Honors

See also: List of things named after Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein has been recognized numerous times for his achievements. The International Union of Pure and Applied Physics named 2005 the “World Year of Physics” in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the publication of the Annus Mirabilis Papers.^[106]

The Albert Einstein Memorial in central Washington, D.C. is a monumental bronze statue depicting Einstein seated with manuscript papers in hand. The statue is located in a grove of trees at the southwest corner of the grounds of the National Academy of Sciences on Constitution Avenue, near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

The chemical element 99, einsteinium, was named for him in August 1955, four months after Einstein’s death.^[107][108]

In 1999 Time magazine named him the Person of the Century, beating contenders like Mahatma Gandhi and Franklin Roosevelt, and in the words of a biographer, “to the scientifically literate and the public at large, Einstein is synonymous with genius.”^[109]

2001 Einstein is an inner main belt asteroid discovered on 5 March 1973.^[110]

The Albert Einstein Award (sometimes called the Albert Einstein Medal because it is accompanied with a gold medal) is an award in theoretical physics, that was established to recognize high achievement in the natural sciences. It was endowed by the Lewis and Rosa Strauss Memorial Fund in honor of Albert Einstein’s 70th birthday. It was first awarded in 1951 and included a prize money of $ 15,000,^[111][112] which was later reduced to $ 5,000.^[113][114] The winner is selected by a committee (the first of which consisted of Einstein, Oppenheimer, von Neumann and Weyl^[115]) of the Institute for Advanced Study, which administers the award.^[112] Lewis L. Strauss used to be one of the trustees of the institute.^[116]

The Albert Einstein Peace Prize is an award that is given yearly by the Chicago, Illinois-based Albert Einstein Peace Prize Foundation. Winners of the prize receive $50,000.^[117]

In 1990, his name was added to the Walhalla temple, east of Regensburg, in Bavaria, Germany.^[118]

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Awards

In 1922, Einstein was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics,^[101] "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect". This refers to his 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect, "On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light", which was well supported by the experimental evidence by that time. The presentation speech began by mentioning "his theory of relativity [which had] been the subject of lively debate in philosophical circles [and] also has astrophysical implications which are being rigorously examined at the present time." (Einstein 1923)

It was long reported that Einstein gave the Nobel prize money directly to his first wife, Mileva Marić, in compliance with their 1919 divorce settlement. However, personal correspondence made public in 2006^[102] shows that he invested much of it in the United States, and saw much of it wiped out in the Great Depression.

Einstein traveled to New York City in the United States for the first time on 2 April 1921. When asked where he got his scientific ideas, Einstein explained that he believed scientific work best proceeds from an examination of physical reality and a search for underlying axioms, with consistent explanations that apply in all instances and avoid contradicting each other. He also recommended theories with visualizable results (Einstein 1954).^[103]

In 1999, Albert Einstein was named Person of the Century by Time magazine. ^{[99] [104]} A Gallup poll recorded him as the fourth most admired person of the 20th century in the U.S. ^[105]

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Death

On 17 April 1955, Albert Einstein experienced internal bleeding caused by the rupture of an abdominal aortic aneurysm, which had previously been reinforced surgically by Dr. Rudolph Nissen in 1948.^[88] He took the draft of a speech he was preparing for a television appearance commemorating the State of Israel’s seventh anniversary with him to the hospital, but he did not live long enough to complete it.^[89] Einstein refused surgery, saying: "I want to go when I want. It is tasteless to prolong life artificially. I have done my share, it is time to go. I will do it elegantly."^[90] He died in Princeton Hospital early the next morning at the age of 76, having continued to work until near the end. Einstein’s remains were cremated and his ashes were scattered around the grounds of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey.^[91][92] During the autopsy, the pathologist of Princeton Hospital, Thomas Stoltz Harvey removed Einstein’s brain for preservation, without the permission of his family, in hope that the neuroscience of the future would be able to discover what made Einstein so intelligent.<sup>[93]

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Einstein’s mistakes

In addition to his well-accepted results, some of Einstein’s papers contain mistakes:

• 1905: In the original German version of the special relativity paper, and in some English translations, Einstein gives a wrong expression for the transverse mass of a fast moving particle. The transverse mass is the antiquated name for the ratio of the 3-force to the 3-acceleration when the force is perpendicular to the velocity. Einstein gives this ratio as , while the actual value is (corrected by Max Planck).
• 1905: In his PhD dissertation, the friction in dilute solutions has a miscalculated numerical prefactor, which makes the estimate of Avogadro’s number off by a factor of 3. The mistake is corrected by Einstein in a later publication.
• 1905: An expository paper explaining how airplanes fly includes an example which is incorrect. There is a wing which he claims will generate lift. This wing is flat on the bottom, and flat on the top, with a small bump at the center. It is designed to generate lift by Bernoulli’s principle, and Einstein claims that it will. Simple action reaction considerations, though, show that the wing will not generate lift, at least if it is long enough.
• 1911: Einstein predicted how much the sun’s gravity would deflect nearby starlight, but used an approximation which gives an answer which is half as big as the correct one.^[66]
• 1913: Einstein started writing papers based on his belief that the hole argument made general covariance impossible in a theory of gravity.
• 1922: Einstein published a qualitative theory of superconductivity based on the vague idea of electrons shared in orbits. This paper predated modern quantum mechanics, and is well understood to be completely wrong. The correct BCS theory of low temperature superconductivity was only worked out in 1957, thirty years after the establishing of modern quantum mechanics.
• 1937: Einstein believed that the focusing properties of geodesics in general relativity would lead to an instability which causes plane gravitational waves to collapse in on themselves. While this is true to a certain extent in some limits, because gravitational instabilities can lead to a concentration of energy density into black holes, for plane waves of the type Einstein and Rosen considered in their paper, the instabilities are under control. Einstein retracted this position a short time later, but until his death his collaborator Nathan Rosen maintained that gravitational waves are unstable.
• 1939: Einstein denied several times that black holes could form, the last time in print. He published a paper that argues that a star collapsing would spin faster and faster, spinning at the speed of light with infinite energy well before the point where it is about to collapse into a black hole. This paper received no citations, and the conclusions are well understood to be wrong. Einstein’s argument itself is inconclusive, since he only shows that stable spinning objects have to spin faster and faster to stay stable before the point where they collapse. But it is well understood today (and was understood well by some even then) that collapse cannot happen through stationary states the way Einstein imagined.

In addition to these well established mistakes, there are other arguments whose deduction is considered correct, but whose interpretation or philosophical conclusion is considered to have been incorrect:

• In the Bohr–Einstein debates and the papers following this, Einstein tries to poke holes in the uncertainty principle, ingeniously, but unsuccessfully.
• In the EPR paper, Einstein concludes that quantum mechanics must be replaced by local hidden variables. The measured violations of Bell’s inequality show that hidden variables, if they exist, must be nonlocal.

Einstein himself considered the use of the "fudge factor" lambda in his 1917 paper founding cosmology as a "blunder".^[66] The theory of general relativity predicted an expanding or contracting universe, but Einstein wanted a universe which is an unchanging three dimensional sphere, like the surface of a three dimensional ball in four dimensions. He wanted this for philosophical reasons, so as to incorporate Mach’s principle in a reasonable way. He stabilized his solution by introducing a cosmological constant, and when the universe was shown to be expanding, he retracted the constant as a blunder. This is not really much of a blunder – the cosmological constant is necessary within general relativity as it is currently understood, and it is widely believed to have a nonzero value today. Einstein took the wrong side in a few scientific debates.

• He briefly flirted with transverse and longitudinal mass concepts, before rejecting them.
• Einstein initially opposed Minkowski’s geometrical formulation of special relativity, changing his mind completely a few years later.
• Based on his cosmological model, Einstein rejected expanding universe solutions by Friedman and Lemaitre as unphysical, changing his mind when the universe was shown to be expanding a few years later.
• Finding it too formal, Einstein believed that Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics was incorrect. He changed his mind when Schrödinger and others demonstrated that the formulation in terms of the Schrödinger equation, based on Einstein’s wave-particle duality was equivalent to Heisenberg’s matrices.
• Einstein rejected work on black holes^[67] by Chandrasekhar, Oppenheimer, and others, believing, along with Eddington, that collapse past the horizon (then called the ’Schwarzschild singularity’) would never happen. So big was his influence, that this opinion was not rejected until the early 1960s, almost a decade after his death.
• Einstein believed that some sort of nonlinear instability could lead to a field theory whose solutions would collapse into pointlike objects which would behave like quantum particles. While there are many field theories with point-like particle solutions, none of them behave like quantum particles. It is widely believed that quantum mechanics would be impossible to reproduce from a local field theory of the type Einstein considered, because of Bell’s inequality.

In addition to these well known mistakes, it is sometimes claimed that the general line of Einstein’s reasoning in the 1905 relativity paper is flawed, or the photon paper, or one or another of the most famous papers. None of these claims are widely accepted.

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General relativity

See also: History of general relativity

In 1912, Einstein returned to Switzerland to accept a professorship at his alma mater, the ETH. Once back in Zurich, he immediately visited his old ETH classmate Marcel Grossmann, now a professor of mathematics, who introduced him to Riemannian geometry and, more generally, to differential geometry. On the recommendation of Italian mathematician Tullio Levi-Civita, Einstein began exploring the usefulness of general covariance (essentially the use of tensors) for his gravitational theory. For a while Einstein thought that there were problems with the approach, but he later returned to it and, by late 1915, had published his general theory of relativity in the form in which it is used today.^[49] This theory explains gravitation as distortion of the structure of spacetime by matter, affecting the inertial motion of other matter. During World War I, the work of Central Powers scientists was available only to Central Powers academics, for national security reasons. Some of Einstein’s work did reach the United Kingdom and the United States through the efforts of the Austrian Paul Ehrenfest and physicists in the Netherlands, especially 1902 Nobel Prize-winner Hendrik Lorentz and Willem de Sitter of Leiden University. After the war ended, Einstein maintained his relationship with Leiden University, accepting a contract as an Extraordinary Professor; for ten years, from 1920 to 1930, he travelled to Holland regularly to lecture.^[50]

In 1917, several astronomers accepted Einstein ’s 1911 challenge from Prague. The Mount Wilson Observatory in California, U.S., published a solar spectroscopic analysis that showed no gravitational redshift.^[51] In 1918, the Lick Observatory, also in California, announced that it too had disproved Einstein’s prediction, although its findings were not published.^[52]

Eddington’s photograph of a solar eclipse, which confirmed Einstein’s theory that light “bends.” On 7^th November 1919, the leading British newspaper The Times printed a banner headline that read: “Revolution in Science – New Theory of the Universe – Newtonian Ideas Overthrown.”^[53]

However, in May 1919, a team led by the British astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington claimed to have confirmed Einstein’s prediction of gravitational deflection of starlight by the Sun while photographing a solar eclipse with dual expeditions in Sobral, northern Brazil, and Príncipe, a west African island.^[48] Nobel laureate Max Born praised general relativity as the "greatest feat of human thinking about nature";^[54] fellow laureate Paul Dirac was quoted saying it was "probably the greatest scientific discovery ever made".^[55] The international media guaranteed Einstein’s global renown.

There have been claims that scrutiny of the specific photographs taken on the Eddington expedition showed the experimental uncertainty to be comparable to the same magnitude as the effect Eddington claimed to have demonstrated, and that a 1962 British expedition concluded that the method was inherently unreliable.^[53] The deflection of light during a solar eclipse was confirmed by later, more accurate observations.^[56] Some resented the newcomer’s fame, notably among some German physicists, who later started the Deutsche Physik (German Physics) movement.^[57][58]

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Hole argument and Entwurf theory

Main article: Hole argument

While developing general relativity, Einstein became confused about the gauge invariance in the theory. He formulated an argument that led him to conclude that a general relativistic field theory is impossible. He gave up looking for fully generally covariant tensor equations, and searched for equations that would be invariant under general linear transformations only.

The Entwurf ("draft") theory was the result of these investigations. As its name suggests, it was a sketch of a theory, with the equations of motion supplemented by additional gauge fixing conditions. Simultaneously less elegant and more difficult than general relativity, Einstein abandoned the theory after realizing that the hole argument was mistaken.

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Principle of equivalence

Main article: Principle of equivalence

In 1907, while still working at the patent office, Einstein had what he would call his "happiest thought". He realized that the principle of relativity could be extended to gravitational fields. He thought about the case of a uniformly accelerated box not in a gravitational field, and noted that it would be indistinguishable from a box sitting still in an unchanging gravitational field.^[46] He used special relativity to see that the rate of clocks at the top of a box accelerating upward would be faster than the rate of clocks at the bottom. He concludes that the rates of clocks depend on their position in a gravitational field, and that the difference in rate is proportional to the gravitational potential to first approximation.

Although this approximation is crude, it allowed him to calculate the deflection of light by gravity, and show that it is nonzero. This gave him confidence that the scalar theory of gravity proposed by Gunnar Nordström was incorrect. But the actual value for the deflection that he calculated was too small by a factor of two, because the approximation he used doesn’t work well for things moving at near the speed of light. When Einstein finished the full theory of general relativity, he would rectify this error, and predict the correct amount of light deflection by the sun.

From Prague, Einstein published a paper about the effects of gravity on light, specifically the gravitational redshift and the gravitational deflection of light. The paper challenged astronomers to detect the deflection during a solar eclipse.^[47] German astronomer Erwin Finlay-Freundlich publicized Einstein’s challenge to scientists around the world.^[48]

Einstein thought about the nature of the gravitational field in the years 1909–1912, studying its properties by means of simple thought experiments. A notable one is the rotating disk. Einstein imagined an observer making experiments on a rotating turntable. He noted that such an observer would find a different value for the mathematical constant pi than the one predicted by Euclidean geometry. The reason is that the radius of a circle would be measured with an uncontracted ruler, but according to special relativity, the circumference would seem to be longer, because the ruler would be contracted.

Since Einstein believed that the laws of physics were local, described by local fields, he concluded from this that spacetime could be locally curved. This led him to study Riemannian geometry, and to formulate general relativity in this language.

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