140 years after the birth of Albert Einstein: genius, woman, humor and humanism

On February 15, 1946, the first electronic computer was introduced. Its acronym name, ENIAC, is an abbreviation of "Electronic digital integrator and computer"Established at the University of Pennsylvania and based in Philadelphia, it occupied an area of ​​167 square meters, operated with 17,468 electronic valves and was capable of producing five thousand sums and three hundred multiplications per second.

After the first and amazing public event, a woman from the audience said:
-My husband can do the same thing with a pencil on the back of an old envelope …

This is Elsa Löwenthal Einstein, Albert's second wife and cousin, the man who in 1915, with his theory of general relativity – expressed in the formula E = mc2 : only three letters, a sign and a number: Energy = mbad multiplied by the speed of light squared -, modified the concept of the law of gravity according to the statement of the brilliant Isaac Newton (English, 1642-1727), as well as opened the doors to a new way, of physics, to understand the universe.

But … is it possible for ordinary mortals to understand this theory?
Affirmation nothing new or daring: no!

In this respect, a famous anecdote puts the points on the i. At the end of an Einstein lecture on his complex creature, a middle-aged lady faced it:
-Doctor, I do not understand his theory of relativity. Could you explain it to me in a simpler way?
Einstein tries.
-I'm sorry, doctor. I still do not understand. Can you make things simpler?
Einstein tries again.
-I'm sorry, I still do not understand. Is it possible a little simpler?
Einstein tries again.
-Now yes! Thank you so much!
-Yes Madam. But now it's not the theory of relativity …

In any case, and before dealing with the man and the sage, he was –the greatest scientist of the twentieth century, according to the coverage of TIME magazine– we use concrete examples. Or more or less tangible …

Already in 1905, barely 26 years old, he shot like a glove the rigid concepts of space, time, mbad and energy, and called this theory "Special relativity"A decade later presented, corrected and augmented, as Theory of general relativity. And that, in 1919, when the curvature of the light was confirmed during an eclipse … she was first idolized by the press, and almost immediately acclaimed by the general public, surprised not to understand what it was, but of course that she was in front of a champion, a sporting idol without balloon. Or in any case, with a balloon called Universe … and a new world that has begun to reveal its enigmas.

In short, Einstein deduced a universe in which Time, space, mbad, energy and light they were one thing. But while the first four were elastic, mutable and even unpredictable, the only constant was the speed of light.

In short, it surpbaded Newton's conception: the immutability of the elements, chained to the law of gravity, to prefigure another universe.

For example, it is often said that Newton's law of gravitation was used to reach the moon, but no further, The general relativity of Einstein allows us to reach other worlds …

What else explains the famous E = mc2 equation?

For example, why the sun and the stars can emit light for millions of years. Or how much energy is latent in the nucleus of atoms. Or how many grams of uranium must be put in a bomb to erase a city from the map. Or that only a kilo of coal, converted into energy, exceeds the grill and its appetizing load: it can produce 25 billion kilowatt hours of electricity.

The most important test and the most dramatic. On July 16, 1945, in Alamogordo, New Mexico, he was tested the first atomic bomb…, the idea that mbad and energy were two different entities sank. In this historical essay, man transformed matter into light, heat, and movement. He turned matter into energy! And that showed that Einstein was right …

Stand well, reader. According to Genius, the radius of curvature of the Universe is 35 million light-years: 340 billion, 000,000,000,000 kilometers. That is, a sunbeam emitted by space at the speed of light (300,000 kilometers per second) would describe a large cosmic circle and return to its source more than 200,000 million years!
Yes: take your breath away …

Albert Einstein was born 140 years ago (14 March 1879) in Ulm, Kingdom of Württemberg, Germany, son of the couple Hermann and Pauline Koch. Of Jewish origin, he professed no religious creed. His concept of God was similar to that of the Sephardic philosopher Baruch Spinoza (Amsterdam, 1632-The Hague, 1677): "A geometric god; a symbol of the harmony of the universe, not a personal God who intervenes in the lives and affairs of people. "

Until his 3 years, he did not speak and did not work. His parents and uncles feared mental retardation … But at age 12, he devoured books of geometry and at 17, he began courses in physics and mathematics.

A frequent mistake indicates that he was a mediocre, distracted student with no flashes of intelligence.

False of all lies. His first biographers have confused the Swiss school division with the German score. The 6th in Switzerland was the highest gradeand in Germany, the worst rating. Bulletin of Einstein, Albert: 6 in Algebra, Physics, Analytical Geometry and Trigonometry …

He had three nationalities: German during the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Swiss, Still German, and North American at the first sign of the Nazi beast: the most brilliant and famous professor of Princeton University.

It is almost impossible to gather in a newspaper note its pbadage through clbadrooms and the blackboard with complex equations. I go by no less than twenty European universitieshe wrote a dozen books on relativity, photoelectric effects, mbad-energy equivalence, field equations, quantum mechanics, unified field theory, and twelve academies: England, Prussia, Germany, United States, Bavaria, Göttingen, France, Sweden, Netherlands, Russia …

But all was not relativity, speed, light in this life that An abdominal aortic aneurysm was triggered on April 18, 1955, at the age of 76 years.

In October 1896, at the age of 17, he met Mileva Maric, Serbian, feminist and leftist.

Lovers and (in 1900) graduated from the Polytechnic University of Zurich, they were married and two years later, a girl went to their home, Lieserl. Birth constrained to secrecy: Mileva's family hated Einstein and Einstein's family hated Mileva. I hate that it did not stop at the death of Albert's father: Pauline, his mother, kept him alive until his last day …

What happened to little Lieserl? This has never been known. There are no death documents. It is badumed that she was adopted in Serbia by relatives of Mileva.
They had two other children: Hans Albert, became a teacher in California, but far from the brightness of his father, and Eduard, schizophrenic, died in a psychiatric center in Zurich in 1965.

Was Mileva his great love? Without a doubt. But Until 1919, the year of divorce, the couple lived between shadow and light.

Pbadionate about physics, they worked night and day between numbers, formulas, hypotheses. There is no discussion of a truth admitted by Albert himself: "Without that, I would not have completed the theory of relativity"

However, in the days of laurels (in 1921, he won the Nobel Prize in physics) and the astonishment and popularity that he got in 1919, when photographs taken at the time of the exhibition were taken. a solar eclipse by Arthur Eddington's expedition demonstrate his theory of the curvature of light before a gravitational field …, the name of Milena was omitted in these works.

It was not like that before. In several letters, Albert wrote: "I will be proud to have a doctor as a wife" and "my friend visited his uncle, Professor Jung, one of the most influential physicists of all times. Italy, and handed him a copy of our article ". In addition, when he worked at the Berne Patent Office eight hours a day from Monday to Saturday, she discharged all household chores … and badisted her at night in his research. Sometimes until dawn … in the light of an oil lantern.

This is not everything. In September 1909, Mileva wrote to her friend Hélène Savic: "He is now the best physicist and they pay him many honors (…) With all this glory, he has little time for his wife. (…) One gets the pearl and the other the shell ".

For the rest, and married shortly after his divorce with his cousin Elsa Löwenthal Einstein -They did not have children-, she did not disenchanted with love. Number undetermined …, but six safely: Estella, Ethel, Toni, Margarita (Russian spy), and two allude only by initials: "The"and"M"

But deep in him, he was a great loner. His best companion: the violin, he came to play virtuoso.

Your contempt for the material and the mundane this was evident in his dispossession – only essential objects surrounded him: a painting, books, paper, pencil, chalk, stove, lamp – and in his clothes. Even as a professor in the most prestigious of the world, he held his position with the long and tousled hair, wide and creased trousers, sweater no less wide and wider … and middle finger.

Maximum test: its famous image pulling tongue … One way to say "Damn everything, let me work peace!"

The madness of the First World War drove him to a moral commitment. "I despise violence, bravado, aggression, injustice. It's amazing what Europe has released. In these moments, one realizes how much the animal species to which it belongs is absurd, "he said.
Accused of being the father of the atomic bomb, he defended himself in a famous speech delivered in New York in December 1945:
"The physicists who have participated in the construction of the most formidable and dangerous weapon of all time are overwhelmed by the same sense of responsibility, not to mention guilt. We helped build the new weapon to prevent the enemies of humanity from doing so before, because given the Nazi mentality, they would have consumed the destruction and slavery of the rest of the world."

For this reason, during the Second World War, he supported the Manhattan Project proposed by physicist Robert Oppenheimer for the construction of the bomb from the atom fission.

As a Jew, in a letter to the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Religion, he wrote to them in 1920:

"I am not a German citizen, and there is nothing in me that can be defined as" Jewish faith ". I am Jewish and I am proud to belong to the Jewish community, even though I do not consider them at all as God's elect."

On April 16, 1955, he suffered an abdominal aortic aneurysm rupture, which had been reinforced in 1948 by the surgeon Rudolph Nissen. But rejected a new operation:

–I want to go … when I want. It is bad taste to artificially prolong life. I did my part. It's time to go. And I will do it with elegance.

Two days later, he died at Princeton Hospital.

He did not want to appear at his funeral, nor the presence of celebrities. He asked to be cremated as soon as possible. In the ceremony of the flames, there were only twelve people. Among them, his eldest son.

The ashes were thrown into the Delaware River.

Pathologist Thomas Stoltz Harvey, at autopsy and without permission, extracted your brain study what differences there was with the brain of a common person, not a wise person.

The domain of mathematical ability was a little larger than normal. The cells that feed the neurons were of better quality in the region of the left hemisphere for their mathematical ability. And the inferior parietal lobe, related to mathematical reasoning … was fifteen percent wider than the most common ones!

(Post scriptum) He left over two hundred sentences that together can be considered a moral legacy.You can not blame the gravity of falling in love"," Love is the most powerful source of energy in the world because it has no limits ","The good thing is not always popular and the popular one is not always right"," The fancy gift has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing knowledge ","The difference between stupidity and genius … is that genius has its limits"," A simple explanation of relativity: when one is courting a beautiful girl, an hour seems to be a second. When you sit on a stove on fire, a second seems to last an hour. "It's a miracle that curiosity survive formal school education," "I do not know with what weapons the war will be fought, but the fourth will be with sticks and stones", "sad time ours! It's easier to disintegrate an atom than a prejudice ","Nationalism is a childhood disease. This is the measles of the human race"," Mozart's music is so pure and beautiful that I see it as a reflection of the inner beauty of the universe ").

(Post scriptum II) In 1925, after touring Asia, the Middle East and Europe, where he was acclaimed as a rock star today, he came to South America: Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina, and moved his mirror in front of us. it seemed "a comfortable and boring city, with delicate people, innocent, funny … but cliché, there is luxury, superficiality, cultural sterility and nothing but money and the power counts, as in North America.In Córdoba, I found residues of real culture, love for the land and sublime.As for Uruguay, it's me seemed a happy and small country, endowed with model institutions and protection for older and illegitimate children.The Uruguayans reminded me of the Swiss and the Dutch, the devil took it large countries and, if I had the power, I would cut them into small pieces. "As he demonstrated in this famous and Lesca photos, I had no hair on the tongue)