Including the time). In summary, Einstein, with his idea of connecting gravity with geometry, drastically changed the concept of gravitational interaction. Gravity is no longer a force, it’s a deformation of space-time. He changed Newton’s formula for gravitation, therefore his theory perfectly explains (that is, to the precision to which we are able to measure) all astronomical experiments and observations, including the discrepancy of the orbit of Mercury. But beware, Einstein talks about the deformation of space-time. Do you mean that time also "warps" in the presence of a mass? Yes. Does Einstein say that the time measured by our clock is different if we are near or far from a mass? Yes, and this has been measured in a very direct experiment: comparing how a very precise clock located at ground level marks the seconds with what others located at high altitude (for example on the roof of a skyscraper or on a satellite in orbit to Earth). The clock on the ground runs slower than the clock at high altitude (since the force of gravity is greater on the ground; remember that it decreases with the square of the distance from the center of the Earth). In other words, time is also curved in the presence of a mass, and this is yet another proof of the reality of space-time and that the temporal and spatial dimensions have the same nature.


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