Title

Albert Einstein
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Einstein" redirects here. For other uses, see Einstein (disambiguation).

Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein in 1921
Born 14 March 1879
Ulm, Kingdom of Württemberg, German Empire
Died 18 April 1955 (aged 76)
Princeton, New Jersey, United States
Residence Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, United Kingdom, United States
Citizenship 
Württemberg/Germany (1879–1896)
Stateless (1896–1901)
Switzerland (1901–1955)
Austria (1911–1912)
Germany (1914–1933)
United States (1940–1955)
Fields Physics
Institutions 
Swiss Patent Office (Bern)
University of Zurich
Charles University in Prague
ETH Zurich
Prussian Academy of Sciences
Kaiser Wilhelm Institute
University of Leiden
Institute for Advanced Study
Alma mater 
ETH Zurich
University of Zurich
Doctoral advisor Alfred Kleiner
Other academic advisors Heinrich Friedrich Weber
Notable students 
Ernst G. Straus
Nathan Rosen
Leó Szilárd
Raziuddin Siddiqui[1]
Known for 
General relativity and special relativity
Photoelectric effect
Mass-energy equivalence
Theory of Brownian Motion
Einstein field equations
Bose–Einstein statistics
Bose-Einstein condensate
Bose–Einstein correlations
Unified Field Theory
EPR paradox
Notable awards 
Nobel Prize in Physics (1921)
Matteucci Medal (1921)
Copley Medal (1925)
Max Planck Medal (1929)
Time Person of the Century (1999)
Spouse Mileva Maric (1903–1919)
Elsa Löwenthal (1919–1936)
Signature

Albert Einstein ( /'ælb?rt 'a?nsta?n/; German: ['alb?t 'a?n?ta?n] ( listen); 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the general theory of relativity, effecting a revolution in physics. For this achievement, Einstein is often regarded as the father of modern physics[2][3] and the most influential physicist of the 20th century. While best known for his mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc2 (which has been dubbed "the world's most famous equation"),[4] he received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect".[5] The latter was pivotal in establishing quantum theory within physics.
Near the beginning of his career, Einstein thought that Newtonian mechanics was no longer enough to reconcile the laws of classical mechanics with the laws of the electromagnetic field. This led to the development of his special theory of relativity. He realized, however, that the principle of relativity could also be extended to gravitational fields, and with his subsequent theory of gravitation in 1916, he published a paper on the general theory of relativity. He continued to deal with problems of statistical mechanics and quantum theory, which led to his explanations of particle theory and the motion of molecules. He also investigated the thermal properties of light which laid the foundation of the photon theory of light. In 1917, Einstein applied the general theory of relativity to model the structure of the universe as a whole.[6]
He was visiting the United States when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, and did not go back to Germany, where he had been a professor at the Berlin Academy of Sciences. He settled in the U.S., becoming a citizen in 1940.[7] On the eve of World War II, he helped alert President Franklin D. Roosevelt that Germany might be developing an atomic weapon, and recommended that the U.S. begin similar research; this eventually led to what would become the Manhattan Project. Einstein was in support of defending the Allied forces, but largely denounced using the new discovery of nuclear fission as a weapon. Later, together with Bertrand Russell, Einstein signed the Russell–Einstein Manifesto, which highlighted the danger of nuclear weapons. Einstein was affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, until his death in 1955.
Einstein published more than 300 scientific papers along with over 150 non-scientific works.[6][8] His great intelligence and originality have made the word "Einstein" synonymous with genius.[9]
Contents  [hide]
1 Biography
1.1 Early life and education
1.2 Marriages and children
1.3 Patent office
1.4 Academic career
1.5 Travels abroad
1.6 Emigration to U.S. in 1933
1.6.1 World War II and the Manhattan Project
1.6.2 U.S. citizenship
1.7 Death
2 Scientific career
2.1 1905 - Annus Mirabilis papers
2.2 Thermodynamic fluctuations and statistical physics
2.3 General principles
2.4 Theory of relativity and E = mc²
2.5 Photons and energy quanta
2.6 Quantized atomic vibrations
2.7 Adiabatic principle and action-angle variables
2.8 Wave–particle duality
2.9 Theory of critical opalescence
2.10 Zero-point energy
2.11 General relativity and the Equivalence Principle
2.12 Hole argument and Entwurf theory
2.13 Cosmology
2.14 Modern quantum theory
2.15 Bose–Einstein statistics
2.16 Energy momentum pseudotensor
2.17 Unified field theory
2.18 Wormholes
2.19 Einstein–Cartan theory
2.20 Equations of motion
2.21 Other investigations
2.22 Collaboration with other scientists
2.22.1 Einstein–de Haas experiment
2.22.2 Schrödinger gas model
2.22.3 Einstein refrigerator
2.23 Bohr versus Einstein
2.24 Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen paradox
3 Political and religious views
4 Love of music
5 Non-scientific legacy
6 In popular culture
7 Awards and honors
8 Publications
9 See also
10 Notes
11 References
12 Further reading
13 External links
Biography

Early life and education

Einstein at the age of three in 1882

Albert Einstein in 1893 (age 14)

Einstein's matriculation certificate at the age of 17, showing his final grades from the Aargau Kantonsschule (on a scale of 1-6).
Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, in the Kingdom of Württemberg in the German Empire on 14 March 1879.[10] His father was Hermann Einstein, a salesman and engineer. His mother was Pauline Einstein (née Koch). In 1880, the family moved to Munich, where his father and his uncle founded Elektrotechnische Fabrik J. Einstein & Cie, a company that manufactured electrical equipment based on direct current.[10]
The Einsteins were non-observant Jews. Albert attended a Catholic elementary school from the age of five for three years. Later, at the age of eight, Einstein was transferred to the Luitpold Gymnasium where he received advanced primary and secondary school education until he left Germany seven years later.[11] Although it has been thought that Einstein had early speech difficulties, this is disputed by the Albert Einstein Archives, and he excelled at the first school that he attended.[12] He was right handed;[12][13] there appears to be no evidence for the widespread popular belief[14] that he was left handed.
His father once showed him a pocket compass; Einstein realized that there must be something causing the needle to move, despite the apparent "empty space".[15] As he grew, Einstein built models and mechanical devices for fun and began to show a talent for mathematics.[10] When Einstein was ten years old, Max Talmud (later changed to Max Talmey), a poor Jewish medical student from Poland, was introduced to the Einstein family by his brother, and during weekly visits over the next five years, he gave the boy popular books on science, mathematical texts and philosophical writings. These included Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Euclid's Elements (which Einstein called the "holy little geometry book").[16][17][fn 1]
In 1894, his father's company failed: direct current (DC) lost the War of Currents to alternating current (AC). In search of business, the Einstein family moved to Italy, first to Milan and then, a few months later, to Pavia. When the family moved to Pavia, Einstein stayed in Munich to finish his studies at the Luitpold Gymnasium. His father intended for him to pursue electrical engineering, but Einstein clashed with authorities and resented the school's regimen and teaching method. He later wrote that the spirit of learning and creative thought were lost in strict rote learning. At the end of December 1894, he travelled to Italy to join his family in Pavia, convincing the school to let him go by using a doctor's note.[19] It was during his time in Italy that he wrote a short essay with the title "On the Investigation of the State of the Ether in a Magnetic Field."[20][21]
In late summer 1895, at the age of sixteen, Einstein sat the entrance examinations for the Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Zurich (later the Eidgenössische Polytechnische Schule). He failed to reach the required standard in several subjects, but obtained exceptional grades in physics and mathematics.[22] On the advice of the Principal of the Polytechnic, he attended the Aargau Cantonal School in Aarau, Switzerland, in 1895-96 to complete his secondary schooling. While lodging with the family of Professor Jost Winteler, he fell in love with Winteler's daughter, Marie. (His sister Maja later married the Wintelers' son, Paul.)[23] In January 1896, with his father's approval, he renounced his citizenship in the German Kingdom of Württemberg to avoid military service.[24] In September 1896, he passed the Swiss Matura with mostly good grades (including a top grade of 6 in physics and mathematical subjects, on a scale of 1-6),[25] and, though only seventeen, enrolled in the four-year mathematics and physics teaching diploma program at the ETH Zurich. Marie Winteler moved to Olsberg, Switzerland for a teaching post.
Einstein's future wife, Mileva Maric, also enrolled at the Polytechnic that same year, the only woman among the six students in the mathematics and physics section of the teaching diploma course. Over the next few years, Einstein and Maric's friendship developed into romance, and they read books together on extra-curricular physics in which Einstein was taking an increasing interest. In 1900, Einstein was awarded the Zurich Polytechnic teaching diploma, but Maric failed the examination with a poor grade in the mathematics component, theory of functions.[26] There have been claims that Maric collaborated with Einstein on his celebrated 1905 papers,[27][28] but historians of physics who have studied the issue find no evidence that she made any substantive contributions.[29][30][31][32]
Marriages and children
Main article: Einstein family
In early 1902, Einstein and Maric had a daughter they named Lieserl in their correspondence, who was born in Novi Sad where Maric's parents lived.[33] Her full name is not known, and her fate is uncertain after 1903.[34]
Einstein and Maric married in January 1903. In May 1904, the couple's first son, Hans Albert Einstein, was born in Bern, Switzerland. Their second son, Eduard, was born in Zurich in July 1910. In 1914, Einstein moved to Berlin, while his wife remained in Zurich with their sons. They divorced on 14 February 1919, having lived apart for five years.
Einstein married Elsa Löwenthal (née Einstein) on 2 June 1919, after having had a relationship with her since 1912. She was his first cousin maternally and his second cousin paternally. In 1933, they emigrated to the United States. In 1935, Elsa Einstein was diagnosed with heart and kidney problems and died in December 1936.[35]
Patent office

Left to right: Conrad Habicht, Maurice Solovine and Einstein, who founded the Olympia Academy

Einstein's home in Bern
After graduating, Einstein spent almost two frustrating years searching for a teaching post, but a former classmate's father helped him secure a job in Bern, at the Federal Office for Intellectual Property, the patent office, as an assistant examiner.[36] He evaluated patent applications for electromagnetic devices. In 1903, Einstein's position at the Swiss Patent Office became permanent, although he was passed over for promotion until he "fully mastered machine technology".[37]
Much of his work at the patent office related to questions about transmission of electric signals and electrical-mechanical synchronization of time, two technical problems that show up conspicuously in the thought experiments that eventually led Einstein to his radical conclusions about the nature of light and the fundamental connection between space and time.[38]
With a few friends he met in Bern, Einstein started a small discussion group, self-mockingly named "The Olympia Academy", which met regularly to discuss science and philosophy. Their readings included the works of Henri Poincaré, Ernst Mach, and David Hume, which influenced his scientific and philosophical outlook.
Academic career

Einstein's official 1921 portrait after receiving the Nobel Prize in Physics.
During 1901, the paper "Folgerungen aus den Kapillarität Erscheinungen" ("Conclusions from the Capillarity Phenomena") was published in the prestigious Annalen der Physik.[39] On 30 April 1905, Einstein completed his thesis, with Alfred Kleiner, Professor of Experimental Physics, serving as pro-forma advisor. Einstein was awarded a PhD by the University of Zurich. His dissertation was entitled "A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions".[40][41] That same year, which has been called Einstein's annus mirabilis (miracle year), he published four groundbreaking papers, on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity, and the equivalence of matter and energy, which were to bring him to the notice of the academic world.
By 1908, he was recognized as a leading scientist, and he was appointed lecturer at the University of Bern. The following year, he quit the patent office and the lectureship to take the position of physics docent [42] at the University of Zurich. He became a full professor at Karl-Ferdinand University in Prague in 1911. In 1914, he returned to Germany after being appointed director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics (1914–1932)[43] and a professor at the Humboldt University of Berlin, with a special clause in his contract that freed him from most teaching obligations. He became a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. In 1916, Einstein was appointed president of the German Physical Society (1916–1918).[44][45]
During 1911, he had calculated that, based on his new theory of general relativity, light from another star would be bent by the Sun's gravity. That prediction was claimed confirmed by observations made by a British expedition led by Sir Arthur Eddington during the solar eclipse of 29 May 1919. International media reports of this made Einstein world famous. On 7 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".[46] Much later, questions were raised whether the measurements had been accurate enough to support Einstein's theory. In 1980 historians John Earman and Clark Glymour published an analysis suggesting that Eddington had suppressed unfavorable results.[47] The two reviewers found possible flaws in Eddington's selection of data, but their doubts, although widely quoted and, indeed, now with a "mythical" status almost equivalent to the status of the original observations, have not been confirmed.[48][49] Eddington's selection from the data seems valid and his team indeed made astronomical measurements verifying the theory.[50]
In 1921, Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his explanation of the photoelectric effect, as relativity was considered still somewhat controversial. He also received the Copley Medal from the Royal Society in 1925.
Travels abroad
Einstein visited New York City for the first time on 2 April 1921, where he received an official welcome by the Mayor, followed by three weeks of lectures and receptions. He went on to deliver several lectures at Columbia University and Princeton University, and in Washington he accompanied representatives of the National Academy of Science on a visit to the White House. On his return to Europe he was the guest of the British statesman and philosopher Viscount Haldane in London, where he met several renowned scientific, intellectual and political figures, and delivered a lecture at Kings College.[51]
In 1922, he traveled throughout Asia and later to Palestine, as part of a six-month excursion and speaking tour. His travels included Singapore, Ceylon, and Japan, where he gave a series of lectures to thousands of Japanese. His first lecture in Tokyo lasted four hours, after which he met the emperor and empress at the Imperial Palace where thousands came to watch. Einstein later gave his impressions of the Japanese in a letter to his sons:[52]:307 "Of all the people I have met, I like the Japanese most, as they are modest, intelligent, considerate, and have a feel for art."[52]:308
On his return voyage, he also visited Palestine for 12 days in what would become his only visit to that region. "He was greeted with great British pomp, as if he were a head of state rather than a theoretical physicist", writes Isaacson. This included a cannon salute upon his arrival at the residence of the British high commissioner, Sir Herbert Samuel. During one reception given to him, the building was "stormed by throngs who wanted to hear him". In Einstein's talk to the audience, he expressed his happiness over the event:
I consider this the greatest day of my life. Before, I have always found something to regret in the Jewish soul, and that is the forgetfulness of its own people. Today, I have been made happy by the sight of the Jewish people learning to recognize themselves and to make themselves recognized as a force in the world.[53]:308
Emigration to U.S. in 1933

Cartoon of Einstein, who has shed his "Pacifism" wings, standing next to a pillar labeled "World Peace." He is rolling up his sleeves and holding a sword labeled "Preparedness" (circa 1933).
In February 1933 while on a visit to the United States, Einstein decided not to return to Germany due to the rise to power of the Nazis under Germany's new chancellor.[54][55] He visited American universities in early 1933 where he undertook his third two-month visiting professorship at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He and his wife Elsa returned by ship to Belgium at the end of March. During the voyage they were informed that their cottage was raided by the Nazis and his small recreational boat was confiscated. Upon landing in Antwerp on March 28th, he immediately went to the German consulate where he turned in his passport and formally renounced his German citizenship.[53]
In early April, he learned that the new German government had passed laws barring Jews from holding any official positions, including teaching at universities.[53] A month later, Einstein's works were among those targeted by Nazi book burnings, and Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels proclaimed, "Jewish intellectualism is dead."[53] Einstein also learned that his name was on a list of assassination targets, with a "$5,000 bounty on his head."[53] One German magazine included him in a list of enemies of the German regime with the phrase, "not yet hanged".[53]
He resided in Belgium for some months, before temporarily living in England.[56][57] In a letter to his friend, physicist Max Born, who also emigrated from Germany and lived in England, Einstein wrote, ". . . I must confess that the degree of their brutality and cowardice came as something of a surprise."[53]
In October 1933 he returned to the U.S. and took up a position at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey, that required his presence for six months each year.[58][59] He was still undecided on his future (he had offers from European universities, including Oxford), but in 1935 he arrived at the decision to remain permanently in the United States and apply for citizenship.[60][61] His affiliation with the Institute for Advance Studies would last until his death in 1955.[62] He was one of the four first selected (two of the others being John von Neumann and Kurt Gödel) at the new Institute, where he soon developed a close friendship with Gödel. The two would take long walks together discussing their work. His last assistant was Bruria Kaufman, who later became a renowned physicist. During this period, Einstein tried to develop a unified field theory and to refute the accepted interpretation of quantum physics, both unsuccessfully.
Other scientists also fled to America. Among them were Nobel laureates and professors of theoretical physics. With so many other Jewish scientists now forced by circumstances to live in America, often working side by side, Einstein wrote to a friend, "For me the most beautiful thing is to be in contact with a few fine Jews—a few millennia of a civilized past do mean something after all." In another letter he writes, "In my whole life I have never felt so Jewish as now."[53]

World War II and the Manhattan Project

Photograph of Albert Einstein (1947)
In 1939, a group of Hungarian scientists that included emigre physicist Leó Szilárd attempted to alert Washington of ongoing Nazi atomic bomb research. The group's warnings were discounted.[63] Einstein and Szilárd, along with other refugees such as Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner, "regarded it as their responsibility to alert Americans to the possibility that German scientists might win the race to build an atomic bomb, and to warn that Hitler would be more than willing to resort to such a weapon."[52]:630[64] In the summer of 1939, a few months before the beginning of World War II in Europe, Einstein was persuaded to lend his prestige by writing a letter with Szilárd to President Franklin D. Roosevelt to alert him of the possibility. The letter also recommended that the U.S. government pay attention to and become directly involved in uranium research and associated chain reaction research.
The letter is believed to be "arguably the key stimulus for the U.S. adoption of serious investigations into nuclear weapons on the eve of the U.S. entry into World War II".[65] President Roosevelt could not take the risk of allowing Hitler to possess atomic bombs first. As a result of Einstein's letter and his meetings with Roosevelt, the U.S. entered the "race" to develop the bomb, drawing on its "immense material, financial, and scientific resources" to initiate the Manhattan Project. It became the only country to successfully develop an atomic bomb during World War II.
For Einstein, "war was a disease . . . [and] he called for resistance to war." But in 1933, after Hitler assumed full power in Germany, "he renounced pacifism altogether . . . In fact, he urged the Western powers to prepare themselves against another German onslaught."[66]:110 In 1954, a year before his death, Einstein said to his old friend, Linus Pauling, "I made one great mistake in my life — when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be made; but there was some justification — the danger that the Germans would make them..."[67]
U.S. citizenship

Einstein accepting U.S. citizenship, 1940
Einstein became an American citizen in 1940. Not long after settling into his career at Princeton, he expressed his appreciation of the "meritocracy" in American culture when compared to Europe. According to Isaacson, he recognized the "right of individuals to say and think what they pleased", without social barriers, and as result, the individual was "encouraged" to be more creative, a trait he valued from his own early education. Einstein writes:
What makes the new arrival devoted to this country is the democratic trait among the people. No one humbles himself before another person or class. . . American youth has the good fortune not to have its outlook troubled by outworn traditions.[53]:432
As a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) at Princeton who campaigned for the civil rights of African Americans, Einstein corresponded with civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois, and in 1946 Einstein called racism America's "worst disease".[68] He later stated, "Race prejudice has unfortunately become an American tradition which is uncritically handed down from one generation to the next. The only remedies are enlightenment and education".[69]
After the death of Israel's first president, Chaim Weizmann, in November 1952, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion offered Einstein the position of President of Israel, a mostly ceremonial post.[70] The offer was presented by Israel's ambassador in Washington, Abba Eban, who explained that the offer "embodies the deepest respect which the Jewish people can repose in any of its sons".[52]:522 However, Einstein declined, and wrote in his response that he was "deeply moved", and "at once saddened and ashamed" that he could not accept it:
All my life I have dealt with objective matters, hence I lack both the natural aptitude and the experience to deal properly with people and to exercise official function. I am the more distressed over these circumstances because my relationship with the Jewish people became my strongest human tie once I achieved complete clarity about our precarious position among the nations of the world.[52]:522[70][71]
Death

The New York World-Telegram announces Einstein's death on 18 April 1955.
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.[72] 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.[73] 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."[74] He died in Princeton Hospital early the next morning at the age of 76, having continued to work until near the end.
During the autopsy, the pathologist of Princeton Hospital, Thomas Stoltz Harvey, removed Einstein's brain for preservation without the permission of his family, in the hope that the neuroscience of the future would be able to discover what made Einstein so intelligent.[75] Einstein's remains were cremated and his ashes were scattered at an undisclosed location.[76][77]
In his lecture at Einstein's memorial, nuclear physicist Robert Oppenheimer summarized his impression of him as a person: "He was almost wholly without sophistication and wholly without worldliness . . . There was always with him a wonderful purity at once childlike and profoundly stubborn."[66]
Scientific career

 

Albert Einstein in 1904

The photoelectric effect. Incoming photons on the left strike a metal plate (bottom), and eject electrons, depicted as flying off to the right.
Throughout his life, Einstein published hundreds of books and articles.[8][10] In addition to the work he did by himself he also collaborated with other scientists on additional projects including the Bose–Einstein statistics, the Einstein refrigerator and others.[78]
1905 - Annus Mirabilis papers
Main articles: Annus Mirabilis papers, Photoelectric effect, Special theory of relativity, and Mass–energy equivalence
The Annus Mirabilis papers are four articles pertaining to the photoelectric effect (which gave rise to quantum theory), Brownian motion, the special theory of relativity, and E = mc2 that Albert Einstein published in the Annalen der Physik scientific journal in 1905. These four works contributed substantially to the foundation of modern physics and changed views on space, time, and matter. The four papers are:
Title (translated) Area of focus Received Published Significance
On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light Photoelectric effect 18 March 9 June Resolved an unsolved puzzle by suggesting that energy is exchanged only in discrete amounts (quanta).[79] This idea was pivotal to the early development of quantum theory.[80]
On the Motion of Small Particles Suspended in a Stationary Liquid, as Required by the Molecular Kinetic Theory of Heat Brownian motion 11 May 18 July Explained empirical evidence for the atomic theory, supporting the application of statistical physics.
On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies Special relativity 30 June 26 September Reconciled Maxwell's equations for electricity and magnetism with the laws of mechanics by introducing major changes to mechanics close to the speed of light, resulting from analysis based on empirical evidence that the speed of light is independent of the motion of the observer.[81] Discredited the concept of a "luminiferous ether."[82]
Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content? Matter–energy equivalence 27 September 21 November Equivalence of matter and energy, E = mc2 (and by implication, the ability of gravity to "bend" light), the existence of "rest energy", and the basis of nuclear energy.
Thermodynamic fluctuations and statistical physics
Main articles: Statistical mechanics, thermal fluctuations, and statistical physics
Albert Einstein's first paper[83] submitted in 1900 to Annalen der Physik was on capillary attraction. It was published in 1901 with the title "Folgerungen aus den Kapillarität Erscheinungen," which translates as "Conclusions from the capillarity phenomena". Two papers he published in 1902–1903 (thermodynamics) attempted to interpret atomic phenomena from a statistical point of view. These papers were the foundation for the 1905 paper on Brownian motion, which showed that Brownian movement can be construed as firm evidence that molecules exist. His research in 1903 and 1904 was mainly concerned with the effect of finite atomic size on diffusion phenomena.[83]
General principles
He articulated the principle of relativity. This was understood by Hermann Minkowski to be a generalization of rotational invariance from space to space-time. Other principles postulated by Einstein and later vindicated are the principle of equivalence and the principle of adiabatic invariance of the quantum number.
Theory of relativity and E = mc²
Main article: History of special relativity
Einstein's "Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper" ("On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies") was received on 30 June 1905 and published 26 September of that same year. It reconciles Maxwell's equations for electricity and magnetism with the laws of mechanics, by introducing major changes to mechanics close to the speed of light. This later became known as Einstein's special theory of relativity.
Consequences of this include the time-space frame of a moving body appearing to slow down and contract (in the direction of motion) when measured in the frame of the observer. This paper also argued that the idea of a luminiferous aether – one of the leading theoretical entities in physics at the time – was superfluous.[84]
In his paper on mass–energy equivalence Einstein produced E = mc2 from his special relativity equations.[85] Einstein's 1905 work on relativity remained controversial for many years, but was accepted by leading physicists, starting with Max Planck.[86][87]
Photons and energy quanta
Main articles: Photon and Quantum
In a 1905 paper,[88] Einstein postulated that light itself consists of localized particles (quanta). Einstein's light quanta were nearly universally rejected by all physicists, including Max Planck and Niels Bohr. This idea only became universally accepted in 1919, with Robert Millikan's detailed experiments on the photoelectric effect, and with the measurement of Compton scattering.
Einstein concluded that each wave of frequency f is associated with a collection of photons with energy hf each, where h is Planck's constant. He does not say much more, because he is not sure how the particles are related to the wave. But he does suggest that this idea would explain certain experimental results, notably the photoelectric effect.[89]
Quantized atomic vibrations
Main article: Einstein solid
In 1907 Einstein proposed a model of matter where each atom in a lattice structure is an independent harmonic oscillator. In the Einstein model, each atom oscillates independently – a series of equally spaced quantized states for each oscillator. Einstein was aware that getting the frequency of the actual oscillations would be different, but he nevertheless proposed this theory because it was a particularly clear demonstration that quantum mechanics could solve the specific heat problem in classical mechanics. Peter Debye refined this model.[90]
Adiabatic principle and action-angle variables
Main article: Old quantum theory
Throughout the 1910s, quantum mechanics expanded in scope to cover many different systems. After Ernest Rutherford discovered the nucleus and proposed that electrons orbit like planets, Niels Bohr was able to show that the same quantum mechanical postulates introduced by Planck and developed by Einstein would explain the discrete motion of electrons in atoms, and the periodic table of the elements.
Einstein contributed to these developments by linking them with the 1898 arguments Wilhelm Wien had made. Wien had shown that the hypothesis of adiabatic invariance of a thermal equilibrium state allows all the blackbody curves at different temperature to be derived from one another by a simple shifting process. Einstein noted in 1911 that the same adiabatic principle shows that the quantity which is quantized in any mechanical motion must be an adiabatic invariant. Arnold Sommerfeld identified this adiabatic invariant as the action variable of classical mechanics. The law that the action variable is quantized was a basic principle of the quantum theory as it was known between 1900 and 1925.[citation needed]
Wave–particle duality

Einstein during his visit to the United States
Main article: Wave–particle duality
Although the patent office promoted Einstein to Technical Examiner Second Class in 1906, he had not given up on academia. In 1908, he became a privatdozent at the University of Bern.[91] In "über die Entwicklung unserer Anschauungen über das Wesen und die Konstitution der Strahlung" ("The Development of Our Views on the Composition and Essence of Radiation"), on the quantization of light, and in an earlier 1909 paper, Einstein showed that Max Planck's energy quanta must have well-defined momenta and act in some respects as independent, point-like particles. This paper introduced the photon concept (although the name photon was introduced later by Gilbert N. Lewis in 1926) and inspired the notion of wave–particle duality in quantum mechanics.
Theory of critical opalescence
Main article: Critical opalescence
Einstein returned to the problem of thermodynamic fluctuations, giving a treatment of the density variations in a fluid at its critical point. Ordinarily the density fluctuations are controlled by the second derivative of the free energy with respect to the density. At the critical point, this derivative is zero, leading to large fluctuations. The effect of density fluctuations is that light of all wavelengths is scattered, making the fluid look milky white. Einstein relates this to Raleigh scattering, which is what happens when the fluctuation size is much smaller than the wavelength, and which explains why the sky is blue.[92] Einstein quantitatively derived critical opalescence from a treatment of density fluctuations, and demonstrated how both the effect and Rayleigh scattering originate from the atomistic constitution of matter.
Zero-point energy
Main article: Zero-point energy
Einstein's physical intuition led him to note that Planck's oscillator energies had an incorrect zero point. He modified Planck's hypothesis by stating that the lowest energy state of an oscillator is equal to 1/2hf, to half the energy spacing between levels. This argument, which was made in 1913 in collaboration with Otto Stern, was based on the thermodynamics of a diatomic molecule which can split apart into two free atoms.
General relativity and the Equivalence Principle
Main article: History of general relativity
See also: Principle of equivalence, Theory of relativity, and Einstein field equations

Eddington's photograph of a solar eclipse.
General relativity (GR) is a theory of gravitation that was developed by Albert Einstein between 1907 and 1915. According to general relativity, the observed gravitational attraction between masses results from the warping of space and time 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 Albert 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.[93] So in 1908 he published an article on acceleration under special relativity. In that article, he argued that free fall is really inertial motion, and that for a freefalling observer the rules of special relativity must apply. This argument is called the Equivalence principle. In the same article, Einstein also predicted the phenomenon of gravitational time dilation. In 1911, Einstein published another article expanding on the 1907 article, in which additional effects such as the deflection of light by massive bodies were predicted.
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.
In June, 1913 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, after more than two years of intensive work Einstein abandoned the theory in November, 1915 after realizing that the hole argument was mistaken.[94]
Cosmology
Main article: Cosmology
In 1917, Einstein applied the General theory of relativity to model the structure of the universe as a whole. He wanted the universe to be eternal and unchanging, but this type of universe is not consistent with relativity. To fix this, Einstein modified the general theory by introducing a new notion, the cosmological constant. With a positive cosmological constant, the universe could be an eternal static sphere.[95]

Einstein in his office at the University of Berlin.
Einstein believed a spherical static universe is philosophically preferred, because it would obey Mach's principle. He had shown that general relativity incorporates Mach's principle to a certain extent in frame dragging by gravitomagnetic fields, but he knew that Mach's idea would not work if space goes on forever. In a closed universe, he believed that Mach's principle would hold. Mach's principle has generated much controversy over the years.
Modern quantum theory
Main article: Schrödinger equation
Einstein was displeased with quantum theory and mechanics, despite its acceptance by other physicists, stating "God doesn't play with dice." As Einstein passed away at the age of 76 he still would not accept quantum theory.[96] In 1917, at the height of his work on relativity, Einstein published an article in Physikalische Zeitschrift that proposed the possibility of stimulated emission, the physical process that makes possible the maser and the laser.[97] This article showed that the statistics of absorption and emission of light would only be consistent with Planck's distribution law if the emission of light into a mode with n photons would be enhanced statistically compared to the emission of light into an empty mode. This paper was enormously influential in the later development of quantum mechanics, because it was the first paper to show that the statistics of atomic transitions had simple laws. Einstein discovered Louis de Broglie's work, and supported his ideas, which were received skeptically at first. In another major paper from this era, Einstein gave a wave equation for de Broglie waves, which Einstein suggested was the Hamilton–Jacobi equation of mechanics. This paper would inspire Schrödinger's work of 1926.
Bose–Einstein statistics
Main article: Bose–Einstein condensation
In 1924, Einstein received a description of a statistical model from Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose, based on a counting method that assumed that light could be understood as a gas of indistinguishable particles. Einstein noted that Bose's statistics applied to some atoms as well as to the proposed light particles, and submitted his translation of Bose's paper to the Zeitschrift für Physik. Einstein also published his own articles describing the model and its implications, among them the Bose–Einstein condensate phenomenon that some particulates should appear at very low temperatures.[98] It was not until 1995 that the first such condensate was produced experimentally by Eric Allin Cornell and Carl Wieman using ultra-cooling equipment built at the NIST–JILA laboratory at the University of Colorado at Boulder.[99] Bose–Einstein statistics are now used to describe the behaviors of any assembly of bosons. Einstein's sketches for this project may be seen in the Einstein Archive in the library of the Leiden University.[78]
Energy momentum pseudotensor
Main article: Stress-energy-momentum pseudotensor
General relativity includes a dynamical spacetime, so it is difficult to see how to identify the conserved energy and momentum. Noether's theorem allows these quantities to be determined from a Lagrangian with translation invariance, but general covariance makes translation invariance into something of a gauge symmetry. The energy and momentum derived within general relativity by Noether's presecriptions do not make a real tensor for this reason.
Einstein argued that this is true for fundamental reasons, because the gravitational field could be made to vanish by a choice of coordinates. He maintained that the non-covariant energy momentum pseudotensor was in fact the best description of the energy momentum distribution in a gravitational field. This approach has been echoed by Lev Landau and Evgeny Lifshitz, and others, and has become standard.
The use of non-covariant objects like pseudotensors was heavily criticized in 1917 by Erwin Schrödinger and others.
Unified field theory
Main article: Classical unified field theories
Following his research on general relativity, Einstein entered into a series of attempts to generalize his geometric theory of gravitation to include electromagnetism as another aspect of a single entity. In 1950, he described his "unified field theory" in a Scientific American article entitled "On the Generalized Theory of Gravitation".[100] Although he continued to be lauded for his work, Einstein became increasingly isolated in his research, and his efforts were ultimately unsuccessful. In his pursuit of a unification of the fundamental forces, Einstein ignored some mainstream developments in physics, most notably the strong and weak nuclear forces, which were not well understood until many years after his death. Mainstream physics, in turn, largely ignored Einstein's approaches to unification. Einstein's dream of unifying other laws of physics with gravity motivates modern quests for a theory of everything and in particular string theory, where geometrical fields emerge in a unified quantum-mechanical setting.
Wormholes
Main article: Wormhole
Einstein collaborated with others to produce a model of a wormhole. His motivation was to model elementary particles with charge as a solution of gravitational field equations, in line with the program outlined in the paper "Do Gravitational Fields play an Important Role in the Constitution of the Elementary Particles?". These solutions cut and pasted Schwarzschild black holes to make a bridge between two patches.
If one end of a wormhole was positively charged, the other end would be negatively charged. These properties led Einstein to believe that pairs of particles and antiparticles could be described in this way.
Einstein–Cartan theory
Main article: Einstein–Cartan theory
In order to incorporate spinning point particles into general relativity, the affine connection needed to be generalized to include an antisymmetric part, called the torsion. This modification was made by Einstein and Cartan in the 1920s.
Equations of motion
Main article: Einstein–Infeld–Hoffmann equations
The theory of general relativity has a fundamental law  – the Einstein equations which describe how space curves, the geodesic equation which describes how particles move may be derived from the Einstein equations.
Since the equations of general relativity are non-linear, a lump of energy made out of pure gravitational fields, like a black hole, would move on a trajectory which is determined by the Einstein equations themselves, not by a new law. So Einstein proposed that the path of a singular solution, like a black hole, would be determined to be a geodesic from general relativity itself.
This was established by Einstein, Infeld, and Hoffmann for pointlike objects without angular momentum, and by Roy Kerr for spinning objects.
Other investigations
Main article: Einstein's unsuccessful investigations
Einstein conducted other investigations that were unsuccessful and abandoned. These pertain to force, superconductivity, gravitational waves, and other research. Please see the main article for details.
Collaboration with other scientists

The 1927 Solvay Conference in Brussels, a gathering of the world's top physicists. Einstein in the center.
In addition to long time collaborators Leopold Infeld, Nathan Rosen, Peter Bergmann and others, Einstein also had some one-shot collaborations with various scientists.
Einstein–de Haas experiment
Main article: Einstein–de Haas effect
Einstein and De Haas demonstrated that magnetization is due to the motion of electrons, nowadays known to be the spin. In order to show this, they reversed the magnetization in an iron bar suspended on a torsion pendulum. They confirmed that this leads the bar to rotate, because the electron's angular momentum changes as the magnetization changes. This experiment needed to be sensitive, because the angular momentum associated with electrons is small, but it definitively established that electron motion of some kind is responsible for magnetization.
Schrödinger gas model
Einstein suggested to Erwin Schrödinger that he might be able to reproduce the statistics of a Bose–Einstein gas by considering a box. Then to each possible quantum motion of a particle in a box associate an independent harmonic oscillator. Quantizing these oscillators, each level will have an integer occupation number, which will be the number of particles in it.
This formulation is a form of second quantization, but it predates modern quantum mechanics. Erwin Schrödinger applied this to derive the thermodynamic properties of a semiclassical ideal gas. Schrödinger urged Einstein to add his name as co-author, although Einstein declined the invitation.[101]
Einstein refrigerator
Main article: Einstein refrigerator
In 1926, Einstein and his former student Leó Szilárd co-invented (and in 1930, patented) the Einstein refrigerator. This absorption refrigerator was then revolutionary for having no moving parts and using only heat as an input.[102] On 11 November 1930, U.S. Patent 1,781,541 was awarded to Albert Einstein and Leó Szilárd for the refrigerator. Their invention was not immediately put into commercial production, as the most promising of their patents were quickly bought up by the Swedish company Electrolux to protect its refrigeration technology from competition.[103]
Bohr versus Einstein
Main article: Bohr–Einstein debates

Einstein and Niels Bohr, 1925
The Bohr–Einstein debates were a series of public disputes about quantum mechanics between Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr who were two of its founders. Their debates are remembered because of their importance to the philosophy of science.[104][105][106]
Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen paradox
Main article: EPR paradox
In 1935, Einstein returned to the question of quantum mechanics. He considered how a measurement on one of two entangled particles would affect the other. He noted, along with his collaborators, that by performing different measurements on the distant particle, either of position or momentum, different properties of the entangled partner could be discovered without disturbing it in any way.
He then used a hypothesis of local realism to conclude that the other particle had these properties already determined. The principle he proposed is that if it is possible to determine what the answer to a position or momentum measurement would be, without in any way disturbing the particle, then the particle actually has values of position or momentum.
This principle distilled the essence of Einstein's objection to quantum mechanics. As a physical principle, it was shown to be incorrect when the Aspect experiment of 1982 confirmed Bell's theorem, which had been promulgated in 1964.
Political and religious views

Main articles: Albert Einstein's political views and Albert Einstein's religious views

Albert Einstein, seen here with his wife Elsa Einstein and Zionist leaders, including future President of Israel Chaim Weizmann, his wife Dr. Vera Weizmann, Menahem Ussishkin, and Ben-Zion Mossinson on arrival in New York City in 1921.
Albert Einstein's political view was in favor of socialism[107][108]; his political views emerged publicly in the middle of the 20th century due to his fame and reputation for genius. Einstein offered to and was called on to give judgments and opinions on matters often unrelated to theoretical physics or mathematics.[109]
Einstein's views about religious belief have been collected from interviews and original writings. These views covered Judaism, theological determinism, agnosticism, and humanism. He also wrote much about ethical culture, opting for Spinoza's god over belief in a personal god.[110]
Love of music

Einstein developed an appreciation of music at an early age. His mother played the piano reasonably well and wanted her son to learn the violin, not only to instill in him a love of music but also to help him assimilate German culture. According to conductor Leon Botstein, Einstein is said to have begun playing when he was five, but did not enjoy it at that age.[111]
When he turned thirteen, however, he discovered the violin sonatas of Mozart. "Einstein fell in love" with Mozart's music, notes Botstein, and learned to play music more willingly. According to Einstein, he taught himself to play by "ever practicing systematically," adding that "Love is a better teacher than a sense of duty."[111] At age seventeen, he was heard by a school examiner in Aarau as he played Beethoven's violin sonatas, the examiner stating afterward that his playing was "remarkable and revealing of 'great insight.'" What struck the examiner, writes Botstein, was that Einstein "displayed a deep love of the music, a quality that was and remains in short supply. Music possessed an unusual meaning for this student."[111]
Botstein notes that music assumed a pivotal and permanent role in Einstein's life from that period on. Although the idea of becoming a professional himself was not on his mind at any time, among those with whom Einstein played chamber music were a few professionals, and he performed for private audiences and friends. Chamber music also became a regular part of his social life while living in Bern, Zurich, and Berlin, where he played with Max Planck and his son, among others. In 1931, while engaged in research at California Institute of Technology, he visited the Zoellner family conservatory in Los Angeles and played some of Beethoven and Mozart's works with members of the Zoellner Quartet, recently retired from two decades of acclaimed touring all across the United States; Einstein later presented the family patriarch with an autographed photograph as a memento.[112][113] Near the end of his life, when the young Juilliard Quartet visited him in Princeton, he played his violin with them; although they slowed the tempo to accommodate his lesser technical abilities, Botstein notes the quartet was "impressed by Einstein's level of coordination and intonation."[111]
Non-scientific legacy

While travelling, Einstein wrote daily to his wife Elsa and adopted stepdaughters Margot and Ilse. The letters were included in the papers bequeathed to The Hebrew University. Margot Einstein permitted the personal letters to be made available to the public, but requested that it not be done until twenty years after her death (she died in 1986[114]). Barbara Wolff, of The Hebrew University's Albert Einstein Archives, told the BBC that there are about 3,500 pages of private correspondence written between 1912 and 1955.[115]
Einstein bequeathed the royalties from use of his image to The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Corbis, successor to The Roger Richman Agency, licenses the use of his name and associated imagery, as agent for the university.[116]
In popular culture

Main article: Albert Einstein in popular culture
In the period before World War II, Einstein was so well known in America that he would be stopped on the street by people wanting him to explain "that theory". He finally figured out a way to handle the incessant inquiries. He told his inquirers "Pardon me, sorry! Always I am mistaken for Professor Einstein."[117]
Einstein has been the subject of or inspiration for many novels, films, plays, and works of music.[118] He is a favorite model for depictions of mad scientists and absent-minded professors; his expressive face and distinctive hairstyle have been widely copied and exaggerated. Time magazine's Frederic Golden wrote that Einstein was "a cartoonist's dream come true".[119]
Awards and honors

Main article: Einstein's awards and honors
Einstein received numerous awards and honors, including the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Publications

The following publications by Albert Einstein are referenced in this article. A more complete list of his publications may be found at List of scientific publications by Albert Einstein.
Einstein, Albert (1901), "Folgerungen aus den Capillaritätserscheinungen (Conclusions Drawn from the Phenomena of Capillarity)", Annalen der Physik 4 (3): 513, Bibcode 1901AnP...309..513E, doi:10.1002/andp.19013090306
Einstein, Albert (1905a), "Über einen die Erzeugung und Verwandlung des Lichtes betreffenden heuristischen Gesichtspunkt (On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light)", Annalen der Physik 17 (6): 132–148, Bibcode 1905AnP...322..132E, doi:10.1002/andp.19053220607 This annus mirabilis paper on the photoelectric effect was received by Annalen der Physik 18 March.
Einstein, Albert (1905b), A new determination of molecular dimensions. This PhD thesis was completed 30 April and submitted 20 July.
Einstein, Albert (1905c), "On the Motion – Required by the Molecular Kinetic Theory of Heat – of Small Particles Suspended in a Stationary Liquid", Annalen der Physik 17 (8): 549–560, Bibcode 1905AnP...322..549E, doi:10.1002/andp.19053220806. This annus mirabilis paper on Brownian motion was received 11 May.
Einstein, Albert (1905d), "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies", Annalen der Physik 17 (10): 891–921, Bibcode 1905AnP...322..891E, doi:10.1002/andp.19053221004. This annus mirabilis paper on special relativity was received 30 June.
Einstein, Albert (1905e), "Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?", Annalen der Physik 18 (13): 639–641, Bibcode 1905AnP...323..639E, doi:10.1002/andp.19053231314. This annus mirabilis paper on mass-energy equivalence was received 27 September.
Einstein, Albert (1915), "Die Feldgleichungen der Gravitation (The Field Equations of Gravitation)", Königlich Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften: 844–847
Einstein, Albert (1917a), "Kosmologische Betrachtungen zur allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie (Cosmological Considerations in the General Theory of Relativity)", Königlich Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften
Einstein, Albert (1917b), "Zur Quantentheorie der Strahlung (On the Quantum Mechanics of Radiation)", Physikalische Zeitschrift 18: 121–128, Bibcode 1917PhyZ...18..121E
Einstein, Albert (11 July 1923), "Fundamental Ideas and Problems of the Theory of Relativity", Nobel Lectures, Physics 1901–1921, Amsterdam: Elsevier Publishing Company, archived from the original on 10 February 2007, retrieved 25 March 2007
Einstein, Albert (1924), "Quantentheorie des einatomigen idealen Gases (Quantum theory of monatomic ideal gases)", Sitzungsberichte der Preussichen Akademie der Wissenschaften Physikalisch-Mathematische Klasse: 261–267. First of a series of papers on this topic.
Einstein, Albert (1926), "Die Ursache der Mäanderbildung der Flussläufe und des sogenannten Baerschen Gesetzes", Die Naturwissenschaften 14 (11): 223–224, Bibcode 1926NW.....14..223E, doi:10.1007/BF01510300. On Baer's law and meanders in the courses of rivers.
Einstein, Albert; Podolsky, Boris; Rosen, Nathan (15 May 1935), "Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?", Physical Review 47 (10): 777–780, Bibcode 1935PhRv...47..777E, doi:10.1103/PhysRev.47.777
Einstein, Albert (1940), "On Science and Religion", Nature (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic) 146 (3706): 605, Bibcode 1940Natur.146..605E, doi:10.1038/146605a0, ISBN 0-7073-0453-9
Einstein, Albert et al. (4 December 1948), "To the editors", New York Times (Melville, NY: AIP, American Inst. of Physics), ISBN 0-7354-0359-7
Einstein, Albert (May 1949), "Why Socialism?", Monthly Review, archived from the original on 11 January 2006, retrieved 16 January 2006
Einstein, Albert (1950), "On the Generalized Theory of Gravitation", Scientific American CLXXXII (4): 13–17
Einstein, Albert (1954), Ideas and Opinions, New York: Random House, ISBN 0-517-00393-7
Einstein, Albert (1969) (in German), Albert Einstein, Hedwig und Max Born: Briefwechsel 1916–1955, Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, ISBN 3-88682-005-X
Einstein, Albert (1979), Autobiographical Notes, Paul Arthur Schilpp (Centennial ed.), Chicago: Open Court, ISBN 0-87548-352-6. The chasing a light beam thought experiment is described on pages 48–51.
Collected Papers: Stachel, John, Martin J. Klein, a. J. Kox, Michel Janssen, R. Schulmann, Diana Komos Buchwald and others (Eds.) (1987–2006), The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Vol. 1–10, Princeton University Press Further information about the volumes published so far can be found on the webpages of the Einstein Papers Project and on the Princeton University Press Einstein Page
See also

 Biography portal
 Physics portal
 Science portal
 Book: Albert Einstein
Wikipedia books are collections of articles that can be downloaded or ordered in print.
The Einstein Theory of Relativity (educational film about the theory of relativity)
German inventors and discoverers
Heinrich Burkhardt
Hermann Einstein
Historical Museum of Bern (Einstein museum)
History of gravitational theory
Introduction to special relativity
List of coupled cousins
Relativity priority dispute
Sticky bead argument
Summation convention
List of Jewish Nobel laureates
Notes

^ "Albert's intellectual growth was strongly fostered at home. His mother, a talented pianist, ensured the children's musical education. His father regularly read Schiller and Heine aloud to the family. Uncle Jakob challenged Albert with mathematical problems, which he solved with 'a deep feeling of happiness'." More significant were the weekly visits of Max Talmud from 1889 through 1894 during which time he introduced the boy to popular scientific texts that brought to an end a short-lived religious phase, convincing him that 'a lot in the Bible stories could not be true'. A textbook of plane geometry that he quickly worked through led on to an avid self-study of mathematics, several years ahead of the school curriculum. [18]
References

^ "Mohammad Raziuddin Siddiqui". Ias.ac.in. 2 January 1998. Archived from the original on 1 June 2004. Retrieved 3 April 2011.
^ Zahar, Élie (2001), Poincaré's Philosophy. From Conventionalism to Phenomenology, Carus Publishing Company, Chapter 2, p.41, ISBN 0-8126-9435-X.
^ Whittaker, E. (1955). "Albert Einstein. 1879-1955". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 1: 37–67. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1955.0005. JSTOR 769242. edit
^ David Bodanis, E = mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation (New York: Walker, 2000).
^ "The Nobel Prize in Physics 1921". Nobel Foundation. Archived from the original on 5 October 2008. Retrieved 6 March 2007.
^ a b "Scientific Background on the Nobel Prize in Physics 2011. The accelerating universe." (page 2) Nobelprize.org.
^ Hans-Josef, Küpper (2000). "Various things about Albert Einstein". einstein-website.de. Retrieved 18 July 2009.
^ a b Paul Arthur Schilpp, editor (1951), Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, Volume II, New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers (Harper Torchbook edition), pp. 730–746His non-scientific works include: About Zionism: Speeches and Lectures by Professor Albert Einstein (1930), "Why War?" (1933, co-authored by Sigmund Freud), The World As I See It (1934), Out of My Later Years (1950), and a book on science for the general reader, The Evolution of Physics (1938, co-authored by Leopold Infeld).
^ WordNet for Einstein.
^ a b c d "Albert Einstein – Biography". Nobel Foundation. Archived from the original on 6 March 2007. Retrieved 7 March 2007.
^ John J. Stachel (2002), Einstein from "B" to "Z", Springer, pp. 59–61, ISBN 978-0-8176-4143-6, retrieved 20 February 2011
^ a b "The Legend of the Dull-Witted Child Who Grew Up to Be a Genius". Albert Einstein archives. Retrieved 23 July 2012.
^ "Frequently asked questions". einstein-website.de. Retrieved 23 July 2012.
^ "Left Handed Einstein". Being Left Handed.com. Retrieved 23 July 2012.
^ Schilpp (Ed.), P. A. (1979), Albert Einstein – Autobiographical Notes, Open Court Publishing Company, pp. 8–9
^ M. Talmey, The Relativity Theory Simplified and the Formative Period of its Inventor. Falcon Press, 1932, pp. 161–164.
^ Dudley Herschbach, "Einstein as a Student", Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA, pp. 4–5, web: HarvardChem-Einstein-PDF
^ Einstein as a Student, pp. 3–5.
^ A. Fölsing, Albert Einstein, 1997, pp. 30-31.
^ Albert Einstein Collected Papers, vol. 1 (1987), doc. 5.
^ Mehra, Jagdish (2001), "Albert Einstein's first paper", The Golden Age of Physics, World Scientific, ISBN 981-02-4985-3
^ A. Fölsing, Albert Einstein, 1997, pp. 36-37.
^ Highfield & Carter (1993, pp. 21,31,56–57)
^ A. Fölsing, Albert Einstein, 1997, p. 40.
^ Collected Papers, vol. 1, docs. 21-27.
^ Albert Einstein Collected Papers, vol. 1, 1987, doc. 67.
^ Troemel-Ploetz, D., "Mileva Einstein-Maric: The Woman Who Did Einstein's Mathematics", Women's Studies Int. Forum, vol. 13, no. 5, pp. 415–432, 1990.
^ Walker, Evan Harris (February 1989) (PDF), Did Einstein Espouse his Spouse's Ideas?, Physics Today, retrieved 2012-07-24.
^ Pais, A., Einstein Lived Here, Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. 1–29.
^ Holton, G., Einstein, History, and Other Passions, Harvard University Press, 1996, pp. 177–193.
^ Stachel, J., Einstein from B to Z, Birkhäuser, 2002, pp. 26–38; 39–55. philoscience.unibe.ch
^ Martinez, A. A., "Handling evidence in history: the case of Einstein's Wife." School Science Review, 86 (316), March 2005, pp. 49–56. PDF
^ This conclusion is from Einstein's correspondence with Maric. Lieserl is first mentioned in a letter from Einstein to Maric (who was staying with her family in or near Novi Sad at the time of Lieserl's birth) dated 4 February 1902 (Collected papers Vol. 1, document 134).
^ Albrecht Fölsing (1998). Albert Einstein: A Biography. Penguin Group. ISBN 0-14-023719-4; see section I, II,
^ Highfield & Carter 1993, p. 216
^ Now the Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property, retrieved 16 October 2006. See also their FAQ about Einstein and the Institute
^ Peter Galison, "Einstein's Clocks: The Question of Time" Critical Inquiry 26, no. 2 (Winter 2000): 355–389.
^ Peter Galison, "Einstein's Clocks: The Question of Time" Critical Inquiry 26, no. 2 (Winter 2000).
^ Galison, Peter (2003), Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps: Empires of Time, New York: W.W. Norton, ISBN 0-393-02001-0
^ (Einstein 1905b)
^ "Eine Neue Bestimmung der Moleküldimensionen". ETH Zürich. 1905. Retrieved 26 September 2011.
^ "Universität Zürich: Geschichte". Uzh.ch. 2 December 2010. Retrieved 3 April 2011.
^ Kant, Horst. "Albert Einstein and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin". in Renn, Jürgen. "Albert Einstein – Chief Engineer of the Universe: One Hundred Authors for Einstein." Ed. Renn, Jürgen. Wiley-VCH. 2005. pp. 166–169. ISBN 3-527-40574-7
^ Calaprice, Alice; Lipscombe, Trevor (2005), Albert Einstein: a biography, Greenwood Publishing Group, p. xix, ISBN 0-313-33080-8, Timeline, p. xix
^ Heilbron, 2000, p. 84.
^ Andrzej, Stasiak (2003), "Myths in science", EMBO Reports 4 (3): 236, doi:10.1038/sj.embor.embor779, retrieved 31 March 2007
^ Earman, John; Glymour, Clark (1980). "Relativity and Eclipses: The British Eclipse Expeditions of 1919 and Their Predecessors". Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press) 11 (1): 49–85. ISSN 0890-9997.
^ Minkel, J. R. (6 March 2008). "Did Researchers Cook Data from the First Test of General Relativity?". Scientific American (New York: Nature Publishing).
^ Harper, William (1998). "Isaac Newton on Empirical Success and Scientific Method". In Earman, John; Norton, John. The Cosmos of Science: Essays of Exploration. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh. p. 81. ISBN 978-0-8229-3930-6. "It is not at all obvious that…the Glymour-Earman criticisms are accurate reflections of the evidential implications of the data."
^ Kennefick, Daniel (March 2009). "Testing relativity from the 1919 eclipse— a question of bias". Physics Today (College Park, MD: American Institute of Physics): 37–42. ISSN 0031-9228.
^ Hoffman and Dukas (1972), pp. 145–148; Fölsing (1997), pp. 499–508.
^ a b c d e Isaacson, Walter. Einstein: His Life and Universe, Simon & Schuster (2007)
^ a b c d e f g h i Isaacson, Walter. Einstein: His Life and Universe, Simon & Schuster (2007) pp. 407–410
^ Fölsing (1997), p. 659.
^ Isaacson (2007), p. 404.
^ Hoffman, B. (1972), pp. 165–171
^ Fölsing, A. (1997), pp. 666–677.
^ Clark (1971), p. 619.
^ Fölsing (1997), pp. 649, 678.
^ Clark (1971), p.642.
^ Fölsing (1997), pp. 686-687.
^ "In Brief". Institute for Advanced Study. Archived from the original on 29 March 2010. Retrieved 4 March 2010.
^ Evans-Pritchard, Ambrose (29 August 2010). "Obama could kill fossil fuels overnight with a nuclear dash for thorium". The Daily Telegraph (London).
^ Gosling, F.G. The Manhattan Project: Making the Atomic Bomb, U.S. Department of Energy, History Division (January, 1999) p. vii
^ Diehl, Sarah J.; Moltz, James Clay. Nuclear Weapons and Nonproliferation: a Reference Handbook, ABC-CLIO (2008) p. 218
^ a b Stern, Fritz. Essay, "Einstein's Germany", E = Einstein: His Life, His Thought, and His Influence on Our Culture, Sterling Publishing (2006) pp. 97–118
^ Einstein: The Life and Times by Ronald Clark. page 752
^ Fred Jerome, Rodger Taylor (2006) Einstein on Race and Racism Rutgers University Press, 2006.
^ Calaprice, Alice (2005) The new quotable Einstein. pp.148–149 Princeton University Press, 2005. See also Odyssey in Climate Modeling, Global Warming, and Advising Five Presidents
^ a b "ISRAEL: Einstein Declines". Time magazine. 1 December 1952. Retrieved 31 March 2010.
^ "Einstein in Princeton / Scientist, Humanitarian, Cultural Icon". Historical Society of Princeton. Archived from the original on 27 April 2010. Retrieved 31 March 2010.
^ The Case of the Scientist with a Pulsating Mass, 14 June 2002, retrieved 11 June 2007
^ Albert Einstein Archives (April 1955), "Draft of projected Telecast Israel Independence Day, April 1955 (last statement ever written)", Einstein Archives Online, archived from the original on 13 March 2007, retrieved 14 March 2007
^ Cohen, J.R.; Graver, L.M. (November 1995), "The ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm of Albert Einstein", Surgery, Gynecology & Obstetrics 170 (5): 455–8, PMID 2183375.
^ The Long, Strange Journey of Einstein's Brain, National Public Radio, retrieved 3 October 2007
^ O'Connor, J.J.; Robertson, E.F. (1997), "Albert Einstein", The MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St. Andrews
^ "Dr. Albert Einstein Dies in Sleep at 76. World Mourns Loss of Great Scientist", New York Times, 19 April 1955, "Princeton, New Jersey, 18 April 1955. Dr. Albert Einstein, one of the great thinkers of the ages, died in his sleep here early today."
^ a b "Einstein archive at the Instituut-Lorentz". Instituut-Lorentz. 2005. Retrieved on 21 November 2005.
^ Das, Ashok (2003). Lectures on quantum mechanics. Hindustan Book Agency. p. 59. ISBN 81-85931-41-0.
^ Spielberg, Nathan; Anderson, Bryon D. (1995). Seven ideas that shook the universe (2nd ed.). John Wiley & Sons. p. 263. ISBN 0-471-30606-1.
^ Major, Fouad G. (2007). The quantum beat: principles and applications of atomic clocks (2nd ed.). Springer. p. 142. ISBN 0-387-69533-8.
^ Lindsay, Robert Bruce; Margenau, Henry (1981). Foundations of physics. Ox Bow Press. p. 330. ISBN 0-918024-17-X.
^ a b Hans-Josef Kuepper. "List of Scientific Publications of Albert Einstein". Einstein-website.de. Retrieved 3 April 2011.
^ (Einstein 1905d)
^ Stachel, John J. (December 2001), Einstein from "B" to "Z", Einstein Studies, Vol. 9, Center for Einstein Studies, Boston University: Springer-Verlag New York, LLC, pp. vi, 15, 90, 131, 215, ISBN 978-0-8176-4143-6
^ For a discussion of the reception of relativity theory around the world, and the different controversies it encountered, see the articles in Thomas F. Glick, ed., The Comparative Reception of Relativity (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1987), ISBN 90-277-2498-9.
^ Pais, Abraham (1982), Subtle is the Lord. The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein, Oxford University Press, pp. 382–386, ISBN 0-19-853907-X
^ Einstein, Albert (1905), "Über einen die Erzeugung und Verwandlung des Lichtes betreffenden heuristischen Gesichtspunkt", Annalen der Physik 17 (6): 132–148, Bibcode 1905AnP...322..132E, doi:10.1002/andp.19053220607, retrieved 27 June 2009
^ (Einstein 1905a).
^ Celebrating Einstein "Solid Cold". U.S. DOE., Office of Scientific and Technical Information, 2011.
^ Pais, Abraham (1982), Subtle is the Lord. The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein, Oxford University Press, p. 522, ISBN 0-19-853907-X
^ Levenson, Thomas. "Einstein's Big Idea". Public Broadcasting Service. 2005. Retrieved on 25 February 2006.
^ Albert Einstein, Nobel lecture in 1921
^ van Dongen, Jeroen (2010) Einstein's Unification Cambridge University Press, p.23.
^ (Einstein 1917a)
^ Video: The Elegant Universe: Part 1 | Watch NOVA Online | PBS Video. Video.pbs.org. Retrieved on 11 May 2012.
^ (Einstein 1917b)
^ (Einstein 1924)
^ Cornell and Wieman Share 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics, 9 October 2001, archived from the original on 10 June 2007, retrieved 11 June 2007
^ (Einstein 1950)
^ Moore, Walter (1989), Schrödinger: Life and Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-43767-9
^ Goettling, Gary. Einstein's refrigerator Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine. 1998. Retrieved on 21 November 2005. Leó Szilárd, a Hungarian physicist who later worked on the Manhattan Project, is credited with the discovery of the chain reaction
^ In September 2008 it was reported that Malcolm McCulloch of Oxford University was heading a three-year project to develop more robust appliances that could be used in locales lacking electricity, and that his team had completed a prototype Einstein refrigerator. He was quoted as saying that improving the design and changing the types of gases used might allow the design's efficiency to be quadrupled.Alok, Jha (21 September 2008), "Einstein fridge design can help global cooling", The Guardian (UK), archived from the original on 24 January 2011, retrieved 22 February 2011
^ Bohr N. "Discussions with Einstein on Epistemological Problems in Atomic Physics". The Value of Knowledge: A Miniature Library of Philosophy. Marxists Internet Archive. Archived from the original on 13 September 2010. Retrieved 30 August 2010. From Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist (1949), publ. Cambridge University Press, 1949. Niels Bohr's report of conversations with Einstein.
^ (Einstein 1969). A reprint of this book was published by Edition Erbrich in 1982, ISBN 3-88682-005-X
^ (Einstein 1935)
^ Einstein, Albert (May 1949). "Why Socialism?". Monthly Review (New York City) 1 (1). Retrieved 29 July 2012.
^ David E. Rowe and Robert Schulmann (08). David A., Walsh. ed. "What Were Einstein's Politics?". George Mason University's History News Network (George Mason University). Retrieved 29 July 2012.
^ Clark, Ronald W. (1971), Einstein: The Life and Times, Avon, ISBN 0-380-44123-3
^ Dukas, Helen (1981). Albert Einstein the Human Side. Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 43. Einstein Archives 59-494[dead link]
^ a b c d Botstein, Leon; Galison, Peter; Holton, Gerald James; Schweber, Silvan S. Einstein for the 21st century: His Legacy in Science, Art, and Modern Culture, Princeton Univ. Press (2008) pp. 161-164
^ Cariaga, Daniel, "Not Taking It with You: A Tale of Two Estates," Los Angeles Times, 22 December 1985. Retrieved April 2012.
^ Auction listing by RR Auction, auction closed 13 October 2010.
^ "Obituary". New York Times. 12 July 1986. Retrieved 3 April 2011.
^ "Letters Reveal Einstein Love Life", BBC News (BBC), 11 July 2006, retrieved 14 March 2007
^ Einstein, Corbis Rights Representation, archived from the original on 19 August 2008, retrieved 8 August 2008
^ The New Yorker April 1939 pg 69 Disguise
^ McTee, Cindy. "Einstein's Dream for orchestra". Cindymctee.com.
^ Golden, Frederic (3 January 2000), "Person of the Century: Albert Einstein", Time, archived from the original on 21 February 2006, retrieved 25 February 2006
Further reading

Brian, Denis (1996). Einstein: A Life. New York: John Wiley.
Clark, Ronald (1971). Einstein: The Life and Times. New York: Avon Books.
Fölsing, Albrecht (1997): Albert Einstein: A Biography. New York: Penguin Viking. (Translated and abridged from the German by Ewald Osers.) ISBN 978-0670855452
Highfield, Roger; Carter, Paul (1993). The Private Lives of Albert Einstein. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 978-0-571-16744-9.
Hoffmann, Banesh, with the collaboration of Helen Dukas (1972): Albert Einstein: Creator and Rebel. London: Hart-Davis, MacGibbon Ltd. ISBN 978-0670111817
Isaacson, Walter (2007): Einstein: His Life and Universe. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, New York. ISBN 978-0-7432-6473-0
Moring, Gary (2004): The complete idiot's guide to understanding Einstein ( 1st ed. 2000). Indianapolis IN: Alpha books (Macmillan USA). ISBN 0-02-863180-3
Pais, Abraham (1982): Subtle is the Lord: The science and the life of Albert Einstein. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0198539070. The definitive biography to date.
Pais, Abraham (1994): Einstein Lived Here. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-192-80672-6
Parker, Barry (2000): Einstein's Brainchild: Relativity Made Relatively Easy!. Prometheus Books. Illustrated by Lori Scoffield-Beer. A review of Einstein's career and accomplishments, written for the lay public. ISBN 978-1591025221
Schweber, Sylvan S. (2008): Einstein and Oppenheimer: The Meaning of Genius. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-02828-9.
Oppenheimer, J.R. (1971): "On Albert Einstein," p. 8–12 in Science and synthesis: an international colloquium organized by Unesco on the tenth anniversary of the death of Albert Einstein and Teilhard de Chardin, Springer-Verlag, 1971, 208 pp. (Lecture delivered at the UNESCO House in Paris on 13 December 1965.) Also published in The New York Review of Books, 17 March 1966, On Albert Einstein by Robert Oppenheimer
External links

Find more about Albert Einstein on Wikipedia's sister projects:
 Definitions and translations from Wiktionary
 Images and media from Commons
 Learning resources from Wikiversity
 News stories from Wikinews
 Quotations from Wikiquote
 Source texts from Wikisource
 Textbooks from Wikibooks
Ideas and Opinions, Einstein's letters and speeches, Full text, Crown Publishers (1954) 384 pages
Einstein's Scholar Google profile
Works by Albert Einstein (public domain in Canada)
The MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St Andrews, Scotland, April 1997, retrieved 14 June 2009
Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein, Monthly Review, May 1949
Einstein's Personal Correspondence: Religion, Politics, The Holocaust, and Philosophy Shapell Manuscript Foundation
FBI file on Albert Einstein
Nobelprize.org Biography:Albert Einstein
The Einstein You Never Knew — slideshow by Life magazine
Albert Einstein — videos
Science Odyssey People And Discoveries
MIT OpenCourseWare STS.042J/8.225J: Einstein, Oppenheimer, Feynman: Physics in the 20th century — free study course that explores the changing roles of physics and physicists during the 20th century
List of publications from Google Scholar.
Albert Einstein Archives Online (80,000+ Documents) (MSNBC - 19 March 2012)
[show] v t e
Albert Einstein
[show] v t e
Copley Medallists
[show] v t e
Nobel Laureates in Physics (1901–1925)
[show] v t e
Philosophy of science
Authority control: PND: 118529579 | LCCN: n79022889 | VIAF: 75121530 | WorldCat
View page ratings
Rate this page
What's this?
Trustworthy
Objective
Complete
Well-written
I am highly knowledgeable about this topic (optional)

Submit ratings
Categories: 1879 births1955 deaths20th-century Swiss peopleAcademics of Charles University in PragueAlbert EinsteinAmerican physicistsCosmologistsDeaths from abdominal aortic aneurysmEinstein familyETH Zurich alumniETH Zurich facultyGerman emigrants to SwitzerlandGerman Jews who emigrated to the United States to escape NazismGerman physicistsInstitute for Advanced Study facultyJewish agnosticsJewish physicistsLeiden University facultyNobel laureates in PhysicsPatent examinersPeople from UlmStateless personsSwiss emigrants to the United StatesSwiss physicistsTheoretical physicistsPhilosophers of sciencePacifists
Create accountLog inArticleTalkReadView sourceView history

Main page
Contents
Featured content
Current events
Random article
Donate to Wikipedia
Wikipedia Shop
Interaction
Help
About Wikipedia
Community portal
Recent changes
Contact Wikipedia
Toolbox
Print/export
Languages
Afrikaans
Alemannisch
????
Ænglisc
???????
Aragonés
??????
Asturianu
Aymar aru
Az?rbaycanca
Bamanankan
?????
Bân-lâm-gú
Basa Banyumasan
??????????
??????????? (???????????)?
Bikol Central
?????????
Bosanski
Brezhoneg
Català
???????
Cesky
Chavacano de Zamboanga
Corsu
Cymraeg
Dansk
Deutsch
Diné bizaad
Eesti
????????
Español
Esperanto
Estremeñu
Euskara
?????
Fiji Hindi
Français
Frysk
Gaeilge
Gaelg
Gàidhlig
Galego
??
???????
???
Hawai`i
???????
??????
Hrvatski
Ido
Igbo
Ilokano
????????????? ???????
Bahasa Indonesia
Interlingua
????
Íslenska
Italiano
?????
Basa Jawa
?????
Kapampangan
???????
???????
Kiswahili
Kreyòl ayisyen
Kurdî
????????
Ladino
?????
Latina
Latviešu
Lëtzebuergesch
Lietuviu
Ligure
Lojban
Lumbaart
Magyar
??????????
Malagasy
??????
?????
?????????
????
????????
Bahasa Melayu
Mirandés
??????
??????????
Nahuatl
Nederlands
Nedersaksisch
??????
???
?norsk (bokmål)?
?norsk (nynorsk)?
Novial
Occitan
????
O?zbekcha
??????
Pangasinan
??????
????
?????????
Picard
Piemontèis
Tok Pisin
Plattdüütsch
Polski
Português
Qaraqalpaqsha
Ripoarisch
Româna
Runa Simi
??????????
???????
???? ????
Sámegiella
Sardu
Scots
Shqip
Sicilianu
?????
Simple English
Slovencina
Slovenšcina
Slunski
Soomaaliga
?????
?????? / srpski
Srpskohrvatski / ??????????????
Basa Sunda
Suomi
Svenska
Tagalog
?????
???????/tatarça
??????
???
Türkçe
??????????
????
???????? / Uyghurche
Vahcuengh
Vèneto
Vepsän kel’
Ti?ng Vi?t
Volapük
Võro
Walon
Winaray
Wolof
??????
Yorùbá
??
Zazaki
Žemaiteška
??
This page was last modified on 9 August 2012 at 15:25.
Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. See Terms of use for details.
Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.
Contact us
Privacy policyAbout WikipediaDisclaimersMobile view

HomeA-Z IndexFAQPressContact Us
Nobel Prizes
Alfred Nobel
Educational
Video Player
Nobel Organizations

Search
Home / Nobel Prizes / Nobel Prize in Physics / Albert Einstein - Biography
About the Nobel Prizes
Facts and Lists
Nobel Prize in Physics
All Nobel Prizes in Physics
Facts on the Nobel Prize in Physics
Prize Awarder for the Nobel Prize in Physics
Nomination and Selection of Physics Laureates
Nobel Medal for Physics
Articles in Physics
Video Interviews
Video Nobel Lectures
Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Nobel Prize in Medicine
Nobel Prize in Literature
Nobel Peace Prize
Prize in Economic Sciences
Nobel Laureates Have Their Say
Nobel Prize Award Ceremonies
Nomination and Selection of Nobel Laureates

 

19012011

Prize category: 

 

The Nobel Prize in Physics 1921
Albert Einstein
The Nobel Prize in Physics 1921
Albert Einstein
Biography
Albert Einstein was born at Ulm, in Württemberg, Germany, on March 14, 1879. Six weeks later the family moved to Munich, where he later on began his schooling at the Luitpold Gymnasium. Later, they moved to Italy and Albert continued his education at Aarau, Switzerland and in 1896 he entered the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich to be trained as a teacher in physics and mathematics. In 1901, the year he gained his diploma, he acquired Swiss citizenship and, as he was unable to find a teaching post, he accepted a position as technical assistant in the Swiss Patent Office. In 1905 he obtained his doctor's degree.

During his stay at the Patent Office, and in his spare time, he produced much of his remarkable work and in 1908 he was appointed Privatdozent in Berne. In 1909 he became Professor Extraordinary at Zurich, in 1911 Professor of Theoretical Physics at Prague, returning to Zurich in the following year to fill a similar post. In 1914 he was appointed Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Physical Institute and Professor in the University of Berlin. He became a German citizen in 1914 and remained in Berlin until 1933 when he renounced his citizenship for political reasons and emigrated to America to take the position of Professor of Theoretical Physics at Princeton*. He became a United States citizen in 1940 and retired from his post in 1945.

After World War II, Einstein was a leading figure in the World Government Movement, he was offered the Presidency of the State of Israel, which he declined, and he collaborated with Dr. Chaim Weizmann in establishing the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Einstein always appeared to have a clear view of the problems of physics and the determination to solve them. He had a strategy of his own and was able to visualize the main stages on the way to his goal. He regarded his major achievements as mere stepping-stones for the next advance.

At the start of his scientific work, Einstein realized the inadequacies of Newtonian mechanics and his special theory of relativity stemmed from an attempt to reconcile the laws of mechanics with the laws of the electromagnetic field. He dealt with classical problems of statistical mechanics and problems in which they were merged with quantum theory: this led to an explanation of the Brownian movement of molecules. He investigated the thermal properties of light with a low radiation density and his observations laid the foundation of the photon theory of light.

In his early days in Berlin, Einstein postulated that the correct interpretation of the special theory of relativity must also furnish a theory of gravitation and in 1916 he published his paper on the general theory of relativity. During this time he also contributed to the problems of the theory of radiation and statistical mechanics.

In the 1920's, Einstein embarked on the construction of unified field theories, although he continued to work on the probabilistic interpretation of quantum theory, and he persevered with this work in America. He contributed to statistical mechanics by his development of the quantum theory of a monatomic gas and he has also accomplished valuable work in connection with atomic transition probabilities and relativistic cosmology.

After his retirement he continued to work towards the unification of the basic concepts of physics, taking the opposite approach, geometrisation, to the majority of physicists.

Einstein's researches are, of course, well chronicled and his more important works include Special Theory of Relativity (1905), Relativity (English translations, 1920 and 1950), General Theory of Relativity (1916), Investigations on Theory of Brownian Movement (1926), and The Evolution of Physics (1938). Among his non-scientific works, About Zionism (1930), Why War? (1933), My Philosophy (1934), and Out of My Later Years (1950) are perhaps the most important.

Albert Einstein received honorary doctorate degrees in science, medicine and philosophy from many European and American universities. During the 1920's he lectured in Europe, America and the Far East and he was awarded Fellowships or Memberships of all the leading scientific academies throughout the world. He gained numerous awards in recognition of his work, including the Copley Medal of the Royal Society of London in 1925, and the Franklin Medal of the Franklin Institute in 1935.

Einstein's gifts inevitably resulted in his dwelling much in intellectual solitude and, for relaxation, music played an important part in his life. He married Mileva Maric in 1903 and they had a daughter and two sons; their marriage was dissolved in 1919 and in the same year he married his cousin, Elsa Löwenthal, who died in 1936. He died on April 18, 1955 at Princeton, New Jersey.

From Nobel Lectures, Physics 1901-1921, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1967

This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and first published in the book series Les Prix Nobel. It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.

* Albert Einstein was formally associated with the Institute for Advanced Study located in Princeton, New Jersey.

 

Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 1922
TO CITE THIS PAGE:
MLA style: "Albert Einstein - Biography". Nobelprize.org. 11 Aug 2012 http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1921/einstein-bio.html/
RELATED DOCUMENTS:
ARTICLE

PHYSICS
The Nobel Prize in Physics
Read more about the Nobel Prize in Physics 1901-2000

EDUCATIONAL

NOBEL PRIZES IN PHYSICS
Relativity
Einstein was far from being the only person who contributed to the development of the theory of special relativity. However, he was the one who put everything together.

RECOMMENDED:
EVENTS

2012 NOBEL WEEK DIALOGUE
The Genetic Revolution and its Impact on Society
A new free event on 9 December with discussions on genetics and genomics

FACTS AND LISTS

2011 NOBEL PRIZES
Who Are They? What Did They Do?
See a list of the thirteen Nobel Laureates of 2011

ANNOUNCEMENTS

2012 NOBEL PRIZES
Prize Announcement Dates
Watch the schedule for the announcements of the 2012 Nobel Prizes

FOLLOW US
Youtube
Facebook
Twitter
Nobelprize.org Monthly
RSS
About Nobelprize.org
Privacy Policy
Terms of Use
Technical Support
Copyright © Nobel Media AB 2012
HomeA-Z IndexFAQPressContact Us

HomeA-Z IndexFAQPressContact Us
Nobel Prizes
Alfred Nobel
Educational
Video Player
Nobel Organizations

Search
Home / Nobel Prizes / Nobel Prize in Physics / Albert Einstein - Biography
About the Nobel Prizes
Facts and Lists
Nobel Prize in Physics
All Nobel Prizes in Physics
Facts on the Nobel Prize in Physics
Prize Awarder for the Nobel Prize in Physics
Nomination and Selection of Physics Laureates
Nobel Medal for Physics
Articles in Physics
Video Interviews
Video Nobel Lectures
Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Nobel Prize in Medicine
Nobel Prize in Literature
Nobel Peace Prize
Prize in Economic Sciences
Nobel Laureates Have Their Say
Nobel Prize Award Ceremonies
Nomination and Selection of Nobel Laureates

 

19012011

Prize category: 

 

The Nobel Prize in Physics 1921
Albert Einstein
The Nobel Prize in Physics 1921
Albert Einstein
Biography
Albert Einstein was born at Ulm, in Württemberg, Germany, on March 14, 1879. Six weeks later the family moved to Munich, where he later on began his schooling at the Luitpold Gymnasium. Later, they moved to Italy and Albert continued his education at Aarau, Switzerland and in 1896 he entered the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich to be trained as a teacher in physics and mathematics. In 1901, the year he gained his diploma, he acquired Swiss citizenship and, as he was unable to find a teaching post, he accepted a position as technical assistant in the Swiss Patent Office. In 1905 he obtained his doctor's degree.

During his stay at the Patent Office, and in his spare time, he produced much of his remarkable work and in 1908 he was appointed Privatdozent in Berne. In 1909 he became Professor Extraordinary at Zurich, in 1911 Professor of Theoretical Physics at Prague, returning to Zurich in the following year to fill a similar post. In 1914 he was appointed Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Physical Institute and Professor in the University of Berlin. He became a German citizen in 1914 and remained in Berlin until 1933 when he renounced his citizenship for political reasons and emigrated to America to take the position of Professor of Theoretical Physics at Princeton*. He became a United States citizen in 1940 and retired from his post in 1945.

After World War II, Einstein was a leading figure in the World Government Movement, he was offered the Presidency of the State of Israel, which he declined, and he collaborated with Dr. Chaim Weizmann in establishing the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Einstein always appeared to have a clear view of the problems of physics and the determination to solve them. He had a strategy of his own and was able to visualize the main stages on the way to his goal. He regarded his major achievements as mere stepping-stones for the next advance.

At the start of his scientific work, Einstein realized the inadequacies of Newtonian mechanics and his special theory of relativity stemmed from an attempt to reconcile the laws of mechanics with the laws of the electromagnetic field. He dealt with classical problems of statistical mechanics and problems in which they were merged with quantum theory: this led to an explanation of the Brownian movement of molecules. He investigated the thermal properties of light with a low radiation density and his observations laid the foundation of the photon theory of light.

In his early days in Berlin, Einstein postulated that the correct interpretation of the special theory of relativity must also furnish a theory of gravitation and in 1916 he published his paper on the general theory of relativity. During this time he also contributed to the problems of the theory of radiation and statistical mechanics.

In the 1920's, Einstein embarked on the construction of unified field theories, although he continued to work on the probabilistic interpretation of quantum theory, and he persevered with this work in America. He contributed to statistical mechanics by his development of the quantum theory of a monatomic gas and he has also accomplished valuable work in connection with atomic transition probabilities and relativistic cosmology.

After his retirement he continued to work towards the unification of the basic concepts of physics, taking the opposite approach, geometrisation, to the majority of physicists.

Einstein's researches are, of course, well chronicled and his more important works include Special Theory of Relativity (1905), Relativity (English translations, 1920 and 1950), General Theory of Relativity (1916), Investigations on Theory of Brownian Movement (1926), and The Evolution of Physics (1938). Among his non-scientific works, About Zionism (1930), Why War? (1933), My Philosophy (1934), and Out of My Later Years (1950) are perhaps the most important.

Albert Einstein received honorary doctorate degrees in science, medicine and philosophy from many European and American universities. During the 1920's he lectured in Europe, America and the Far East and he was awarded Fellowships or Memberships of all the leading scientific academies throughout the world. He gained numerous awards in recognition of his work, including the Copley Medal of the Royal Society of London in 1925, and the Franklin Medal of the Franklin Institute in 1935.

Einstein's gifts inevitably resulted in his dwelling much in intellectual solitude and, for relaxation, music played an important part in his life. He married Mileva Maric in 1903 and they had a daughter and two sons; their marriage was dissolved in 1919 and in the same year he married his cousin, Elsa Löwenthal, who died in 1936. He died on April 18, 1955 at Princeton, New Jersey.

From Nobel Lectures, Physics 1901-1921, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1967

This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and first published in the book series Les Prix Nobel. It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.

* Albert Einstein was formally associated with the Institute for Advanced Study located in Princeton, New Jersey.

 

Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 1922
TO CITE THIS PAGE:
MLA style: "Albert Einstein - Biography". Nobelprize.org. 11 Aug 2012 http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1921/einstein-bio.html/
RELATED DOCUMENTS:
ARTICLE

PHYSICS
The Nobel Prize in Physics
Read more about the Nobel Prize in Physics 1901-2000

EDUCATIONAL

NOBEL PRIZES IN PHYSICS
Relativity
Einstein was far from being the only person who contributed to the development of the theory of special relativity. However, he was the one who put everything together.

RECOMMENDED:
EVENTS

2012 NOBEL WEEK DIALOGUE
The Genetic Revolution and its Impact on Society
A new free event on 9 December with discussions on genetics and genomics

FACTS AND LISTS

2011 NOBEL PRIZES
Who Are They? What Did They Do?
See a list of the thirteen Nobel Laureates of 2011

ANNOUNCEMENTS

2012 NOBEL PRIZES
Prize Announcement Dates
Watch the schedule for the announcements of the 2012 Nobel Prizes

FOLLOW US
Youtube
Facebook
Twitter
Nobelprize.org Monthly
RSS
About Nobelprize.org
Privacy Policy
Terms of Use
Technical Support
Copyright © Nobel Media AB 2012
HomeA-Z IndexFAQPressContact Us
The Long Good Read
The Long Good Read
Articles hand picked twice daily from the Guardian

David Hasselhoff: ‘If we have to go with the Hoff to pay the rent, let’s go with the Hoff’

First published online by Emma Brockes.

 

David Hasselhoff, psyched from jetlag and a morning can of Red Bull, bounces into the living room of his home in LA, where his dog Henry and I have been waiting. “I’m David!” he says and, sure enough, the height, the hair, the tan, it’s all there, plus a pair of turquoise moccasins and the giddy air of the over-caffeinated. In the room with us: a 12ft-long, fibreglass model of the actor in his red Baywatch shorts; a Baywatch pinball machine; the mounted heads of various stuffed animals; and a photo of his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He hands me a copy of his new album, This Time Around, and calls Nick, his assistant, to cart off the dog. “Henry loves women,” he says. Oh, Hoff!

I have to admit it: I’m fairly giddy myself. For those of us who grew up on Knight Rider, Hasselhoff, 60, is and for ever will be the man with the backlit bouffant, leading us each Saturday night on a shadowy flight into the dangerous world of a man who does not exist. Baywatch, the drinking, the inexhaustible hilarity of the phrase “famous in Germany” – none of that matters. What matters is the man, and the man is here.

It must be odd for the Hoff, moving between the sincere adoration of his fans in the German-speaking world – the gold discs on his wall are all from Germany and Austria – to the English-speaking world, where he is no less loved, but in a different way. Hoff understands the embrace to be partly ironic, and that it doesn’t preclude affection. He also benefits, as stars of his ilk must, from an endearing range of blind spots. In the course of our conversation, and with no malice intended, he will refer to his Welsh girlfriend’s parents as “hobbits”, compare the relative thinness of his two daughters, liken a room full of fans to zombies and summarise Hitler’s impact on Germany in the language of a failed relationship. But first, the singing.

Reading this on mobile? Click here to view
“I want to do the music I want to do,” says Hoff, who has moved lately from rock anthems to show tunes. “In Germany, I was singing everything from … ” he breaks off and shout-sings: “I’VE BEEN LOOKING FOR FREEDOM!”

I jump in my chair.

“Which is a big anthem and huge hit. Kind of almost a Bruce Springsteen … “

Was that the one he did when the Berlin Wall came down? (Memorably, Hoff played at the Wall in 1989.)

“Yeah.” He moves through several more song snippets, interrupting himself to shout “WE LOVE YOU HOFF!” to demonstrate a typical response from his audience. There is a nice rendition of What I Did For Love, A Chorus Line, and a few lines from The Producers, which Hoff’s agent had counselled against – “I don’t think you should do Hitler, it’s deadly,” he said – but the Hoff put him straight. “I said, what the fuck are you talking about? This is from The Producers, one of the greatest musicals. We’re mocking him. It’s not a tribute to Hitler, it’s a gay Hitler.”

Does he do that song in Germany? The Hoff stares at me incredulously.

“The show was a monster hit in Germany! The people of Germany hate Hitler more than the Americans hate Hitler! He screwed up their whole life. So.”

To round off the show, he does a number from the musical Jekyll and Hyde, a rousing gothic anthem in the style of Meat Loaf, in which he plays both protagonists. He leaps to his feet to show me the moves.

“I had two wigs on. One wig for Jekyll, Jekyll was left, and Hyde was. Wait – Hyde was right and Jekyll was – Jekyll was right and Hyde was left. And then it gets really insane.”

In slightly worse circumstances, Hasselhoff might have been another Charlie Sheen. He is doing shows in Edinburgh and London this summer, in which he does skits on Knight Rider and Baywatch, sings songs from his albums and conducts a jokey Q and A with the audience. Cannibalising one’s own image like this nods to the so-bad-it’s-good interpretation of his work, inviting a measure of condescension and there is a pre-emptive defensiveness to the Hoff that I can imagine tipping into bitterness. I’m sure he was horrible to deal with when he was drinking. But on the day I meet him, he is goofy and sweet and gives the impression of being a nice guy, albeit one who uses the “royal we”. “It all started,” says Hoff, “when we were eight years old and doing it for fun, not trying to make a living.” He looks at me guilessly. Oh, Hoff.

He is currently dating a 32-year-old Welsh woman called Hayley, whom he met at a hotel in Cardiff when he was filming Britain’s Got Talent. “Hayley’s from Glynneath, which is near Merthyr Tydfil?” says the Hoff. For their first date, he whisked her away to a spa in Switzerland – “really nice and healthy and clean cut. Because I’m older than her and I didn’t want her to think this was just about getting, you know, having … sex. It was about, I really like this girl.”

When they met, Hayley was working in Debenhams. Now she is with him in LA. So she has moved in?

The Hoff looks alarmed. “She’s moved, yeah, uh, no. Yes. We’re both – we’re back and forth.”

The Hoff has been married twice and has two grownup daughters with his second wife, Pamela. It was one of his daughters who, in an effort to shame him into sobriety, filmed him drunk on a hotel room floor five years ago, the video of which turned up on YouTube. It worked; the Hoff says he is now sober. The fly-on-the-wall documentary about him and his family was cancelled after two episodes because the producers were “hoping that my ex-wife would come over, or that I was going to fall off the wagon. And I didn’t. We have a pretty normal family, a lot of love. We’re not hoarders, or drug addicts.”

Reading this on mobile? Click here to view
His father was in sales and the family frequently moved around while the Hoff was growing up. He was close to his family; he gets his drive and sociability from his father, he says, who taught him the importance of being nice to everyone. After studying theatre at the California Institute of the Arts, he won a role in the soap opera The Young and the Restless and, in 1982, went straight from there on to Knight Rider. Baywatch first aired in 1989 and was the more profitable show – certainly for the Hoff, who had the acumen to buy back the rights from NBC and make a fortune on the reruns. “Maybe it’s not curing cancer,” he says, “but it’s about saving lives, about heroes, and good-looking people and women in bathing suits and what’s wrong with that when you’re at the beach and the weather is the way it is?”

He gives it some more thought. “Over in the UK and in Wales, it’s nice to turn on the TV and see Baywatch.”

Until 10 years ago, he was a TV star in the conventional manner. And then one day he received a phone call from a journalist at a newspaper in Sydney. Something odd was going on in offices around the city.

“They said there is an epidemic of emails going back and forth between secretaries, using your name – “the Hoff” – in different situations. I said, what do you mean? They sent me the emails. So, Brave-Hoff, Some Like It Hoff, the Wizard of Hoff, every possible Hoffism you could think of. Irreverent ones, like whack Hoff, fuck Hoff. There were 400 of them. I have them for my show. When people walk in, I have them flash up on the screens. They are pretty funny.”

Whatever got this started – some rare confluence in Hasselhoff of cheese, chest hair and good-natured sincerity – he saw the commercial potential immediately and started playing up to his kitschy new image. Now, when people come to his shows, he invites them to “party, Hoff-style”. I wonder what that means, given his sobriety. “Mad rock’n'roll fun,” he says.

Does he get a buzz these days from being the most sober guy in the room?

“You know I just feel – I don’t like to go to clubs, or concerts, I like to be on stage. When you’re on stage, you’re in control. No one can get to you. I can invite them on and send them off.”

He looks suddenly crestfallen. “If someone says something negative, I – I, it’s fine, I can play that game as well.”

His phone goes and Hoff yells through the door: “HEY NICK, SOMEONE JUST TEXTED ME, SORT IT OUT WILL YOU?”

Nick appears. “That was me. Texting you the address of where you need to be at 2pm.”

“Oh.”

He has to be disciplined about exercise. It’s always a bad sign, he says, when he stops going to the gym.

“I once didn’t work out for six weeks. It took me for ever to get the weight off. My daughter – one daughter is naturally thin, the other is constantly working out and I see the pain that she goes through. She works more than anybody. She’s so beautiful, she’s got a gorgeous porcelain face. [When she models] she’s smart enough to work for the plus-sizes.”

His daughters find his music corny – “techno-pop” is more to their liking – but now and then a song will appeal to them. Most of his fans are in their 30s, although since Knight Rider and Baywatch have been reshown around the world, a new generation of Hoff fans is emerging. And, says the Hoff, he discovered something amazing while performing in Germany recently. “We have this huge gay following!”

I glance at his album cover, in which the Hoff sits on a gold throne, shirt unbuttoned almost to his waist, a large celtic cross on a leather thong around his neck.

“They said I’m like the new Cher!” He looks mystified.

He is pragmatic about his appeal. Would he rather be a straightforward TV star, without the irony? Of course. “But if we have to go with the Hoff to pay the rent, let’s go with the Hoff.”

Reading this on mobile? Click here to view
And he is canny about business. He is doing panto again this Christmas; is in an ad campaign for Mr Lean, a brand of snack food, and has a Hoff video game coming out. The 12ft replica is from the SpongeBob movie he did. For Hoff-hair authenticity, it is covered in yak-hair. (“Somewhere,” says the Hoff, “there is a very bald yak.”) He would like to do a Bollywood spinoff of Baywatch – “Bombaywatch”.

“I think, OK; I’ve got the money for retirement over here. I’ve got the money to take care of the ex and the kids. And I’ve got my rent money.”

He looks suddenly tired. The problem is he gets bored– “don’t you get bored?” He worries he doesn’t have enough Twitter followers – 430,000 when “Justin Bieber has millions.” He thinks about how to stay in the public eye. “I know places I can go to have a nice trendy lunch and keep current in the press,” he says. That’s when he advises Hayley to “put on your little nice outfit”. Likewise, “where to be grungy, [where] nobody bothers. I know where there’s the best beach, where there’s whales. She’s been on jetskis with me. For my birthday I’m trying to go diving with whale sharks. They’re really big, but they’re real docile.”

He wants to go on a university tour in the US, giving motivational seminars in which his message will be: “life isn’t fair. That’s my key. When you realise that life isn’t fair, you don’t act out, you don’t get overly wasted, you don’t get self-indulgent. You just move forward.”

He frowns. “You can create your own environment! You can go and do a rock show!” With sudden, heartbreaking bafflement he says, “I mean, they dress up in discos as me. We went to one in Hertfordshire and there were 1,200 people dressed up as me. They told me they loved me. And at first I thought, these guys are making fun of me. But they’re not. They’re really not.” He says quietly. “They think it’s retro and cool.”

We go into the kitchen. A potbellied pig snuffles at the door to get in. A cockatoo called Peaches squawks in a cage. Hayley says a cheerful hello. He is grateful to her family, he says, for putting up with a lot of press intrusion, particularly her parents – “they’re like little hobbits” – who made him feel so welcome in Wales. “I love adventure,” says the Hoff, and tells me about the time he hired a car and drove to Mumbles on the Welsh coast.

As a favour to Hayley’s sister, Hoff attended the Greggs Bakery Christmas party last year (“I think we were the thinnest people there”) and almost caused a riot. “Can you image walking into a room of 500 people and everybody got up and started coming at me like the Night of the Living Dead, holding their cell phones?” For an hour he worked the tables, signing autographs and posing for photos. He was, I imagine, happy as a clam.

“If I could be James Bond,” he says, ”great. And if not,” – a good-natured shrug – “I’ll just see what comes along.”

David Hasselhoff performs at the Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, 21-27 August. edfringe.com

Filed under: Television & radio by admin
Roll up for the financial crisis tour

First published online by Tom Meltzer.

 

Our tour guide for the morning looks every inch the old-fashioned stereotype of a jolly City gent. His outfit could almost be a store-bought costume: the bright red braces, the wide polka-dot tie, even the carefully folded red handkerchief protruding from the left breast pocket of his suit. But Justin Urquhart Stewart is not a costumed actor, and this is no ordinary themed tour. He is a banker of more than two decades’ experience, and the kind of distant City of London bigwig who, as a rule, people outside the world of finance don’t get a chance to question.

Debt and The City: A Political Tour is a sort of safari of the financial crisis. Over six hours, I and my fellow six tour-goers will travel from the cold stone steps of the Royal Exchange down ancient alleyways, over bridges and up to glass-walled conference rooms in mirrored corporate lifts. Our quest to understand what went wrong will take us to the far corners of the Square Mile. Along the way we will meet bankers, property consultants and financial journalists, and discover the joys of securitisation, the Glass-Steagall Act and collateralised debt obligations. As tourist itineraries go, I will admit, it’s pretty dry.

Stewart is the first of today’s eight speakers, here to give us a potted history of the British financial sector. He leads us through the City’s narrow alleys, past plaques marking the sites of the coffee shops that served as meeting places for the bankers and merchants of centuries past. We learn that the financial crisis is a well-established national tradition, recurring under many if not most of our past monarchs. “By the time we get to Edward I,” he says, “England is already in debt.”

“The history lesson is really to reinforce that it’s not new, what’s happening,” explains tour director Nicholas Wood. A former journalist, Wood spent five years as the New York Times correspondent for the Balkans before leaving to set up Political Tours in 2009. In the past year he has led excursions of knowledge-hungry tourists to Libya, Kosovo and North Korea, but today’s financial crash course is his first in the UK. It will serve as a prototype for a two-day tour of the City that he plans to run from early October.You could call it information tourism. “Basically,” says Wood, “the simplest thought behind it is: if you have art tours and history tours why can’t you have serious political tours? It’s about how you piece it all together, the complexities behind it. It’s saying: ‘Look, banking clearly serves a purpose, so how did we get here?’ It’s very easy to pin it on the bankers but in actual fact there’s a whole frame of people. We were happy to take the cheap credit and see our house prices grow, politicians were happy to take the taxes.”

We follow Stewart to the original site of the London Stock Exchange – now, fittingly, a luxury shopping centre – where he introduces us to two old and vital distinctions in the world of banking. First, between market jobbers (“the people making the price, like bookies at a race course”) and stockbrokers (“who go round trying to get the best price”), and second, between commercial and investment banks, both of which were kept separate for decades, but collapsed into one with the “Big Bang” of 1986.

Combining commercial and investment banks, we learn, was never a good idea. “When you put those two together,” Stewart tells us, “it is a bit like mixing nitrogen and glycerine. One is more aggressive than the other, and it doesn’t work, it never has.” But he goes on to explain that Big Bang was just the first step on the road to our current crisis. If Thatcher’s government is in part to blame, then Bill Clinton’s is even more so; driven by a desire to let every American own their own home, it was Clinton’s decision to create the ill-fated sub-prime mortgage system.

“The whole idea,” explains Stewart, “was to spread them all around the world to spread the risk of it. They were spread in the same way as if you take a nice fresh cowpat and hit it with a shovel very hard. They went everywhere. That’s why all the banks were sitting there not trusting each other, because no one knew who had the debt. And remember, the basis of banking anywhere in the world is trust. If you lose that, the system fails, and that’s what London is going through right now. If you have a 10-year boom, you then have 10 years of lean. We’ve got at least another seven years of this to work our way through.”

Today’s tour-goers are a varied bunch. Several have already taken Wood’s flagship eight-day political tour of Kosovo, among them retired equity analyst Elizabeth Balsom. She’s enthusiastic about the experience: “I think one of the pluses was that everybody there was very interested, and knowledgeable, and wanted to know more. We all already knew the background.”

The expectation that tour-goers will already know quite a bit can, of course, make it all a little daunting for the true layperson. Student Ben Forrest, 24, here with his dad Mike, a bike shop owner, admits to having struggled to keep up in places. “To start with we were doing fine. Because some of the other people here are quite familiar with the terms they’re asking questions that are sometimes a little bit over my head. But then I’m coming from a background of having no experience in this field at all.”

Things are about to get a whole lot more baffling. With our introductory history over, we head to the offices of Stewart’s firm Seven Investment Management to get stuck in to the technical details. Senior portfolio manager Chris Darbyshire introduces us to securitisation, the process that saw sub-prime mortgages bundled together in packages and sold as bonds, first in small groups of properties from single states, then, bundled again, in America-wide financial lucky dips called collateralised debt obligations (CDOs). These, in turn, were bundled world-wide: the dreaded CDOs squared.

The youngest attendee is 21-year-old business and politics student Jean-Michel Mbala. He is here through community group SE1 United, who work to raise aspirations among young people in Lambeth and Southwark. The two-day tours will cost £400 a head, but Wood plans to set aside two places on each for members of NGOs and non-profit organisations. Another graduate of the Kosovo tour, Mbala is here today with a career in mind: “I want to do finance. I’ve done an internship at Morgan Stanley three years ago. It opened up my eyes to that sort of world. There’s good and bad, but it helped me pay off my debt.”

There is, says Wood, no average political tourist: “In North Korea we had a guy who runs a cheese business in Gloucester, a market trader. Then we’ve had the former CEO of an American bank. I think it’s more of a mentality. It’s an inquiring mind.”

Having just about wrapped our heads around CDOs, we’re whisked away to rooftop restaurant Coq D’Argent for a fancy lunch and another lecture. Business journalist Kate Walsh is our guide to the original media scapegoats for the crisis: hedge funds. “It was quite convenient to blame the hedge funds,” she explains, as the rest of us tuck in to our meals. “They were a very easy target, in that they’re all super-rich, a lot of them were American, and they were presented as the bad people. They were blamed for what was happening to our banking system, which in reality was complete rubbish.”

Finally, we cross the river to the offices of accounting firm Ernst & Young, a high tower on the south bank of the Thames, peering out across the river through glass walls at the Tower of London. We are here to meet one of the foremost experts on financial regulation in the country. Formerly a department head at the Financial Services Authority, John Liver is both a partner at Ernst & Young and head of its global regulatory reform team. He gives us a condensed and candid account of the changes needed: “We are in a situation now where we as taxpayers have supported our banking industry to the tune of probably $15tn, more than a trillion of that in the UK. There is no more public money, so we’ve got to do something different. Something different is radical change in the financial services industry.”

Liver reels off a list of forthcoming reforms, at lightning speed; derivatives are to become more transparent, safeguards to be strengthened, institutions disentangled so that one can fail without bringing down the others. There is, he says, “a whole raft of regulation saying banks should rely less on ratings agencies” on its way. He finishes on a reassuring note. “You’ll see an industry in three years’ time that’s an awful lot different to that of two years ago.”

The tour over, we traipse out into the street, a little better informed, if also a little overloaded. I ask Wood what the future looks like for his political safaris. “I want to do a tour that looks at the spending cuts, and what their implications are,” he says. “Let’s take a city like Birmingham or Cardiff that’s tremendously dependent on state spending. How do you implement cuts there? The basic building block of any of our tours – and this is the only exception – is to go to the community and ask: how do you live? It’s about going to a community and trying to dissect it.”

Dissecting the City in a day may not be anyone’s idea of fun. But afterwards I realise that – for better or for worse – I now have quite a bit more sympathy for the bankers. When the rules of the game have been tinkered with, it feels daft just to hate the players.

Want to go on a Political Tour? Go to politicaltours.com

Filed under: Business by admin
Will Self: ‘I don’t write for readers’

First published online by Elizabeth Day.

 

Will Self greets me on his doorstep, trailing a small child and an even smaller dog. It could be, of course, that their smallness is accentuated by Self’s impressive height: at 6ft 5in, he moves with the languid grace of a man accustomed to folding himself into constrained spaces. “Oh, sorry, you were meant to have been let in,” he says in a lugubrious monotone, clear blue eyes flicking this way and that. He speaks without smiling and yet you get the sense that he is perpetually on the brink of making some brilliant joke, comprehensible only to himself. Self opens the front door and ushers me inside. “Go on up,” he says, nodding towards the staircase. “You’ll know which room is mine.”

There are three storeys to the tastefully decorated Georgian townhouse in Stockwell, south London that Self shares with his wife, the journalist Deborah Orr, and their children – Ivan, 14, and Luther, 10. The walls are painted in muted aubergines and greys; books line the shelves and everything is orderly without being twee.

Self’s study, by contrast, is a resolutely untidy attic room exploding with paper. The walls are smothered with a complex mosaic of overlapping yellow Post-It notes. Every spare inch is covered with Blu-Tacked scraps: drawings by Self’s children, images of unknown Edwardians taken from Ancestry.com, and – in one easily overlooked corner – an advertisement for sanitary towels from a turn-of-the-century magazine.

It is, perhaps, not surprising that Self should need to work in a state of such organised chaos. His latest novel, Umbrella, is a dazzling feat of imagination and structure: a sprawling, lyrical, stream-of-consciousness narrative that squares up to modernism and brings it kicking and screaming into the 21st century (the title is taken from a James Joyce quotation: “A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella”).

The book is stomach-lurchingly ambitious in scope, spanning 92 years and examining the social legacy of the first world war, anti-psychiatry, the relativity of madness and the impact of technology on the human body.

There are three interwoven strands. In 1918 Audrey Dearth, a munitions worker, is incarcerated at Friern hospital after falling victim to encephalitis lethargica, a brain disease that swept through Europe in the aftermath of the first world war and left some of its victims speechless and motionless. In 1971 she is treated by psychiatrist Dr Zack Busner, who wakes her from her stupor with a new drug. By 2010 the asylum has been turned into a luxury apartment complex and Busner travels waywardly across north London in search of the truth about his past encounter with his former patient.

There is no straightforward chronological narrative: the three time zones are spliced together in intriguing, interconnected ways, sometimes within the space of a single paragraph. It is a portrait of an age but also of a city. Just as Joyce revealed the sprawling subtlety of Dublin in Ulysses, so Self undresses London, layer by layer, in all its pulsating complexity.

No wonder he needed all those Post-It notes.

“I don’t really write for readers,” Self says when he appears, bearing a packet of coffee. He lights a compact gas camping stove on the corner of his desk and puts a stainless steel espresso maker on to boil. “I think that’s the defining characteristic of being serious as a writer. I mean, I’ve said in the past I write for myself. That’s probably some kind of insane egotism but I actually think that’s the only way to proceed – to write what you think you have to write. I write desperately trying to keep myself amused or engaged in what I’m doing and in the world. And if people like it, great, and if they don’t like it, well, that’s that – what can you do? You can’t go round and hold a gun to their head.”

As it happens, Self is pleased to discover I did like the book. “It makes a difference,” he says. “My publishers did look a bit grim when it came in. I think they felt it was resolutely uncommercial and wouldn’t find readers. But you know…”

He drifts off. Five days after we meet, Umbrella is longlisted for the Man Booker prize. It turns out some other people must like it too.

At 50, Self has carved out a reputation for himself as one of the UK’s most uncompromising and interesting novelists. He was still in his 20s when he published his first book, a collection of short stories, under the title The Quantity Theory of Insanity. The book won praise from Doris Lessing and Salman Rushdie and scooped the Geoffrey Faber Memorial prize in 1993.

“It was published, as Cocteau said, to a terrifying baptism of caresses,” Self recalls. “I didn’t get a single negative review. For the one year, between the publication of the first book and the publication of the second book, I couldn’t put a foot wrong.”

Since 1991 there have been six subsequent collections of short stories, seven compilations of Self’s non-fiction writing, one illustrated novella and eight more novels (Umbrella is his ninth) as well as a slew of journalistic assignments. Earlier this year he became the professor of contemporary thought at Brunel University and has just written an undergraduate module for the course.

Does he ever get writer’s block?

“No. I get what I call ‘everythingitis’… where I get obsessed with the idea that everything has to be in the book.”

His novels defy easy categorisation and one senses it is partly for this reason that he has never fully been embraced by the reading public or attained the popular heights of his near contemporary, Martin Amis. In My Idea of Fun (1993), ostensibly a story about a lonely boy growing up in a caravan park, Self created a sinister alternate universe peopled by menacing characters from children’s jokes, including a grotesque version of The Fat Controller.

In How the Dead Live (2000) he charted the afterlife of Lily Bloom, an elderly woman who was moved to live in a London suburb after her death, accompanied by an Aboriginal spirit guide. The Book of Dave, published six years later, was the story of a London cab driver in the throes of a mental breakdown who wrote a book of rantings that was rediscovered after 500 years and used as the sacred foundation for a new religion.

If there is a connecting thread in his fiction, it is, perhaps, a capacity for antic experimentation and a desire – even a compulsion – not to be boring.

“I have no patience with naturalistic fiction, really, I just find it dull,” says Self. He cites JG Ballard as his most formative influence and confesses he doesn’t read modern novels, partly because he’s worried that if he reads something exceptional “it will fuck with my head and I’ll get discouraged”.

And yet he seems exhausted by his own single-mindedness. “I really don’t say this for effect or because it’s false modesty, but every book I write feels like a failure to me,” he says, “and the failures feel worse as I get older. And I don’t even like it in myself that I’m not more catholic [in taste].

“It’s only really in the last decade or so that I’ve started to engage seriously with what I think the implications of modernism are in terms of the novel, and I wish I didn’t have to, frankly, [because] I don’t write to get readers but you can more or less guarantee that you’ll start shedding them at that point.” He emits a low, rich, rumbling laugh. “And I feel isolated enough as it is. Everybody loves, you know, what’s-his-face, beardy guy…”

Alan Hollinghurst?

“Alan Hollinghurst!” he cries, gratefully. “Everybody loves Alan’s books. Tout le monde. And I can’t read them, so… Everyone goes: ‘Ohhh, The Line of Beauty,’” he says, doing an excellent impression of a literary luvvie. “You’d be inclined to think, if you pick up The Line of Beauty and think: ‘OK, so I don’t actually need to go on with this’, [that] the deficiency lay in you. You’d have to be very courageous to think: ‘They’re all wrong, this is not where the party is.’”

For Self, the party is definitely elsewhere. It’s just that his party might not sound much fun to someone in search of an engrossing beach read. Umbrella, after all, is predicated on the modernist belief that it is only in the rejection of conventional linear structure and unity of plot that essential truth will be found.

But it is hard not to admire Self’s determination to stick to his principles. “You can’t go on pretending that the writer is an invisible deity who moves around characters in the simple past,” he says. “I just can’t do that stuff. It’s lies. The world isn’t like that any more. The world is really strange. It’s not to be explained by ‘He went to the pub’. You cannot capture what’s going on with that form, to my way of thinking. You can create a divertissement, you can create a very fine entertainment, but you can’t reach any closer to any kind of truth about what it is to exist.”

The coffee pot boils, no doubt in a deliberate attempt to impose dull, naturalistic order on the contemplation of what it means to exist. Self unfurls himself from his ergonomic computer stool and gingerly removes the pot from the stove using a grubby towel.

“It’s a great privilege to be allowed to have a filthy garret room,” he says as he pours me a deliciously strong cup of black coffee. (Later he will tell me he uses a Robusta “peasant” blend bought from his local newsagents, which tastes smoother than the more expensive Arabica we’re used to drinking. Self’s conversation is full of such interesting digressions, the product of a restless mind accumulating facts like magpies do glitter.)

Usually the window above his desk overlooks the street outside, affording Self an uninterrupted view of the local crack dealers. Today, however, the entire facade of the house is obscured by scaffolding – the result of his roof dramatically collapsing without warning in May after a sudden rise in temperature.

“I was in the front room downstairs looking out the window. The boys and I were at home and it was like – do you remember those old Ray Harryhausen films where the special effects are quite crap, there’s a definite sense of planes shifting against each other? – it was like that. All this masonry and brick just went past the window, with great rumbling and dust clouding.”

Self got his children out on to the street and no one was hurt. “If Deborah had been working in the front garden all day, she’d have been dead.”

Death and illness have been much on Self’s mind of late. Orr was diagnosed with breast cancer in June 2010 and underwent a mastectomy in August, followed by a gruelling course of chemotherapy. Self doesn’t like talking about this – there is an occlusion in the eyes, a quietness when the topic is broached.

“I think she’s all right,” he says. “I mean, you’d have to ask her really, wouldn’t you? She’s not technically in remission yet but she’s not got cancer again so we’ll see.”

It is clear, although he never explicitly states it, that he adores Orr. One of the great achievements of Umbrella is Self’s ability to write a convincing female protagonist. Unlike many of the great male novelists of his generation who have been accused of ignoring the female experience in their work, Self seems entirely at ease with the female psyche.

“Yeah, well, I’m quite girly,” he says. “I like women, my friends are women. I don’t have many male friends – never have.

“I always start with physicality when I’m writing as a woman. So I always have a vagina and think about having periods. I always start with an embodiment. And I think when I read men writing about women, they never seem to have thought about that. They’ve never thought: actually, you’ve got a cycle, you’re different. So if I do succeed at all, that’s what it’s down to.”

In the winter of 2010, a few months after his wife’s diagnosis, Self noticed his hands becoming swollen and livid. It transpired he was suffering from polycythemia vera, a potentially fatal blood disorder in which the bone marrow produces too many red blood cells. The treatment requires the regular siphoning off of blood from the veins through a process called venesection.

“It’s not bad actually,” he says. “I had a pint out yesterday. Last year I was having two pints a week taken out and… it felt very traumatic. But they’ve sort of stabilised it and it’s now only every four to six weeks.”

In an essay he wrote for Granta last October, Self explained that part of the trauma of the treatment stemmed from his well-documented experiences of drug addiction. “I first stuck a needle in my arm in the summer of 1979,” he wrote. “I was 17 years old. I often think back with a protective tenderness towards my younger self and wish I were somehow able to dissuade him from such a mutilation, from breaking the blood-air barrier in that crazy way.”

Why did he start injecting?

“I arrived at it through being very, very unhappy,” he says now. “You can never run your life through again and say, ‘Right, now let’s put you in a different environment and see whether you’re still [unhappy].’ Do you know what I mean? There is no counter-life in that way. I suspect it’s a bit of nature, a bit of nurture, like most things.”

Self was raised in Hampstead Garden Suburb. His mother was a Jewish American who worked as a publisher’s assistant, his father a professor of public administration at the London School of Economics. His parents divorced when Self was 18 and his father later emigrated to Australia.

When Self started doing hard drugs his mother sent him to a psychiatrist – giving rise to one of the recurring obsessions of his novels. Zack Busner, the psychoanalyst in Umbrella, is a familiar figure, having appeared in several of Self’s previous works as a self-promoter intent on making his name at the cost of true engagement with his patients.

“My mother loved psychiatry,” says Self. “You’ve got to remember that, in the immediate postwar period when my mum was a young woman, Freud hit America like a film star. The whole nation went belly-up to it. For her, attempting to treat mental distress in some way, shape or form was just the done thing – [it] absolutely proved you were a cultured person.”

Self, by contrast, was deeply influenced by the work of RD Laing: “That idea, really embodied in anti-psychiatry, that madness was just a different way of being, man, and let’s all just hang out. And that just merged in my own head with getting off my face on drugs.”

For years he injected heroin and also took cocaine and amphetamines. He went to Oxford to read PPE, graduating with a third after spending much of his spare time “hanging out” with schizophrenic outpatients from a local hospital. There was a brief period of cold turkey in the 1980s but he continued to use until a spectacular fall from grace in 1997 when he was found snorting heroin on John Major’s jet while covering the election campaign for this newspaper.

Is his creative impulse allied to an innate self-destructiveness?

“Not any more. When I stopped drinking and doing drugs I let go of that… If I’m frank, one of the reasons I stopped eventually was because I could feel I would be unable to write. Which sounds awful because, of course, I should say I stopped for my family but it’s a very, very all-consuming thing, the old writing.”

Now that he has four children of his own – his two eldest, Alexis, 22, and Madeleine, 19, are from his first marriage to Kate Chancellor – does he worry they could have inherited his capacity for unhappiness?

“Put it this way: none of them seems to be as radically unhappy as I was. And for that, I’m grateful.”

Although Self had an ambivalent relationship with his parents, much of the inspiration for Umbrella came from his own family history. In the book, Audrey’s older brother, Albert, a brilliant mathematician who ran the Woolwich Arsenal, and her younger brother, Stanley, who dies in the trenches, are directly based on Self’s paternal grandfather and great-uncle.

“My grandfather was a polymath and savant,” says Self. ” My grandparents lived in Brighton, and if you came back from the front he’d say, ‘I calculate your pace to be 26 inches, therefore you took 2,923 paces.’

“In a kind of tedious middle-aged way I was doing a bit of family history and saw that Albert had a younger brother, Stanley, which was never spoken of when I was a child. He’s in the 1911 census, and I thought, ‘Hmm, he must have died in the first world war.’”

There seems to be a current vogue for first world war novels and TV adaptations. Did he watch Downton Abbey?

“I certainly watched a bit of the first series and could enjoy it just for the stage-dressing… But by the time it got to the second series it was so kind of leaden and formulaic that it was impossible to watch.”

I’m not particularly astonished to hear Self didn’t take to the light campery of prime-time period television. He is not a man who likes to make things easy for himself. At one point, eager to explain how he tackled the extensive research for Umbrella, he leaps up to show me a black notebook. It is filled with yet more scribbled Post-It notes organised into sub-categories under separate headings for “Metaphors”, “Tropes” and “Ideas”. He explains that the entire novel is shaped like an umbrella – with curved spokes of narrative radiating outwards from a central scene.

He is already beavering away at his next novel, the working rubric for which is, he tells me, “Jaws without the shark”. He rolls a cigarette and lights it, taking a drag and blowing out smoke with a wry smile, aware of how absurd this might sound. For someone with such an inquisitive drive, he is surprisingly easy to be around – solicitous, funny and kind. He would say, of course, that the world cannot be understood through simple observation. He might be right: I’m not sure anything could fully explain what goes on in Will Self’s brain.

Still, he makes a great cup of coffee.

Umbrella is published by Bloomsbury on 30 August.

Filed under: Books by admin
J Mascis: ‘I never took it that seriously’

First published online by Paul Lester.

 

Hi, J. Where are you?

At the K-West hotel in West London. I’m in London doing interviews for the new Dinosaur Jr album (1).

Ah, yes. I Bet On Sky. It’s got guitars on it. Lots of them. Have you ever considered making a dubstep album?

Well, somebody made an electronic Dinosaur Jr album this year with lots of songs from [1987's] You’re Living All Over Me and [1988's] Bug (2) so … it could be done. But I probably wouldn’t do too much electronic stuff. I listen to oldies like Kraftwerk, but nothing new. Reggae and dub I like, but I haven’t dived in yet. Atari Teenage Riot sampled one of our songs.

There’s a track on your new album called Rude. What’s the rudest thing you’ve ever said to anybody?

“You’re fucked.” To somebody’s mom. I was 19.

Why did you tell her that?

Cos she was fucked.

In what way was she fucked?

I’d stayed over the night at her house and she basically tortured me. She’d walk around coughing and at dinner time she said: “What do you wanna eat?” and I said: “I don’t care,” so she said: “If I put some shit on a plate, would you eat that?” I said: “No, probably not.”

Talking of excrement … You once played a show with legendary coprophiliac GG Allin. What was that like?

He was nice. Until he got onstage. Then he flipped a switch. He took a lot of drugs, and Ex-Lax (3). It was quite ugly. He rammed the mic up his butt, cut himself everywhere, he was covered in blood and shit within minutes. They threw him out of the club after four songs.

He was described as “the most spectacular degenerate in rock’n'roll history”. Do you have a moral position on degeneracy of that order?

A moral position? It was quite an unpleasant experience.

Can such behaviour be defended on artistic grounds?

Sure. I mean, it definitely had an effect on people. No one was near the stage. Everyone was against the back wall of the club. He [Allin] had a song called I’m Gonna Rape You and he’d say, “This is where I go out in the crowd and rape the girl so keep playing the guitar solo till I get back onstage.” The fact is, he wouldn’t have to because these girls were happy to give themselves to him.

You were voted the 86th best guitarist in a Rolling Stone poll. Do you know who you were sandwiched between?

I forget.

Andy Summers of The Police and James Hetfield of Metallica. How good are you on guitar? Up there with the greats?

Er, no.

Dinosaur Jr were the Chuck Berry to Sonic Youth’s Elvis. Discuss.

 

That doesn’t sound right.

Nirvana, Pixies, Dinosaur Jr and Sonic Youth are the four horsemen of the grunge apocalypse, though, aren’t they?

Right.

Which was the most important in the development of American rock?

Nirvana, I guess.

Really?

They’re the Beatles to Sonic Youth’s… Deep Purple (4).

Do you ever consider the importance of Dinosaur Jr in the scheme of things?

No.

Are you the godfather of alternative rock?

I don’t know… [laughs]. All labels are offensive in some way.

Was “grunge” offensive?

Not really, but I think of Mudhoney as grunge and everybody else is part-grunge. Our initial concept for Dinosaur was “ear-bleeding country”.

Have you ever played the Grand Ole Opry? (5)

No, but if we did play to country audiences I’m sure they’d be appalled.

Are you really the slow- and soft-talking stoner slacker of early-’90s renown, or were you just winding journalists up and when the interviews were over you’d talk at a regular pace and volume?

Yeah, I mean … obviously I seem stoned all the time and talk slow. I think that’s what it is. But I didn’t even realise I talked slow until people started telling me.

Were you like that at school?

I didn’t feel like I was quiet. When journalists started writing about it, then you realise what people think you’re doing.

Did that make you want to do it more to annoy them?

No.

You’re the son of a dentist. Did you get free treatment?

Oh yeah, but it’s strange. You know how they say, “The cobbler’s son has no shoes”? It’s kind of like that scenario. Dad didn’t really want to ever see anybody in the family. Like, my mom would make appointments under fake names. So you’re in a weird position. You can’t go to another dentist, but your dad doesn’t really want to deal with it.

Is it true that Brits have terrible teeth compared to Americans?

I’ve noticed that in the past, definitely. I don’t know about now.

How are yours? Capped and whitened?

I have a couple of gold teeth. I had braces for a year but I didn’t wear the retainer.

Your relationship with your Dinosaur Jr bandmate Lou Barlow was famously fractured. (6) How are relations since your 2005 reunion?

Um … ok.

Are there bands you wish could have worked things out like you two did? The Smiths, say?

I can’t recommend it for anyone. People have to do what they want to do. I wanted to see The Birthday Party [again], but the bassplayer died.

Your wife is from Germany, and your surname is Italian. Did this cause problems during the recent European semi-finals?

I don’t know. No. I don’t care. Does my wife care? A little bit. Not too much.

How’s your German these days?

Not too good. My wife’s family are from Berlin. I’m going there next week.

German is a language uniquely demanding of force and decibels, isn’t it?

That’s not true. Our first roadie was German and he mumbled a lot.

What comedy are you into?

I like Curb Your Enthusiasm. Mighty Boosh.

Americans always like British comedy, and vice versa (7).

I love Larry David and Louis CK

Have you ever met Larry David?

I’ve come close. “Oh, Larry David was here!” That’s happened a few times.

You used to say Bug was your worst album. Which was your best?

You’re Living All Over Me. That’s the one where everything came together.

Have you spent 25 years trying to recreate the feeling you had on that album, or is that not possible?

Yeah, it’s impossible. When the stars align and everything comes together. And, you know, we had a goal, which was to get on SST Records (8). So we made that record on SST. Where do you go when you’ve achieved your goal?

Do you have a new goal?

No. That was the last one. [Chuckles]

You have a four-year-old son. Do you think your son may well rebel against your slacker reputation by becoming a solicitor or doctor?

It’s hard to tell what he’ll do to rebel. I don’t want to think about it. It’s got to be bad.

On the Rollercoaster tour of 1991, which you did with My Bloody Valentine, Blur, The Jesus And Mary Chain and Dinosaur Jr, who was most fun to hang around with?

Blur probably. They were definitely a lot more fun than any other band, for sure.

Really? You didn’t find Damon [Albarn] to be a pompous blowhard?

Yeah. But you only realised that after. Not at the time. Just in subsequent years.

Damon was the one with the reputation for being loud and getting the other members of Blur embroiled in fights on the road.

Yeah, I can see that. There was a bit of “say one thing to your face and another [behind your back]…” The Mary Chain were way more socially retarded than Dinosaur, which was interesting. It took them a whole tour to do much talking. They were reclusive and seemed petrified of people.

So it could have been one of those rare occasions when you might have been tempted to turn to someone and say, “For God’s sake, man, speak up and be a bit more forthcoming!”?

Right …

Have you ever got tired of people comparing your vocal and guitar style to Neil Young?

Yeah.

Have you ever met him?

Yeah. It was great. He said he was a fan of ours at the time – it was ’93.

Have you ever had an uncomfortable experience, meeting a hero of yours?

Yeah. Glenn Danzig(9). He was just, you know… He wasn’t very friendly.

Isn’t it part of the deal, though, for musicians to behave all rock star-y, rude and aloof?

No, I didn’t like it.

Can you be cool and not a jerk?

Sure. I mean, I think most people who think I’m a jerk are really hyper and if I don’t answer them fast enough at that moment they’ve already written me off as an asshole before I even speak.

If you Google your name, one of the first things that comes up is “Five Awesomely Awkward J Mascis Interviews” (10)

Right.

There’s one where a mumsy-looking woman called Maureen grills you

Yeah, she’s my friend’s mum. She’s the lady I mentioned earlier who I told: “You’re fucked”! We’ve become friends. She’s pretty funny!

Your reunion albums have been good. Can you think of a reunion where the albums have sucked?

Yeah. It seems like most of them. I thought the Gang Of Four one was weird, where they re-recorded songs from Entertainment!. I never heard it, but I thought it was bizarre. They started doing it [the comeback] when we did [circa 2005] and they were really good live and I had hopes that they would do something, or keep going, but that seemed like a weird move.

You were featured on the cover of Spin magazine once next to the proclamation, “J Mascis Is God”. What did you think when you saw that?

I was mortified.

Wasn’t there a tiny bit of pleasure in being compared to an all-powerful deity?

No.

What are your views on who the real God is?

I’m not sure.

But it’s not you?

No.

Has it ever been you?

No.

You once said, “Interviews are stupid. I have nothing to say about the album.” Do you still feel the same way?

Yeah [laughs].

Does that kind of deification make you want to debunk the interview situation?

Oh yeah. You know. I never took it that seriously.

Would that be your epitaph: “I Never Took It That Seriously”?

No.

Gene Simmons recently told me what his would be: “Thank You And Good Night”.

Wasn’t Bukowski’s “Don’t Try”? (11) That wouldn’t be mine, but I like that one.

Footnotes

(1) I Bet On Sky is released by PIAS on September 17
Back to article

(2) A project launched by Brett Nelson of Built To Spill in which renowned rockers do electronic versions of their own songs.
Back to article

(3) “A Trusted Treatment For Constipation For 100 Years” .
Back to article

(4) Great band and all, but Deep Purple weren’t particularly associated with grunge, or US alt rock. More of that Mascis irony.
Back to article

(5) Aka “the spiritual home of country music”
Back to article

(6) Between splitting up and reuniting in 2005, Lou Barlow and Dinosaur bandmate Murphy were alleged to have called Mascis, among other things, an “asshole”, a “dick,” and a “Nazi”
Back to article

(7) Possibly the most famous example of an American lionising UK comedy is Snoop Dogg’s patronage of Benny Hill.
Back to article

(8) Label home of Black Flag, Meat Puppets and, briefly, Sonic Youth.
Back to article

(9) The metal legend is obviously prone to hissy fits – at the Bonnaroo festival in June he had to be held back by security from attacking photographers
Back to article

(10) One such interview included this typically terse exchange:

You really don’t like to play guitar?”

“No.”

“Why do you do it?”

“Dunno.”

Back to article

(11) Poet laureate of American lowlife. Was more loquacious than Mascis.
Back to article

Filed under: Music by admin
The philosopher making the moral case for US drones: ‘There’s no downside’

First published online by Rory Carroll in Monterey.

 

At first sight, Bradley Strawser resembles a humanities professor from central casting. He has a beard, wears jeans, quotes Augustine and calls himself, only half in jest, a hippie. He opposes capital punishment and Guantánamo Bay, calls the Iraq invasion unjust and scorns neo-conservative foreign policy hawks. “Whatever a neocon is, I’m the opposite.”

His office overlooks a placid campus in Monterey, an oasis of California sun and Pacific zephyrs, and he lives up the road in Carmel, a forested beauty spot with an arts colony aura. Strawser has published works on metaphysics and Plato and is especially fond of Immanuel Kant.

Strawser is also, it turns out, an outspoken and unique advocate for what is becoming arguably the US’s single most controversial policy: drone strikes. Strawser has plunged into the churning, anguished debate by arguing the US is not only entitled but morally obliged to use drones.

“It’s all upside. There’s no downside. Both ethically and normatively, there’s a tremendous value,” he says. “You’re not risking the pilot. The pilot is safe. And all the empirical evidence shows that drones tend to be more accurate. We need to shift the burden of the argument to the other side. Why not do this? The positive reasons are overwhelming at this point. This is the future of all air warfare. At least for the US.”

His forceful defence of the military use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), as drones are also called, is largely the reason he has landed a tenure-track post as assistant professor of philosophy at Monterey’s Naval Postgraduate School, an elite college which gives master’s and PhD courses to military officers, academics and policymakers.

The newly created post, part of the school’s defence analysis department, underlines a belief that drones and military ethics are set to become ever more fraught topics in Washington, Islamabad, Kabul and other capitals. “The school wanted a voice in that conversation, so they hired me. My job talk was on the ethics of drones. It’s what I’ve become most known for.”

Strawser, 33, a married father of two young children, just moved here from his previous post as resident research fellow at the Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership in Annapolis, Maryland. He has yet to unpack boxes and properly furnish his office but there is little doubt he will be a vocal, and in some quarters reviled, voice in the debate.

He has edited a book – Killing By Remote Control: The Ethics of an Unmanned Military – to be published soon by Oxford University Press. Drones, controlled by air force operators in Nevada and New Mexico who track targets on screens, have become Washington’s main weapon against Islamist militants in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. The US reportedly has 7,000 drones operating – more than manned aircraft – and 12,000 more on the ground.

Strained relations

The American Civil Liberties Union estimates strikes have killed 4,000 people, a significant number of them civilians, since 2002, with the tempo sharply accelerating under President Barack Obama.

Figures from the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism show that CIA drones stuck Pakistan 75 times in 2011, causing up to 655 fatalities, including as many as 126 civilians.

Pakistani authorities reported that 19 people died last Friday in an attack in the Dattakhel region in North Waziristan, further straining relations with Washington which has ignored protests from Islamabad.

Christof Heyns, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, recently said some strikes may constitute “war crimes” and that they would encourage other states to flout long-established human rights standards. Jimmy Carter, the former president, echoed unease amid reports detailing White House “kill lists”.

“The US can no longer speak with moral authority on human rights,” Carter said.

Strawser, who calls himself “doveish” on foreign policy, has proven an unexpected and forthright champion for the barrage of Hellfire missiles. His background may partly explain it. He is a self-described “army brat”, the son of an academic father who worked on air force computer systems, and grew up on air force bases.

After obtaining a bachelor’s degree in history and English, he followed his father’s footsteps and served seven years in the air force as an administrator – he did not see combat – before taking graduate night courses and “falling in love” with philosophy. He taught ethics courses while obtaining a PhD. His dissertation was on just war and moral responsibility, a recurring topic in his work.

Strawser now lives in the same town as Clint Eastwood and may soon become known as philosophy’s answer to Dirty Harry. With an affable tone, he methodically blasts objections to the drone strikes taking place 7,000 miles away. “When I started studying this topic I didn’t know this would be my conclusion. But that’s where my analysis led me.”

‘What matters to me is whether the cause itself is justified’

One objection sometimes posited is that there is something wrong or ignoble in killing through such lopsided asymmetry. “I share the kind of gut feeling that there’s something odd about that. But I don’t see the ethical problem. What matters to me is whether the cause itself is justified. Because if the operation is justified and is the right thing to do – and by the way I’m not claiming all US military strikes are – then asymmetry doesn’t matter.”

In an analogous case of police officers in a shootout with bank robbers you would want the former to have bullet-proof vests, Strawser says. “It’s a moral gain, not a moral problem.”

Another objection is that risk-free remote killing degrades traditional conceptions of valour. “You hear that from within the military and the average American on the street. That’s a real concern, I share it. But when you speak to these pilots – or operators, there’s a debate over the correct term – they’ll tell you it’s a very stressful job. Several of them have had PTSD. Think about
what they see all day … you’re watching people die on your screen.”

“I think it does take a certain type of intellectual bravery and perhaps some moral courage to fly drones in good conscience and believe in the mission you’re doing. We are called cowards for this. Coward or not, if it’s the right thing to do, to not risk a soldier when you don’t have to, and you think the cause is just, I just feel that that normative force is too powerful to overcome.”

Strawser makes an analogy of not risking human bomb disposal teams if robots could do their job just as well.

Strawser said a third objection, that drones encouraged unjust operations by reducing the financial and political cost to the US, was serious but surmountable. “There could be an upside. There are cases when we should go to war and we don’t, especially in humanitarian case like Rwanda. More generally, this objection is highly predictive about our future moral behaviour. It’s like saying: I’m going to do something which I know is wrong now to prevent me from doing something wrong later.”

Strawser says cases where drone strikes allegedly killed innocents would be unjustified, but did not render the technology illegitimate. “If the policy to begin with is wrong then of course we shouldn’t do it. It’s irrelevant if we use drones, a sniper rifle or a crossbow.” He says he considers poison gas and nuclear weapons inherently wrong because they did not discriminate – unlike drones.

“The question is whether drones will tempt us to do wrong things. But it doesn’t seem so because we have cases where drones were used justly and it seems they actually improve our ability to behave justly. Literally every action they do is recorded. For a difficult decision (operators) can even wait and bring other people into the room. There’s more room for checks and oversights. That to me seems a normative gain.”

Straswer says he understands why many shuddered over revelations of the so-called White House “kill lists” but believes it, in fact, shows accountability at the highest level, unlike Abu Ghraib, when authorities pinned blame on lower ranks.

He acknowledges why many called the strikes assassinations, or extra-judicial killings, but says they could be deemed “necessary and proportionate” to save lives. “People can make themselves liable to be killed by a drone strike in defence of the non-liable people they are threatening.”

Strawser is at pains to stress he is no hawk. But if a particular operation was just, and if using a drone could avert risk to a pilot without compromising the operation, the US had a duty to use drones, he says.

“The cost-savings, the ethical gain by better protecting the war fighter, increased capability: add all that together.”

In the fall, Strawser will start teaching military ethics to classes which are likely to include colonels, generals, admirals, diplomats and policy-makers. He worries that hawks could adopt his arguments about drones without taking account of his caveats. “It’s the thought that keeps me up at night. Because if my arguments were going to be misused..” The voice trails off and he shakes his head.

“In that case you could say maybe I should just keep quiet.”

Silence is unlikely. Strawser and the Naval school are mutually delighted with the appointment. “I wanted to be a working philosopher and here I am. Ridiculous good fortune.”

Filed under: World News by admin
How rave music conquered America

First published online by Simon Reynolds.

 

For anyone who lived through the 90s, the electronic dance music (EDM) explosion in America has an uncanny air of history-repeats about it. Massive gatherings of dancing youths dressed in garish freakadelic clothes? DJs treated like rock stars? Teenagers dropping dead from druggy excess? Didn’t this all happen once already? But the phenomenon isn’t so much deja vu as a rebranding coup. What were once called “raves” are now termed “festivals”; EDM is what we used to know by the name of techno. Even the drugs have been rebranded: “molly,” the big new chemical craze, is just ecstasy in powder form (and reputedly purer and stronger) as opposed to pills.

The main difference between then and now is the sheer scale of the phenomenon. Earlier this summer Electric Daisy Carnival (EDC), the most famous of the new wave of whatever-you-do-don’t-call-them-raves, drew 320,000 people to Las Vegas Motor Speedway over the course of three days. The crowds are lured to EDC and to similar dance-fests like Ultra, Electric Zoo, and IDentity not just by the headliner-piled-upon-headliner bills of superstar DJs but by the no-expense-spared spectacle of LED graphics, projection mapping and other cutting-edge visual technology.

Why did it take so long – 20 years – for techno-rave to conquer the American mainstream? Commentators sometimes compare the delay to the 15-year gap between Never Mind the Bollocks and Nevermind: 1991 as the Year Punk Broke America. But in both cases that’s a simplistic view of history: the Clash were stars in America by 1980 along with other New Wave acts, and likewise electronic dance music made a series of incursions into the US pop charts over the last two decades, only to be returned each time to the underground.

In the early 90s, KLF and C&C Music Factory, Deelite and Crystal Waters took house into the Billboard Top 40, while raves both illegal and commercial sprouted on the east and west coasts – an escalation that climaxed with 1993's Rave America, which drew 17,000 to the Californian amusement park Knots Berry Farm. Then came a lull until the electronica buzz of 1997, when MTV threw its weight behind the Prodigy, the Chemical Brothers, and Underworld. In the immediate years that followed, Fatboy Slim and Moby achieved ubiquity in TV commercials and movie soundtracks, while trance music of the fluffy Paul van Dyk/Paul Oakenfold type spurred a resurgence of raves in southern California, which by the turn of the millennium reached the 20-40,000 range.

Once again, the momentum dissipated. Radio remained hostile to electronic dance music unless it had a conventional pop song structure and vocals (as with the Prodigy’s punk-rave or Madonna’s coopting of trance on Ray of Light ). Major labels couldn’t work out how to develop electronic acts into albums-selling career artists. The next downturn for electronic music was drastic and for a while seemed terminal. Thanks to nu-metal and cool-hair bands like the Strokes and the White Stripes, rock was in the ascendant again; guitars once more sold more than turntables, a reversal of how things were trending in the 90s. In California, always America’s rave stronghold, large-scale parties all but disappeared, while all across the country, clubs moved to smaller premises and weekly events went monthly. The period from 2004-5 was the nadir: some American DJs even emigrated to Berlin, where the work prospects were better.

Watch footage from Electric Daisy Carnival:

How did the US electronic dance scene claw its way back? Basically, by doing its best to shed the word “rave” and all its associations: drugged-up kids slumped on dancefloors, hospitalisations, and the statistically rare but reputation-tarnishing deaths. Repeatedly through the 90s, governments at the state and city level enacted laws and policies designed to stamp out what concerned parents and alarmist newspapers typically called “drug supermarkets”. In Chicago, people who threw a party for friends in their own loft apartment, with no paid admission and the DJing performed by the host, could find themselves ticketed for a $10,000 fine. In New Orleans, laws originally drafted to close down crack houses were used against raves and clubs where drug taking was taking place, regardless of whether the promoter or owner was involved in selling the substances.

“The association of techno with ecstasy, we really had to overcome that stigma,” says Gary Richards of the LA-based promotions company Hard Events. “If you approach a venue owner or local authority for permits and you use the word ‘rave’, your business model is doomed.” Richards went further than most, actually banning from his Hard Festivals such rave-era “silly stuff” as glow-sticks, dummies, and cuddly toys.

The word “festival” itself represents an attempt by promoters to draw line between today’s EDM and 90s rave. From bluegrass and folk to indie and heavy metal, music festivals take place all over the US. Some have their own problems with excessive drug/alcohol use and rowdy, mob-like behaviour (remember the arson and riots at Woodstock in 1999?). But festivals don’t have the media stigma or face the punitive legislation and policing that raves do. Older and shrewder by the late 2000s, the early 90s pioneers involved in Hard Events and Insomniac (the company behind Electric Daisy Carnival) learned how to work with the system, going through the bureaucratic hoops required to get permits, and providing the level of intensive security, entrance searches and overall safety provisions that would give political cover to their local government enablers. In contrast with the 90s ethos of throwing raves in exotic and out-of-the-way places such as abandoned buildings, remote farms, and desert wilderness, promoters deliberately sought out in-plain-sight sites: ultra-mainstream venues like sports stadiums and motor sports courses.

The big breakthrough came with the 2010 Electric Daisy Carnival, for which Insomniac’s Pasquale Rotella secured the LA Memorial Coliseum: an iconic football stadium that is home to the USC Trojans and also hosted the Olympics. Yet this moment of crossover triumph for the resurgent EDM movement almost turned to catastrophe: Insomniac’s bid for respectability was dealt a near-fatal blow with the ecstasy-related death of a 15-year-old girl who somehow managed to bypass the Electric Daisy’s age restrictions and get into the event. The outcry that ensued forced EDC out of Los Angeles altogether. Insomniac now stage the Carnival in Las Vegas, a much more congenial and permissive environment that has lately become the Ibiza of North America, a place where superstar deejays like Tiesto have residencies.

“I would never want our scene to grow out of something tragic,” says Rotella. “But all that media attention was something that opened people’s eyes to how big this scene was getting. It did, I believe, assist in the explosion. Because we were pulling 130,000 people and no one knew. ” He points out that before the Coliseum, there were no other dance festivals in the US on anything like that scale. Now there’s half a dozen.

Whether or not the 2010 Electric Daisy Carnival really proves there’s no such thing as bad publicity, it’s equally true that the event showed that the link between EDM and drugs still existed. Because it wasn’t just one unlucky teenager. According to the LA Times, “about 120 [EDC] attendees were taken to hospitals, mostly for drug intoxication.”

Madonna was recently lambasted for coming onstage at Ultra in Miami and asking the EDM horde: “how many people have seen Molly?” With casuistic adroitness she subsequently made out that she wasn’t really referring to the popular powdered form of MDMA but to the dance track Have You Seen Molly? Except that tune is blatantly a drug-is-the-love song in the 90s rave tradition of Ebeneezer Goode, Let Me Be Your Fantasy and Sesame’s Treet: it features a GPS-style robot-woman saying: “Please help me find Molly/She makes my life happier, more exciting/She makes me want to dance.”

“Molly is short for ‘molecule’,” explains Nathan Messer of DanceSafe, an organization that provides guidance and pill-testing at raves all across North America. “It’s sold in sachets or baggies. Because pressed pills had gotten so diluted with adulterants, everybody wants the powder.” Molly’s reputation for purity and strength was deserved for a long while, but inevitably dealers have started to cut the powder with other substances.

However determined and stringent promoters might be in their attempts to prevent drugs getting into their events, supply tends to find a way to meet up with demand. According to Messer, the super-size festivals have their own special problems when it comes to drug safety. On the one hand, kids buy dubious substances from dealers they don’t know and are unlikely to see again given the size of the venue. On the other, there are no pill-testing facilities: promoters won’t have anything to do with outfits such as DanceSafe, because that would be a tacit admission that problems still exist, opening them to the risk of permits being denied or even having equipment confiscated.

“We provide Wonderland. You don’t need drugs,” insists Rotella. He talks up the “experience” aspect of Electric Daisy Carnival, from its dazzling barrage of state-of-the-art lighting to its dance troupes whose costumes are pitched midway between harlequin and hooker. “It’s about giving people that fantasy; that storybook experience. I want to create celebrations. EDC is like New Year’s Eve; like Mardi Gras.” Rotella says he has got no interest in becoming a concert promoter, putting on events where big name performers are the main draw. “You can see the big DJs in clubs any time. We’re doing ‘destination festivals’.” But he also stresses the role played by the audience: “I like to say our headliners are the fans. They get dressed up.”

And how! At Electric Daisy Carnival and similar dance festivals, the look has evolved from the child-like “candy raver” of the 1990s, with their pigtails and cuddly toys and pacifiers (dummies), to a slick and sexified yet also kitschy-surreal image midway between Venice Beach and Cirque Du Soleil, Willy Wonka and a Gay Pride parade: girls in Daisy Dukes and bikini tops (or even bare breasts daubed in glittery body paint) but who also wear tutus, giant furry boots in turquoise and hot pink, and fairy wings.

What the EDC ravers most recall are the “nutbags” and “mentalists” who flocked to Gatecrasher, the Sheffield club that was the focus of the trance boom of the late 90s. Not only is the music they dance to similar (a rehash-mash of trance, house and electro) but the style is a similar mix of child-like, cyberdelic-futurist, and fancy dress.

Right from the early days, there’s always been a carnivalesque side to rave culture, from the free party sound systems with names like Circus Warp to the commercial UK raves with their bouncy castles, gyroscope rides, and merry-go-rounds. Clubs, likewise, featured all sorts of eye-candy, from lasers and intelligent lighting to trip-tastic projections of cyber-kitsch graphics. The flicker and dazzle was conducive to hallucinatory drugs and the hi-tech fun ‘n’ frolics found the perfect interzone between futurism and regression to childhood. The new electronic dance festivals in America have taken this side of rave to the next level.

Daft Punk’s set at the Coachella festival in 2006, where they performed inside a huge glowing pyramid, is often cited as a turning point. Soon performers like Deadmau5 were pouring as much effort and money into LED panels and beat-synchronised animated graphics as they did into their music.

What’s different about this new breed of audio-visual entertainer is that what they offer are “custom-branded visuals predesigned to fit specific songs”. So says Drew Best, a prime mover in the US dubstep scene with his Los Angeles club/label Smog, but also the motion-graphics designer behind the fledgling company Pattern & Noise. In the old days, Best explains, what a VJ (video jockey) or lighting director did was provide improvised accompaniment to the DJ’s set. But nowadays Deadmau5 will get a designer such as Best, who worked on the former’s recent tour, to create “Pacman-type ghosts” to go with the track Ghosts ‘N’ Stuff or a “Tron-style” factory with clanking pistons to accompany Professional Griefers. The leading performers on the EDM scene are engaged in fierce competition to out-dazzle each other. Skrillex’s Skrill Cell combined projection mapping and motion capture. “Skrillex wore a suit and he had CG characters rigged to it, these 20 foot monsters on a giant wall behind him,” explains Best. “The monsters would match Skrillex’s every movement as he deejayed onstage.”

Watch Deadmau5 live in the UK:

This A/V glitz-blitz costs a lot, but then artists at the Deadmau5 level earn a lot: as much as $1m for a festival appearance, while hardest-gigging-man-in-EDM Skrillex is reportedly worth $15m. With day tickets selling at around $125 and well over 300,000 attending over three days, the Las Vegas EDC must have grossed in the region of $40m. The big money is attracting even bigger money: the mogul Robert FX Sillerman declared his intent to spend $1bn acquiring companies in the EDM field, while Live Nation, America’s leading concert promotions company, recently purchased outright Hard Events.

The increasingly bread-head and circus-like aspects of EDM have provoked a backlash from those who feel dance culture is swapping underground intimacy in favour of soul-less bombast that stuns and stupefies audiences into slack-jawed submission. The Wall Street Journal, of all places, recently railed against “The Dumbing Down of Electronic Dance Music” . Long time west coast rave watcher Dennis Romero penned a caustic verdict for LA Weekly on this June’s Vegas EDC: “A press-play parade of millionaires going through the motions.” DanceSafe’s Messer, a veteran of the idealistic PLUR (peace, love, unity, respect) oriented rave underground of the 90s, complains that the dance festivals offer a “packaged, containerised experience … These events are all about raging hard, getting as fucked up as you can. Not necessarily even about dancing, just being a face in this giant extravaganza.”

At the core of many of the complaints is the belief that these entertainment spectaculars are tyrannical in their inflexibility. “There’s a lot of stuff that’s preprogrammed,” says Drew Best. “The tracks in a Deadmau5 set precisely trigger the visual and lighting systems. All the imagery is absolutely on beat, and that beat is 128 bpm. If you see Deadmau5 several times in a row, you might see the same show.” Earlier this year Deadmau5 incited a furore with his candid admission that everybody at his level basically presses “play” and his assertion that the true artistry comes into play in the recording studio beforehand, not on the stage. In other words, he’s a producer who chooses to publicly represent his sound in person, but not a DJ in the traditional sense: a selector who responds to the mood of the crowd. EDM today has come a long way from the early days of house and techno, when sound was privileged over vision, an ethos enshrined in the title of the 1992 Madhouse compilation A Basement, a Red Light, and a Feeling. In those murky, atmospheric clubs, the deejay booth was often tucked away in a corner rather than placed up on a stage: dancers weren’t meant to all be looking in one direction, they were meant to get lost in music, and in the collective intimacy of the dancefloor .

While festivals like Electric Daisy Carnival have amplified the fantasy and fancy dress side of 90s rave, other sectors in the resurgent scene have gone in the opposite direction, concentrating on the music. Hard Festival’s Richards wanted to lose the “goofy fashion” side of rave that EDC revels in. “Why do we have to dress up like idiots to listen to this music? All those girls in the furry boots, they look like Clydesdale horses!” As “hard” suggests, Richards presents electronic music as modern rock: an old spirit encased in new digital flesh.

It’s a strategy he pursued through the record industry for years. First he worked at Rick Rubin’s American label, at a time circa 1992 when the Def Jam co-founder was briefly convinced that techno was the new punk, or the new hip hop: a revolution waiting to take the country by storm. Then Richards ran his own major label imprint 1500 Records. But just like with his stint at American, he struggled to find a way to sell electronic music through the conventional rock channels. By 2005, that was becoming irrelevant, as the industry was struggling to sell records in any genre. So with perfect timing, Richards formed Hard, a live promotions company, catching the rising tide of live performances and festivals. And it’s through the live experience – something that can’t be shared or bookmarked for later listening, that you have to be present for in real-time – that EDM has really achieved lift-off. Even artists who sell a goodly number of MP3s and make an impression on the Billboard Top 40, such as Skrillex, make the bulk of their income from live shows.

As much as EDM’s spread owes a huge deal to the internet and the circulation of DJ mixes and YouTubed tracks via social media and message boards, what’s striking about the rise of the leading artists is how much it depends on the old-fashioned rock biz grind of touring. Blood Company, the management team behind Skrillex, specialise in hardcore metal bands such as Atreyu and Revoker. “They used the same strategy with Skrillex, which is putting the band on a bus and going to every town in America,” says Drew Best. Last autumn, Skrillex’s two-month Mothership tour played 55 dates across the US. “He took my partner at Smog, the DJ and producer 12th Planet, with him and they were stopping at middle-American cities and college towns that aren’t even on the radar of your electronic booking agents, whose typical approach is to fly artists such as the Chemical Brothers in to the major cities plus a couple of pre-existing festivals.”

In some ways it’s odd that no one thought to try this kind of grass-roots, hard-slog approach to breaking electronic artists before. “Performers such as Skrillex are incredibly efficient touring operations compared to rock bands, ” says Matt Adell of Beatport, the online music retailer that’s something like the deejay’s equivalent to iTunes. “It’s less expensive than a rock group because there’s just one performer, there’s much less gear and it’s easier to set up because there’s no live microphones. So the support team required is so much smaller.” Hoping to retrace the path to success taken by Skrillex, Blood Company now have several other electronic acts on their roster, including American dubstep artists the Juggernaut and J Rabbit.

Paralleling the rocktronica approach of Gary Richards, the rise of dubstep in America represents a countervailing force of hardness and darkness at odds with the escapist fantasy side of EDM developed by the mega-festivals. Best points to a September 2006 Radio One show by Mary Ann Hobbs as a critical moment in dubstep’s dissemination through North America. “Dubstep Warz was this session where she had all the key DJs on the scene playing tracks, but more importantly talking about the music and the culture. It really painted a picture of what dubstep meant. That show was traded throughout the Internet, to the point where it’s almost a cliche to say that it influenced you. Hobbs also talked about Dubstepforum in that broadcast. At that point it had a few hundred users. But subsequently it just grew and grew until it now has a million.”

The internet helped to obliterate the time-lag that always used to hamper the US outposts of UK-based scenes like jungle. Because of the dubplate system, whereby the leading British drum & bass DJs played the latest sounds months before their official release, by the time American deejays got hold of the tracks as expensive imports, the UK scene was already six months into the future. But dubstep, as the first fully networked dance scene, is globally synchronized: sound-files are traded more freely and new tracks gets edited out of DJ mixes on pirate radio and posted as YouTube by fans.

By 2007, not only was dubstep accessible in a way that jungle, UK garage and grime had never been, but the music itself was getting more accessible: increasingly in your face, full-on, and hard-riffing. In its formative years, dubstep had been a connoisseur’s sound: deep and dark, moody and meditational, appealing to an audience largely composed of former junglists and 90s-rave veterans. Gradually the sound gathered new, younger recruits, proving particularly popular with students. DJs such as Skream and Plastician found themselves playing bigger halls and, consciously or unconsciously, started gearing both their sets and their own productions to what would make a big crowd go nuts. Some observers say the ban on smoking in clubs played its role: with a sly, discreet spliff no longer an option, punters switched to pills and energy levels accordingly rose. Whatever the case, dubstep transformed into a big-room, peak hour sound: proper rave music.

New populist heroes such as Caspa and Rusko emerged, amping up the aggression levels and intensifying the wobble basslines that drove dancers crazy. In the early dubstep, the bass drop was a tectonic quake of sub-low frequencies. But now it shifted into the mid-range, with intricately edited, brutally baroque basslines that contorted and backfired like the solo of a lobotomized guitarist. Multiple bass-patterns and bass-timbres were layered to form a churning slurry, like a chainsaw shearing through sewage. Track titles and artist names played up the expulsive and repulsive aspect of the new style (Stenchman’s discography includes Puking Over and The Taste of Vomit) and fans enthused about “filthstep”. These abject-yet-inorganic basslines largely stemmed from a single music-making program, Massive. Made by Native Instruments, it’s a synthesizer plug-in that sits in a producer’s laptop or digital audio workstation and allows him or her to slather different synth-textures together to make the sickest, slimiest bassline.

Listen to The Taste of Vomit by Stenchman:

The Massive sound basically made dubstep massive in the US. A key moment was another widely circulated mix, this time created by the Vancouver-based deejay Excision for the 2008 Shambalaya festival. “Excision isolated the most aggressive, industrial sounding tracks around,” says Best. “Nothing but the hardest dubstep. People here ate that up.”

Meanwhile, many original dubstep believers were recoiling from the rowdy, macho atmosphere that had descended on the scene. “Brostep” was the derisive term coined to discourage the masculinist tendency, mock it out of existence. According to Best, “bro” brings to mind steroid-stacked frat boys and truck-driving dudes into Monster Energy drinks. But the term began to be embraced as a positive identity. “I’ve actually been sent demo tracks by people who say: ‘I make brostep.’”

Ultimately dubstep’s drift towards harder-and-crazier sounds proved unstoppable. In the UK, many of the scene’s guardians refused to go along with it and dispersed into the milder, semi-experimental or house-ified realms of “post-dubstep”. But in America, outfits like Smog embraced the new direction. For Best, dubstep was moving in to claim the space abandoned by rock, through its retreat during the 2000s into either antiquarian retro irrelevance or the non-visceral gentility of indie, all wordsmith craft and over-embellished arrangements. That space was the perennial demand for a tough, aggressive but forward-looking sound for the release of pent-up frustration.

Choosing venues for their increasingly frequent and well-attended dubstep events, Smog deliberately gravitated to Los Angeles’s rock’n'roll venues. “Before I’d done drum’n'bass nights and whenever we’d booked into anywhere polished, it always ended in flames. Bathrooms got trashed, mirrors had tags etched into them. When we started doing Smog, it was same kind of aggressive crowd, so we avoided fancy nights with a dress code and bottle service and went for dark, gritty basement bars. Then a punk rock club called the Echo hooked up with us. Next thing you know at our Smog nights, there’s kids moshing and deejays stage-diving.”

Nu-skool dubstep has become a locus for generational identity in America, says Best. “The mid-range bass sound just captured the attention of young people. It’s like the high-pitched, aggravating sound of a guitar solo in the 70s. Something your parents are going to hate.” A video on YouTube, Elders React to Dubstep, plays on this idea: various old folk, exposed to a barrage of bass-screech, offer comments such as “incomprehensible”, “like Jackass in a bottle”, and, revealingly, “it make me feel like the future is now”. They also suggest genre names for the music, one of which is even better than brostep: metalla-purge.

Watch Elders React to Dubstep:

Although not a dubstep artist per se, Skrillex incorporates elements from the genre into his own eclectic brand of high-energy electro-dance. (The name Skrillex could almost be onomatopoeia for brostep’s shredded, twisting bass lines.) According to Best, Skrillex attended some of the early Smog nights and noticed the rock-of-the-future vibe, which resonated with his own background as the singer in the screamo band From First to Last.

“In America now, Skrillex is the biggest thing since Nirvana,” says Best. “You’re witnessing a whole new cultural revolution happening.” He thinks the rocktronica tendency is set to intensify with the emergence of artists like Knife Party (two former members of Pendulum, the Australian outfit who turned drum’n'bass into a new form of arena rock) and Mosquito (“Daft Punk meets Prodigy meets Skrillex”). Then there’s a figure like Bassnectar, who can play the big carnival-style festivals but also takes his gnarly-but-trippy version of dubstep to events like Electric Forest, where he’ll play on the same bill as jam bands like String Cheese Incident. Descendants of the Deadhead culture that was left in the lurch when the Grateful Dead expired, jam band fans have turned onto dubstep in a huge way.

Right now the EDM scene is an uneasy coalition between the slamming rocktronica of Skrillex and Bassnectar and the fluffy feel-good trance-house of DJs like Avicii, Kaskade, Swedish House Mafia, and Steve Aoki. On one side, there’s Hard’s Gary Richards who wants to push electronic music even further away from rave’s disreputable and daft past. On the other, there’s Electric Daisy Carnival, which has preserved not just rave’s hands-in-the-air euphoria but some of its subcultural ritual aspects too.

Rituals like “tutting”, which evolved out of the glove-dances performed by American ravers in the 90s but which now enhances the intricate hand-movements with glowing and flickering LED fingertips. Tutting is both a competitive form of creative expression (breakdancing for hands) and a practice inextricably entwined with drug culture (it’s kids putting on mini-lightshows for their tripped-out companions). Hard’s Gary Richards can’t stand the glove-dance phenomenon: “I’m like, ‘look at the stage, not your friend’s fingers”. But by suppressing this element from his events, he’s effectively reducing the participatory aspects of rave that gave it so much of its charm and distinctiveness as a subculture.

“Without the people, it’s nothing,” says Pasquale Rotella. “The day it’s turns into just a concert, I’m not going to be inspired anymore.” What the success of Electric Daisy Carnival shows is that if you provide people with a forum in which they can experience a sense of collectivity and occasion along with sheer sensory overload, they don’t really care whether it’s “underground” or not. Rotella says his dream and long-term plan is to build “an adult Disneyland.”

Simon Reynolds is the author of books including Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture and Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past

Filed under: Music by admin
Forced marriage blights the lives of scores of learning disabled people

First published online by Frances Ryan.

 

Six years after her marriage finally ended, Sufia Ahmed has stopped biting her arms and using razors to cut herself. Her mother says she feels guilty, stressing repeatedly that she never would have forced her daughter to marry if she had known what would happen to her.

Ahmed, 33, had no idea what was going on when her family’s community decided she was a good match for a man who had recently arrived from India. He needed a visa, and, as Ahmed has a learning disability, it was felt no one else would want to marry her.

“Mum knows best,” Ahmed recalls. “[I thought] she’d marry me to a nice man. I would get married and be like my sister. I hoped my husband would think I’m pretty.”

Instead, a year into the marriage, her husband was taking all of her benefits and sending the money to his family, who lived abroad, and was regularly beating and raping her. When she became pregnant, his continued abuse caused her to miscarry, she says.

Ahmed’s is not an isolated incident. More than 50 cases of people with learning disabilities forced into marriage were reported to the government’s Forced Marriage Unit (FMU) last year. Many say they were repeatedly raped until they became pregnant. Many routinely faced physical and emotional abuse.

Rachael Clawson, a social work academic at the University of Nottingham, who worked with the Ann Craft Trust to carry out the research, says these figures are “the tip of the iceberg”. According to her understanding of the issue, hundreds of adults with a learning disability, such as Ahmed, could have been forced into marriage and abused.

“All types of abuse of people with learning disabilities are under-reported … and there is no reason to think the abuse of forced marriage would be any different. It is likely to be vastly under reported,” she says.

It is the first time that a practice hitherto associated with honour in Asian communities or with immigration issues has been found to endanger people with learning disabilities. In 2011, there were 1,468 instances where the FMU gave advice or support related to a possible forced marriage. Of these, 66 instances involved those with disabilities, of which 56 had learning disabilities.

“People with a learning disability can be particularly vulnerable to forced marriage,” says Mark Goldring, chief executive of learning disability charity Mencap. “[Those] with a learning disability have a right to develop personal relationships, like anyone else … but the issue here is that incidences of forced marriage can involve people who are unlikely to have the capacity to consent to such a relationship.”

Any marriage where either party does not have the capacity to consent is legally classified as forced. However, Clawson found that many parents of children with a learning disability do not know this is the case. “They didn’t even realise what they were doing was forced marriage, ” she says. Some parents even told health professionals of their plans.

Although all the forced marriages she researched were from within communities where there is a cultural tradition of forced marriage, including families of Pakistani or Indian origin, and others from the Middle East, Africa and Europe, obtaining a visa for a foreign spouse was notably low down on the list of motivations. The main reason most parents gave for forcing their daughters, and sons, to marry was to provide them with a carer, says Clawson.

Mandy Sanghera, a human rights activist who over 20 years has dealt with more than 200 cases in the UK and Canada of people with a learning disability being forced to marry, and who worked on the FMU study, says for parents of adults with learning disabilities, forced marriage is often an act of desperation.

“Many are struggling with their caring responsibilities due to old age, poor health and even not being able to manage their child’s behaviour or disability,” she says. “Parents will try to access services such as education, health and social care without getting anywhere. Out of desperation, they’ll [even] take their child abroad to get a spouse-cum-carer.”

The stigma around disability in some communities is also a factor in many of the cases studied, according to Clawson. Marriage can be seen as a way to “normalise” people with learning disabilities. Others believe that taking on the role of husband or wife will somehow “cure” the disabled person, she says.

Sanghera is emphatic that such cultural beliefs are no excuse. “Even if families have the right intention, they are breaking the law,” she says. “No one has the right to make life-changing decisions on another person’s behalf.”

Teertha Gupta, a QC and barrister specialising in family law and forced marriage, says that as a result of forcing their children into marriages, parents are often “aiding and abetting” their subsequent abuse. “They are really forcing them into marriage. But also potential sexual offences are being committed … for an individual who doesn’t, who cannot, consent to sexual relations – [which parents are] aiding and abetting,” he told BBC Radio 4's Face the Facts, which explores the issue in a programme broadcast on Wednesday.

Ahmed remembers begging for the abuse to stop. “I don’t like this game. I don’t want to play any more,” she says she told her husband. She couldn’t understand why it was happening. It continued for three years until, having acquired UK residency, her husband left.

In many marriages the spouse without the learning disability is the victim. The person may be unaware they are marrying someone who is unable to consent, Clawson points out. They are often used by their in-laws for chores and forced to care for elderly relatives, as well as their partner.

But the trap is much harder to escape for the spouse with the learning disability. The same factors that make people with learning disabilities vulnerable to being forced into marriage can make it difficult for them to leave. They are often reliant on their abusers for care. They may already be isolated and lack the communication skills to disclose their abuse. Ahmed’s situation only came to light when she was hospitalised for a miscarriage.

Worryingly, health visitors often fail to detect the warning signs, Clawson found. “Professionals are less likely to recognise abuse with people with learning difficulties for a whole range of different reasons such as reliance on the parent to speak on the disabled person’s behalf,” she says. In Ahmed’s case, her mother remained silent because she was worried about the family’s honour being disgraced should the abuse be disclosed.

David Cameron confirmed in June that forcing someone to marry is to become a criminal offence in England and Wales, leaving parents who coerce their children into a marriage facing the prospect of prison. The announcement included a £500,000 fund to help schools and other agencies to spot early signs of a forced marriage, and a major summer campaign to raise awareness of the risk of forced marriage abroad.

The FMU, which is a joint initiative between the Home Office and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, says it is working with the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services to emphasise the issue of people with learning disabilities being forced into marriages. A Home Office spokesman says the government aims to “ensure this issue is continually highlighted among those with responsibility for safeguarding vulnerable adults”.

The reality is, even if abuse is detected, victims face real difficulties getting out. There is just one refuge in the UK equipped to support forced marriage victims who have learning disabilities. “There is a terrible lack of options for people with learning disabilities who are escaping abuse and forced marriages,” says Asha Jama, manager of Beverley Lewis House refuge, east London.

The problem, she says, is “compounded by social care cuts. Statutory authorities are placing [victims] in a supported living service or care home. These services are not geared up to provide the specialist support needed to address the abuse the woman has faced.”

As a result of her abuse, Ahmed’s mental health deteriorated and she began to self-harm. “I have ruined my daughter’s life,” says her mother. “I will live with the guilt of what I put her through. Sufia put up with the abuse for my izzat [honour]. I am the one picking up the pieces. Where is my community now?”

• Some names have been changed. Face the Facts is on BBC Radio 4 on 1 August at 12.30pm and repeated on 5 August at 9pm

Filed under: Society by admin
Next Page »
Advertisement

(unless you have ad-blocking turned on)

 

Subscribe

Subscribe to the rss feed

Follow thelonggoodread on twitter

Recent Posts

David Hasselhoff: ‘If we have to go with the Hoff to pay the rent, let’s go with the Hoff’
Roll up for the financial crisis tour
Will Self: ‘I don’t write for readers’
J Mascis: ‘I never took it that seriously’
The philosopher making the moral case for US drones: ‘There’s no downside’
How rave music conquered America
Forced marriage blights the lives of scores of learning disabled people
The A-Z of Gore Vidal
World Bank’s Jim Yong Kim: ‘I want to eradicate poverty’
Stewart Lee: the slow death of the Edinburgh Fringe
Why social media isn’t the magic bullet for self-epublished authors
Enceladus: home of alien lifeforms?
James Kelman: ‘Why is my work so upsetting for people?’
Shirley Conran: all hail the queen of the bonkbuster
Read More

longform.org

Give me something to read

@longreads

@IfYouOnly

Instapaper

Categories

Art and design (53)  Books (106)  Business (30) Comment is Free (56)  Culture (44) Education (18)  Environment (59)  Film (109) Football (9)  Law (8)  Life and Style (139) Media (22)  Money (20)  Music (148) Politics (24)  Science (55)  Society (67) Sport (25)  Stage (26)  Technology (59) Television & radio (43)  Travel (28) UK news (35)  Uncategorized (34) World News (140)
Tags

Art Art and design Books Business Comedy Crime Culture Drama Economics Education Environment Europe Family Fashion Fiction Film Financial crisis Food & drink Global development Health Health & wellbeing Indie Internet Law Life and Style Media Money Music Parents and parenting Politics Pop and rock Science Society Sport Stage Technology Television Television & radio Theatre Travel UK news United States US politics Women World news
Theme: Adapted twitter bootstrap + jQuery.
Content © Copyright 2011 The Long Good Read | All Rights Reserved.
Longreads
 Follow us on Twitter
Search Our Archive

e.g. Top 10 Longreads of 2011, Steve Jobs, tech, fiction

All Article Lengths
Search
Our Picks
Community Picks
 
DeAndre McCullough (1977-2012)
The creator of The Wire remembers a young man whose life as a 15-year-old drug dealer in Baltimore was depicted in his book The Corner:

"At first, he was content with the book we wrote about his world. By the time The Corner was published it was something of an epitaph for people who were already casualties. Not just DeAndre’s father, but Boo, Bread, Fat Curt, his cousin Dinky, Miss Ella from the rec center. The book was an argument that these lives were not without meaning, that they, too, were complete human beings in the balance. He liked that someone — anyone — thought the people of Fayette Street mattered.

"In time, though, he confessed to hating the last line of the narrative, the one in which he is defined as a street dealer and addict at the moment after taking his first adult charge in a raid on a stash house on South Gilmor Street. There was a burden in that, and he grew tired of its weight.

"'That isn’t the end of the story,' he complained to me years later. 'You don’t know that the story ends that way.'"
AUTHOR:David Simon
SOURCE:davidsimon.com
PUBLISHED: Aug. 3, 2012
LENGTH: 6 minutes (1660 words)
Read Later Share
David Rakoff's 'Half Empty' Worldview Is Full Of Wit
An interview with the humorist and essayist about his book, Half Empty, his Academy Award-winning short film, and his recurrence of cancer:

"GROSS: You were diagnosed with cancer in your 20s. Now you're in your 40s and have a cancer diagnosis again. Are you dealing with it emotionally differently now in your 40s than you did in your 20s?

"Mr. RAKOFF: Yes, I think I am. I think - well, first of all, the cancer that I had in my 20s was, I even referred to it as the dilettante cancer. You know, it was Hodgkin's lymphoma, eminently curable and just a whole different ballgame from what I've got now.

"And I was a little less interested in knowing about the cancer back then in my 20s. I was sort of like, well, do whatever you need to do. I'm just going to sit here and lie back and think of England."
AUTHOR:Terry Gross
SOURCE:NPR
PUBLISHED: Sept. 21, 2010
LENGTH: 28 minutes (7017 words)
Read Later Share
Cyborg America: Inside the Strange New World of Basement Body Hackers
A writer meets with "grinders"—people who are obsessed with human enhancement through the manipulation of their body with technology—and then decides to implant a magnet in his finger:

"I chatted with Warwick from his office at The University of Reading, stacked floor to ceiling with books and papers. He has light brown hair that falls over his forehead and an easy laugh. With his long sleeve shirt on, you would never know that his arm is full of complex machinery. The unit allows Warwick to manipulate a robot hand, a mirror of his own fingers and flesh. What’s more, the impulse could flow both ways. Warwick’s wife, Irena, had a simpler cybernetic implant done on herself. When someone grasped her hand, Prof. Warwick was able to experience the same sensation in his hand, from across the Atlantic. It was, Warwick writes, a sort of cybernetic telepathy, or empathy, in which his nerves were made to feel what she felt, via bits of data travelling over the internet."
AUTHOR:Ben Popper
SOURCE:The Verge
PUBLISHED: Aug. 8, 2012
LENGTH: 20 minutes (5016 words)
Read Later Share
More Longreads …
Featured Curators

travelreads
presented by Virgin Atlantic
Discover the best articles on travel destinations and explore before you go.
View Travelreads
PrevNext
Virgin AtlanticGawker
Topics to Explore

Fiction
Comedy
Tech
Obama
Steve Jobs
Education
Interview
Science
Religion
Russia
Brooklyn
Murder
Love
Military
Hollywood
Journalism
San Francisco
Gay Marriage
Review
Oral History
Featured Posts

The Longreads Ebook: Get Our Collection of the Best Stories of the Past Year
With Longreads: Best of 2011 you get our favorite stories from publications including New York magazine, GQ, The New York Times, Lapham's Quarterly, Popular Mechanics, This Recording and The Awl. It makes a great gift to introduce your friends to Longreads, and money from the sales will be shared with the creators.
Read Later Share
Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week: Bruce Springsteen, women's health care in Texas, coping with the loss of a spouse, the Bo Xilai scandal, Olympian Hope Solo, fiction by Alexandra Thom, and a guest pick by Brian Kahn.
Read Later Share
Outside Magazine's Reading Picks: All-Things Olympic Games
Story recommendations about the Olympic Games, featuring Vanity Fair, The Fortnightly Review, The New Yorker, plus more
Read Later Share
Mother Jones's Editor Picks: Stories on the 'Genetics of Life'
The best recent long-form reportage on genetics. Featuring The New York Times, The Atlantic, and more
Read Later Share
From our partners

Save Your Longreads with the New Pocket
Read It Later is now Pocket—and a proud partner of Longreads. Save your favorite stories to Pocket for iPhone, iPad, Android and Kindle Fire. It's free.
Learn more about how it works
Publisher partner

New in This Week's
New York Magazine
From his new home base in Brooklyn, British novelist and firebrand Martin Amis talks to David Wallace-Wells about sex, porn, rioting, the difference between London and New York, and the dwindling fortunes of postmodernist literature and American empire.
Read the story
Featured Longreaders

lincourtl
Jesus Minimus, rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com
2 weeks, 3 days ago
brainpicker
Amy Winehouse: 1983 - 2011 by Jenny Eliscu, www.rollingstone.com
2 weeks, 3 days ago
mandywarhol
We Are Alive by David Remnick, www.newyorker.com
2 weeks, 3 days ago
DAMIENJOYCE
Guns N' Roses' 'Appetite for Destruction': Filthy, Sexy, Cool by Brian Hiatt, www.rollingstone.com
2 weeks, 3 days ago
matt_cardin
Sleepless in America: A $32.4 Billion Business, www.thefiscaltimes.com
2 weeks, 3 days ago
hriefs
Desperately Seeking Mitt by Wells Tower, m.gq.com
2 weeks, 3 days ago
vandelizer
American Baby Names Are Somehow Getting Even Worse, deadspin.com
2 weeks, 3 days ago
RJ_Young
Drive ins, ndepth.newsok.com
2 weeks, 3 days ago
Support Longreads

Become a Longreads Member for just $3 per month
Follow us on Twitter
Follow us on Tumblr
Visit Longreads on Facebook

Like Longreads on Facebook
Get the Longreads weekly email:
Sign up
Home
About
FAQ
Membership
Brands
Press
Team
Contact
RSS Feed
© 2012 Longreads Design by Kjell Reigstad
}
Albert Einstein
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Einstein" redirects here. For other uses, see Einstein (disambiguation).

Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein in 1921
Born 14 March 1879
Ulm, Kingdom of Württemberg, German Empire
Died 18 April 1955 (aged 76)
Princeton, New Jersey, United States
Residence Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, United Kingdom, United States
Citizenship 
Württemberg/Germany (1879–1896)
Stateless (1896–1901)
Switzerland (1901–1955)
Austria (1911–1912)
Germany (1914–1933)
United States (1940–1955)
Fields Physics
Institutions 
Swiss Patent Office (Bern)
University of Zurich
Charles University in Prague
ETH Zurich
Prussian Academy of Sciences
Kaiser Wilhelm Institute
University of Leiden
Institute for Advanced Study
Alma mater 
ETH Zurich
University of Zurich
Doctoral advisor Alfred Kleiner
Other academic advisors Heinrich Friedrich Weber
Notable students 
Ernst G. Straus
Nathan Rosen
Leó Szilárd
Raziuddin Siddiqui[1]
Known for 
General relativity and special relativity
Photoelectric effect
Mass-energy equivalence
Theory of Brownian Motion
Einstein field equations
Bose–Einstein statistics
Bose-Einstein condensate
Bose–Einstein correlations
Unified Field Theory
EPR paradox
Notable awards 
Nobel Prize in Physics (1921)
Matteucci Medal (1921)
Copley Medal (1925)
Max Planck Medal (1929)
Time Person of the Century (1999)
Spouse Mileva Maric (1903–1919)
Elsa Löwenthal (1919–1936)
Signature

Albert Einstein ( /'ælb?rt 'a?nsta?n/; German: ['alb?t 'a?n?ta?n] ( listen); 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the general theory of relativity, effecting a revolution in physics. For this achievement, Einstein is often regarded as the father of modern physics[2][3] and the most influential physicist of the 20th century. While best known for his mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc2 (which has been dubbed "the world's most famous equation"),[4] he received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect".[5] The latter was pivotal in establishing quantum theory within physics.
Near the beginning of his career, Einstein thought that Newtonian mechanics was no longer enough to reconcile the laws of classical mechanics with the laws of the electromagnetic field. This led to the development of his special theory of relativity. He realized, however, that the principle of relativity could also be extended to gravitational fields, and with his subsequent theory of gravitation in 1916, he published a paper on the general theory of relativity. He continued to deal with problems of statistical mechanics and quantum theory, which led to his explanations of particle theory and the motion of molecules. He also investigated the thermal properties of light which laid the foundation of the photon theory of light. In 1917, Einstein applied the general theory of relativity to model the structure of the universe as a whole.[6]
He was visiting the United States when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, and did not go back to Germany, where he had been a professor at the Berlin Academy of Sciences. He settled in the U.S., becoming a citizen in 1940.[7] On the eve of World War II, he helped alert President Franklin D. Roosevelt that Germany might be developing an atomic weapon, and recommended that the U.S. begin similar research; this eventually led to what would become the Manhattan Project. Einstein was in support of defending the Allied forces, but largely denounced using the new discovery of nuclear fission as a weapon. Later, together with Bertrand Russell, Einstein signed the Russell–Einstein Manifesto, which highlighted the danger of nuclear weapons. Einstein was affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, until his death in 1955.
Einstein published more than 300 scientific papers along with over 150 non-scientific works.[6][8] His great intelligence and originality have made the word "Einstein" synonymous with genius.[9]
Contents  [hide]
1 Biography
1.1 Early life and education
1.2 Marriages and children
1.3 Patent office
1.4 Academic career
1.5 Travels abroad
1.6 Emigration to U.S. in 1933
1.6.1 World War II and the Manhattan Project
1.6.2 U.S. citizenship
1.7 Death
2 Scientific career
2.1 1905 - Annus Mirabilis papers
2.2 Thermodynamic fluctuations and statistical physics
2.3 General principles
2.4 Theory of relativity and E = mc²
2.5 Photons and energy quanta
2.6 Quantized atomic vibrations
2.7 Adiabatic principle and action-angle variables
2.8 Wave–particle duality
2.9 Theory of critical opalescence
2.10 Zero-point energy
2.11 General relativity and the Equivalence Principle
2.12 Hole argument and Entwurf theory
2.13 Cosmology
2.14 Modern quantum theory
2.15 Bose–Einstein statistics
2.16 Energy momentum pseudotensor
2.17 Unified field theory
2.18 Wormholes
2.19 Einstein–Cartan theory
2.20 Equations of motion
2.21 Other investigations
2.22 Collaboration with other scientists
2.22.1 Einstein–de Haas experiment
2.22.2 Schrödinger gas model
2.22.3 Einstein refrigerator
2.23 Bohr versus Einstein
2.24 Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen paradox
3 Political and religious views
4 Love of music
5 Non-scientific legacy
6 In popular culture
7 Awards and honors
8 Publications
9 See also
10 Notes
11 References
12 Further reading
13 External links
Biography

Early life and education

Einstein at the age of three in 1882

Albert Einstein in 1893 (age 14)

Einstein's matriculation certificate at the age of 17, showing his final grades from the Aargau Kantonsschule (on a scale of 1-6).
Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, in the Kingdom of Württemberg in the German Empire on 14 March 1879.[10] His father was Hermann Einstein, a salesman and engineer. His mother was Pauline Einstein (née Koch). In 1880, the family moved to Munich, where his father and his uncle founded Elektrotechnische Fabrik J. Einstein & Cie, a company that manufactured electrical equipment based on direct current.[10]
The Einsteins were non-observant Jews. Albert attended a Catholic elementary school from the age of five for three years. Later, at the age of eight, Einstein was transferred to the Luitpold Gymnasium where he received advanced primary and secondary school education until he left Germany seven years later.[11] Although it has been thought that Einstein had early speech difficulties, this is disputed by the Albert Einstein Archives, and he excelled at the first school that he attended.[12] He was right handed;[12][13] there appears to be no evidence for the widespread popular belief[14] that he was left handed.
His father once showed him a pocket compass; Einstein realized that there must be something causing the needle to move, despite the apparent "empty space".[15] As he grew, Einstein built models and mechanical devices for fun and began to show a talent for mathematics.[10] When Einstein was ten years old, Max Talmud (later changed to Max Talmey), a poor Jewish medical student from Poland, was introduced to the Einstein family by his brother, and during weekly visits over the next five years, he gave the boy popular books on science, mathematical texts and philosophical writings. These included Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Euclid's Elements (which Einstein called the "holy little geometry book").[16][17][fn 1]
In 1894, his father's company failed: direct current (DC) lost the War of Currents to alternating current (AC). In search of business, the Einstein family moved to Italy, first to Milan and then, a few months later, to Pavia. When the family moved to Pavia, Einstein stayed in Munich to finish his studies at the Luitpold Gymnasium. His father intended for him to pursue electrical engineering, but Einstein clashed with authorities and resented the school's regimen and teaching method. He later wrote that the spirit of learning and creative thought were lost in strict rote learning. At the end of December 1894, he travelled to Italy to join his family in Pavia, convincing the school to let him go by using a doctor's note.[19] It was during his time in Italy that he wrote a short essay with the title "On the Investigation of the State of the Ether in a Magnetic Field."[20][21]
In late summer 1895, at the age of sixteen, Einstein sat the entrance examinations for the Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Zurich (later the Eidgenössische Polytechnische Schule). He failed to reach the required standard in several subjects, but obtained exceptional grades in physics and mathematics.[22] On the advice of the Principal of the Polytechnic, he attended the Aargau Cantonal School in Aarau, Switzerland, in 1895-96 to complete his secondary schooling. While lodging with the family of Professor Jost Winteler, he fell in love with Winteler's daughter, Marie. (His sister Maja later married the Wintelers' son, Paul.)[23] In January 1896, with his father's approval, he renounced his citizenship in the German Kingdom of Württemberg to avoid military service.[24] In September 1896, he passed the Swiss Matura with mostly good grades (including a top grade of 6 in physics and mathematical subjects, on a scale of 1-6),[25] and, though only seventeen, enrolled in the four-year mathematics and physics teaching diploma program at the ETH Zurich. Marie Winteler moved to Olsberg, Switzerland for a teaching post.
Einstein's future wife, Mileva Maric, also enrolled at the Polytechnic that same year, the only woman among the six students in the mathematics and physics section of the teaching diploma course. Over the next few years, Einstein and Maric's friendship developed into romance, and they read books together on extra-curricular physics in which Einstein was taking an increasing interest. In 1900, Einstein was awarded the Zurich Polytechnic teaching diploma, but Maric failed the examination with a poor grade in the mathematics component, theory of functions.[26] There have been claims that Maric collaborated with Einstein on his celebrated 1905 papers,[27][28] but historians of physics who have studied the issue find no evidence that she made any substantive contributions.[29][30][31][32]
Marriages and children
Main article: Einstein family
In early 1902, Einstein and Maric had a daughter they named Lieserl in their correspondence, who was born in Novi Sad where Maric's parents lived.[33] Her full name is not known, and her fate is uncertain after 1903.[34]
Einstein and Maric married in January 1903. In May 1904, the couple's first son, Hans Albert Einstein, was born in Bern, Switzerland. Their second son, Eduard, was born in Zurich in July 1910. In 1914, Einstein moved to Berlin, while his wife remained in Zurich with their sons. They divorced on 14 February 1919, having lived apart for five years.
Einstein married Elsa Löwenthal (née Einstein) on 2 June 1919, after having had a relationship with her since 1912. She was his first cousin maternally and his second cousin paternally. In 1933, they emigrated to the United States. In 1935, Elsa Einstein was diagnosed with heart and kidney problems and died in December 1936.[35]
Patent office

Left to right: Conrad Habicht, Maurice Solovine and Einstein, who founded the Olympia Academy

Einstein's home in Bern
After graduating, Einstein spent almost two frustrating years searching for a teaching post, but a former classmate's father helped him secure a job in Bern, at the Federal Office for Intellectual Property, the patent office, as an assistant examiner.[36] He evaluated patent applications for electromagnetic devices. In 1903, Einstein's position at the Swiss Patent Office became permanent, although he was passed over for promotion until he "fully mastered machine technology".[37]
Much of his work at the patent office related to questions about transmission of electric signals and electrical-mechanical synchronization of time, two technical problems that show up conspicuously in the thought experiments that eventually led Einstein to his radical conclusions about the nature of light and the fundamental connection between space and time.[38]
With a few friends he met in Bern, Einstein started a small discussion group, self-mockingly named "The Olympia Academy", which met regularly to discuss science and philosophy. Their readings included the works of Henri Poincaré, Ernst Mach, and David Hume, which influenced his scientific and philosophical outlook.
Academic career

Einstein's official 1921 portrait after receiving the Nobel Prize in Physics.
During 1901, the paper "Folgerungen aus den Kapillarität Erscheinungen" ("Conclusions from the Capillarity Phenomena") was published in the prestigious Annalen der Physik.[39] On 30 April 1905, Einstein completed his thesis, with Alfred Kleiner, Professor of Experimental Physics, serving as pro-forma advisor. Einstein was awarded a PhD by the University of Zurich. His dissertation was entitled "A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions".[40][41] That same year, which has been called Einstein's annus mirabilis (miracle year), he published four groundbreaking papers, on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity, and the equivalence of matter and energy, which were to bring him to the notice of the academic world.
By 1908, he was recognized as a leading scientist, and he was appointed lecturer at the University of Bern. The following year, he quit the patent office and the lectureship to take the position of physics docent [42] at the University of Zurich. He became a full professor at Karl-Ferdinand University in Prague in 1911. In 1914, he returned to Germany after being appointed director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics (1914–1932)[43] and a professor at the Humboldt University of Berlin, with a special clause in his contract that freed him from most teaching obligations. He became a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. In 1916, Einstein was appointed president of the German Physical Society (1916–1918).[44][45]
During 1911, he had calculated that, based on his new theory of general relativity, light from another star would be bent by the Sun's gravity. That prediction was claimed confirmed by observations made by a British expedition led by Sir Arthur Eddington during the solar eclipse of 29 May 1919. International media reports of this made Einstein world famous. On 7 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".[46] Much later, questions were raised whether the measurements had been accurate enough to support Einstein's theory. In 1980 historians John Earman and Clark Glymour published an analysis suggesting that Eddington had suppressed unfavorable results.[47] The two reviewers found possible flaws in Eddington's selection of data, but their doubts, although widely quoted and, indeed, now with a "mythical" status almost equivalent to the status of the original observations, have not been confirmed.[48][49] Eddington's selection from the data seems valid and his team indeed made astronomical measurements verifying the theory.[50]
In 1921, Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his explanation of the photoelectric effect, as relativity was considered still somewhat controversial. He also received the Copley Medal from the Royal Society in 1925.
Travels abroad
Einstein visited New York City for the first time on 2 April 1921, where he received an official welcome by the Mayor, followed by three weeks of lectures and receptions. He went on to deliver several lectures at Columbia University and Princeton University, and in Washington he accompanied representatives of the National Academy of Science on a visit to the White House. On his return to Europe he was the guest of the British statesman and philosopher Viscount Haldane in London, where he met several renowned scientific, intellectual and political figures, and delivered a lecture at Kings College.[51]
In 1922, he traveled throughout Asia and later to Palestine, as part of a six-month excursion and speaking tour. His travels included Singapore, Ceylon, and Japan, where he gave a series of lectures to thousands of Japanese. His first lecture in Tokyo lasted four hours, after which he met the emperor and empress at the Imperial Palace where thousands came to watch. Einstein later gave his impressions of the Japanese in a letter to his sons:[52]:307 "Of all the people I have met, I like the Japanese most, as they are modest, intelligent, considerate, and have a feel for art."[52]:308
On his return voyage, he also visited Palestine for 12 days in what would become his only visit to that region. "He was greeted with great British pomp, as if he were a head of state rather than a theoretical physicist", writes Isaacson. This included a cannon salute upon his arrival at the residence of the British high commissioner, Sir Herbert Samuel. During one reception given to him, the building was "stormed by throngs who wanted to hear him". In Einstein's talk to the audience, he expressed his happiness over the event:
I consider this the greatest day of my life. Before, I have always found something to regret in the Jewish soul, and that is the forgetfulness of its own people. Today, I have been made happy by the sight of the Jewish people learning to recognize themselves and to make themselves recognized as a force in the world.[53]:308
Emigration to U.S. in 1933

Cartoon of Einstein, who has shed his "Pacifism" wings, standing next to a pillar labeled "World Peace." He is rolling up his sleeves and holding a sword labeled "Preparedness" (circa 1933).
In February 1933 while on a visit to the United States, Einstein decided not to return to Germany due to the rise to power of the Nazis under Germany's new chancellor.[54][55] He visited American universities in early 1933 where he undertook his third two-month visiting professorship at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He and his wife Elsa returned by ship to Belgium at the end of March. During the voyage they were informed that their cottage was raided by the Nazis and his small recreational boat was confiscated. Upon landing in Antwerp on March 28th, he immediately went to the German consulate where he turned in his passport and formally renounced his German citizenship.[53]
In early April, he learned that the new German government had passed laws barring Jews from holding any official positions, including teaching at universities.[53] A month later, Einstein's works were among those targeted by Nazi book burnings, and Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels proclaimed, "Jewish intellectualism is dead."[53] Einstein also learned that his name was on a list of assassination targets, with a "$5,000 bounty on his head."[53] One German magazine included him in a list of enemies of the German regime with the phrase, "not yet hanged".[53]
He resided in Belgium for some months, before temporarily living in England.[56][57] In a letter to his friend, physicist Max Born, who also emigrated from Germany and lived in England, Einstein wrote, ". . . I must confess that the degree of their brutality and cowardice came as something of a surprise."[53]
In October 1933 he returned to the U.S. and took up a position at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey, that required his presence for six months each year.[58][59] He was still undecided on his future (he had offers from European universities, including Oxford), but in 1935 he arrived at the decision to remain permanently in the United States and apply for citizenship.[60][61] His affiliation with the Institute for Advance Studies would last until his death in 1955.[62] He was one of the four first selected (two of the others being John von Neumann and Kurt Gödel) at the new Institute, where he soon developed a close friendship with Gödel. The two would take long walks together discussing their work. His last assistant was Bruria Kaufman, who later became a renowned physicist. During this period, Einstein tried to develop a unified field theory and to refute the accepted interpretation of quantum physics, both unsuccessfully.
Other scientists also fled to America. Among them were Nobel laureates and professors of theoretical physics. With so many other Jewish scientists now forced by circumstances to live in America, often working side by side, Einstein wrote to a friend, "For me the most beautiful thing is to be in contact with a few fine Jews—a few millennia of a civilized past do mean something after all." In another letter he writes, "In my whole life I have never felt so Jewish as now."[53]

World War II and the Manhattan Project

Photograph of Albert Einstein (1947)
In 1939, a group of Hungarian scientists that included emigre physicist Leó Szilárd attempted to alert Washington of ongoing Nazi atomic bomb research. The group's warnings were discounted.[63] Einstein and Szilárd, along with other refugees such as Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner, "regarded it as their responsibility to alert Americans to the possibility that German scientists might win the race to build an atomic bomb, and to warn that Hitler would be more than willing to resort to such a weapon."[52]:630[64] In the summer of 1939, a few months before the beginning of World War II in Europe, Einstein was persuaded to lend his prestige by writing a letter with Szilárd to President Franklin D. Roosevelt to alert him of the possibility. The letter also recommended that the U.S. government pay attention to and become directly involved in uranium research and associated chain reaction research.
The letter is believed to be "arguably the key stimulus for the U.S. adoption of serious investigations into nuclear weapons on the eve of the U.S. entry into World War II".[65] President Roosevelt could not take the risk of allowing Hitler to possess atomic bombs first. As a result of Einstein's letter and his meetings with Roosevelt, the U.S. entered the "race" to develop the bomb, drawing on its "immense material, financial, and scientific resources" to initiate the Manhattan Project. It became the only country to successfully develop an atomic bomb during World War II.
For Einstein, "war was a disease . . . [and] he called for resistance to war." But in 1933, after Hitler assumed full power in Germany, "he renounced pacifism altogether . . . In fact, he urged the Western powers to prepare themselves against another German onslaught."[66]:110 In 1954, a year before his death, Einstein said to his old friend, Linus Pauling, "I made one great mistake in my life — when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be made; but there was some justification — the danger that the Germans would make them..."[67]
U.S. citizenship

Einstein accepting U.S. citizenship, 1940
Einstein became an American citizen in 1940. Not long after settling into his career at Princeton, he expressed his appreciation of the "meritocracy" in American culture when compared to Europe. According to Isaacson, he recognized the "right of individuals to say and think what they pleased", without social barriers, and as result, the individual was "encouraged" to be more creative, a trait he valued from his own early education. Einstein writes:
What makes the new arrival devoted to this country is the democratic trait among the people. No one humbles himself before another person or class. . . American youth has the good fortune not to have its outlook troubled by outworn traditions.[53]:432
As a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) at Princeton who campaigned for the civil rights of African Americans, Einstein corresponded with civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois, and in 1946 Einstein called racism America's "worst disease".[68] He later stated, "Race prejudice has unfortunately become an American tradition which is uncritically handed down from one generation to the next. The only remedies are enlightenment and education".[69]
After the death of Israel's first president, Chaim Weizmann, in November 1952, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion offered Einstein the position of President of Israel, a mostly ceremonial post.[70] The offer was presented by Israel's ambassador in Washington, Abba Eban, who explained that the offer "embodies the deepest respect which the Jewish people can repose in any of its sons".[52]:522 However, Einstein declined, and wrote in his response that he was "deeply moved", and "at once saddened and ashamed" that he could not accept it:
All my life I have dealt with objective matters, hence I lack both the natural aptitude and the experience to deal properly with people and to exercise official function. I am the more distressed over these circumstances because my relationship with the Jewish people became my strongest human tie once I achieved complete clarity about our precarious position among the nations of the world.[52]:522[70][71]
Death

The New York World-Telegram announces Einstein's death on 18 April 1955.
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.[72] 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.[73] 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."[74] He died in Princeton Hospital early the next morning at the age of 76, having continued to work until near the end.
During the autopsy, the pathologist of Princeton Hospital, Thomas Stoltz Harvey, removed Einstein's brain for preservation without the permission of his family, in the hope that the neuroscience of the future would be able to discover what made Einstein so intelligent.[75] Einstein's remains were cremated and his ashes were scattered at an undisclosed location.[76][77]
In his lecture at Einstein's memorial, nuclear physicist Robert Oppenheimer summarized his impression of him as a person: "He was almost wholly without sophistication and wholly without worldliness . . . There was always with him a wonderful purity at once childlike and profoundly stubborn."[66]
Scientific career

 

Albert Einstein in 1904

The photoelectric effect. Incoming photons on the left strike a metal plate (bottom), and eject electrons, depicted as flying off to the right.
Throughout his life, Einstein published hundreds of books and articles.[8][10] In addition to the work he did by himself he also collaborated with other scientists on additional projects including the Bose–Einstein statistics, the Einstein refrigerator and others.[78]
1905 - Annus Mirabilis papers
Main articles: Annus Mirabilis papers, Photoelectric effect, Special theory of relativity, and Mass–energy equivalence
The Annus Mirabilis papers are four articles pertaining to the photoelectric effect (which gave rise to quantum theory), Brownian motion, the special theory of relativity, and E = mc2 that Albert Einstein published in the Annalen der Physik scientific journal in 1905. These four works contributed substantially to the foundation of modern physics and changed views on space, time, and matter. The four papers are:
Title (translated) Area of focus Received Published Significance
On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light Photoelectric effect 18 March 9 June Resolved an unsolved puzzle by suggesting that energy is exchanged only in discrete amounts (quanta).[79] This idea was pivotal to the early development of quantum theory.[80]
On the Motion of Small Particles Suspended in a Stationary Liquid, as Required by the Molecular Kinetic Theory of Heat Brownian motion 11 May 18 July Explained empirical evidence for the atomic theory, supporting the application of statistical physics.
On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies Special relativity 30 June 26 September Reconciled Maxwell's equations for electricity and magnetism with the laws of mechanics by introducing major changes to mechanics close to the speed of light, resulting from analysis based on empirical evidence that the speed of light is independent of the motion of the observer.[81] Discredited the concept of a "luminiferous ether."[82]
Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content? Matter–energy equivalence 27 September 21 November Equivalence of matter and energy, E = mc2 (and by implication, the ability of gravity to "bend" light), the existence of "rest energy", and the basis of nuclear energy.
Thermodynamic fluctuations and statistical physics
Main articles: Statistical mechanics, thermal fluctuations, and statistical physics
Albert Einstein's first paper[83] submitted in 1900 to Annalen der Physik was on capillary attraction. It was published in 1901 with the title "Folgerungen aus den Kapillarität Erscheinungen," which translates as "Conclusions from the capillarity phenomena". Two papers he published in 1902–1903 (thermodynamics) attempted to interpret atomic phenomena from a statistical point of view. These papers were the foundation for the 1905 paper on Brownian motion, which showed that Brownian movement can be construed as firm evidence that molecules exist. His research in 1903 and 1904 was mainly concerned with the effect of finite atomic size on diffusion phenomena.[83]
General principles
He articulated the principle of relativity. This was understood by Hermann Minkowski to be a generalization of rotational invariance from space to space-time. Other principles postulated by Einstein and later vindicated are the principle of equivalence and the principle of adiabatic invariance of the quantum number.
Theory of relativity and E = mc²
Main article: History of special relativity
Einstein's "Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper" ("On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies") was received on 30 June 1905 and published 26 September of that same year. It reconciles Maxwell's equations for electricity and magnetism with the laws of mechanics, by introducing major changes to mechanics close to the speed of light. This later became known as Einstein's special theory of relativity.
Consequences of this include the time-space frame of a moving body appearing to slow down and contract (in the direction of motion) when measured in the frame of the observer. This paper also argued that the idea of a luminiferous aether – one of the leading theoretical entities in physics at the time – was superfluous.[84]
In his paper on mass–energy equivalence Einstein produced E = mc2 from his special relativity equations.[85] Einstein's 1905 work on relativity remained controversial for many years, but was accepted by leading physicists, starting with Max Planck.[86][87]
Photons and energy quanta
Main articles: Photon and Quantum
In a 1905 paper,[88] Einstein postulated that light itself consists of localized particles (quanta). Einstein's light quanta were nearly universally rejected by all physicists, including Max Planck and Niels Bohr. This idea only became universally accepted in 1919, with Robert Millikan's detailed experiments on the photoelectric effect, and with the measurement of Compton scattering.
Einstein concluded that each wave of frequency f is associated with a collection of photons with energy hf each, where h is Planck's constant. He does not say much more, because he is not sure how the particles are related to the wave. But he does suggest that this idea would explain certain experimental results, notably the photoelectric effect.[89]
Quantized atomic vibrations
Main article: Einstein solid
In 1907 Einstein proposed a model of matter where each atom in a lattice structure is an independent harmonic oscillator. In the Einstein model, each atom oscillates independently – a series of equally spaced quantized states for each oscillator. Einstein was aware that getting the frequency of the actual oscillations would be different, but he nevertheless proposed this theory because it was a particularly clear demonstration that quantum mechanics could solve the specific heat problem in classical mechanics. Peter Debye refined this model.[90]
Adiabatic principle and action-angle variables
Main article: Old quantum theory
Throughout the 1910s, quantum mechanics expanded in scope to cover many different systems. After Ernest Rutherford discovered the nucleus and proposed that electrons orbit like planets, Niels Bohr was able to show that the same quantum mechanical postulates introduced by Planck and developed by Einstein would explain the discrete motion of electrons in atoms, and the periodic table of the elements.
Einstein contributed to these developments by linking them with the 1898 arguments Wilhelm Wien had made. Wien had shown that the hypothesis of adiabatic invariance of a thermal equilibrium state allows all the blackbody curves at different temperature to be derived from one another by a simple shifting process. Einstein noted in 1911 that the same adiabatic principle shows that the quantity which is quantized in any mechanical motion must be an adiabatic invariant. Arnold Sommerfeld identified this adiabatic invariant as the action variable of classical mechanics. The law that the action variable is quantized was a basic principle of the quantum theory as it was known between 1900 and 1925.[citation needed]
Wave–particle duality

Einstein during his visit to the United States
Main article: Wave–particle duality
Although the patent office promoted Einstein to Technical Examiner Second Class in 1906, he had not given up on academia. In 1908, he became a privatdozent at the University of Bern.[91] In "über die Entwicklung unserer Anschauungen über das Wesen und die Konstitution der Strahlung" ("The Development of Our Views on the Composition and Essence of Radiation"), on the quantization of light, and in an earlier 1909 paper, Einstein showed that Max Planck's energy quanta must have well-defined momenta and act in some respects as independent, point-like particles. This paper introduced the photon concept (although the name photon was introduced later by Gilbert N. Lewis in 1926) and inspired the notion of wave–particle duality in quantum mechanics.
Theory of critical opalescence
Main article: Critical opalescence
Einstein returned to the problem of thermodynamic fluctuations, giving a treatment of the density variations in a fluid at its critical point. Ordinarily the density fluctuations are controlled by the second derivative of the free energy with respect to the density. At the critical point, this derivative is zero, leading to large fluctuations. The effect of density fluctuations is that light of all wavelengths is scattered, making the fluid look milky white. Einstein relates this to Raleigh scattering, which is what happens when the fluctuation size is much smaller than the wavelength, and which explains why the sky is blue.[92] Einstein quantitatively derived critical opalescence from a treatment of density fluctuations, and demonstrated how both the effect and Rayleigh scattering originate from the atomistic constitution of matter.
Zero-point energy
Main article: Zero-point energy
Einstein's physical intuition led him to note that Planck's oscillator energies had an incorrect zero point. He modified Planck's hypothesis by stating that the lowest energy state of an oscillator is equal to 1/2hf, to half the energy spacing between levels. This argument, which was made in 1913 in collaboration with Otto Stern, was based on the thermodynamics of a diatomic molecule which can split apart into two free atoms.
General relativity and the Equivalence Principle
Main article: History of general relativity
See also: Principle of equivalence, Theory of relativity, and Einstein field equations

Eddington's photograph of a solar eclipse.
General relativity (GR) is a theory of gravitation that was developed by Albert Einstein between 1907 and 1915. According to general relativity, the observed gravitational attraction between masses results from the warping of space and time 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 Albert 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.[93] So in 1908 he published an article on acceleration under special relativity. In that article, he argued that free fall is really inertial motion, and that for a freefalling observer the rules of special relativity must apply. This argument is called the Equivalence principle. In the same article, Einstein also predicted the phenomenon of gravitational time dilation. In 1911, Einstein published another article expanding on the 1907 article, in which additional effects such as the deflection of light by massive bodies were predicted.
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.
In June, 1913 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, after more than two years of intensive work Einstein abandoned the theory in November, 1915 after realizing that the hole argument was mistaken.[94]
Cosmology
Main article: Cosmology
In 1917, Einstein applied the General theory of relativity to model the structure of the universe as a whole. He wanted the universe to be eternal and unchanging, but this type of universe is not consistent with relativity. To fix this, Einstein modified the general theory by introducing a new notion, the cosmological constant. With a positive cosmological constant, the universe could be an eternal static sphere.[95]

Einstein in his office at the University of Berlin.
Einstein believed a spherical static universe is philosophically preferred, because it would obey Mach's principle. He had shown that general relativity incorporates Mach's principle to a certain extent in frame dragging by gravitomagnetic fields, but he knew that Mach's idea would not work if space goes on forever. In a closed universe, he believed that Mach's principle would hold. Mach's principle has generated much controversy over the years.
Modern quantum theory
Main article: Schrödinger equation
Einstein was displeased with quantum theory and mechanics, despite its acceptance by other physicists, stating "God doesn't play with dice." As Einstein passed away at the age of 76 he still would not accept quantum theory.[96] In 1917, at the height of his work on relativity, Einstein published an article in Physikalische Zeitschrift that proposed the possibility of stimulated emission, the physical process that makes possible the maser and the laser.[97] This article showed that the statistics of absorption and emission of light would only be consistent with Planck's distribution law if the emission of light into a mode with n photons would be enhanced statistically compared to the emission of light into an empty mode. This paper was enormously influential in the later development of quantum mechanics, because it was the first paper to show that the statistics of atomic transitions had simple laws. Einstein discovered Louis de Broglie's work, and supported his ideas, which were received skeptically at first. In another major paper from this era, Einstein gave a wave equation for de Broglie waves, which Einstein suggested was the Hamilton–Jacobi equation of mechanics. This paper would inspire Schrödinger's work of 1926.
Bose–Einstein statistics
Main article: Bose–Einstein condensation
In 1924, Einstein received a description of a statistical model from Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose, based on a counting method that assumed that light could be understood as a gas of indistinguishable particles. Einstein noted that Bose's statistics applied to some atoms as well as to the proposed light particles, and submitted his translation of Bose's paper to the Zeitschrift für Physik. Einstein also published his own articles describing the model and its implications, among them the Bose–Einstein condensate phenomenon that some particulates should appear at very low temperatures.[98] It was not until 1995 that the first such condensate was produced experimentally by Eric Allin Cornell and Carl Wieman using ultra-cooling equipment built at the NIST–JILA laboratory at the University of Colorado at Boulder.[99] Bose–Einstein statistics are now used to describe the behaviors of any assembly of bosons. Einstein's sketches for this project may be seen in the Einstein Archive in the library of the Leiden University.[78]
Energy momentum pseudotensor
Main article: Stress-energy-momentum pseudotensor
General relativity includes a dynamical spacetime, so it is difficult to see how to identify the conserved energy and momentum. Noether's theorem allows these quantities to be determined from a Lagrangian with translation invariance, but general covariance makes translation invariance into something of a gauge symmetry. The energy and momentum derived within general relativity by Noether's presecriptions do not make a real tensor for this reason.
Einstein argued that this is true for fundamental reasons, because the gravitational field could be made to vanish by a choice of coordinates. He maintained that the non-covariant energy momentum pseudotensor was in fact the best description of the energy momentum distribution in a gravitational field. This approach has been echoed by Lev Landau and Evgeny Lifshitz, and others, and has become standard.
The use of non-covariant objects like pseudotensors was heavily criticized in 1917 by Erwin Schrödinger and others.
Unified field theory
Main article: Classical unified field theories
Following his research on general relativity, Einstein entered into a series of attempts to generalize his geometric theory of gravitation to include electromagnetism as another aspect of a single entity. In 1950, he described his "unified field theory" in a Scientific American article entitled "On the Generalized Theory of Gravitation".[100] Although he continued to be lauded for his work, Einstein became increasingly isolated in his research, and his efforts were ultimately unsuccessful. In his pursuit of a unification of the fundamental forces, Einstein ignored some mainstream developments in physics, most notably the strong and weak nuclear forces, which were not well understood until many years after his death. Mainstream physics, in turn, largely ignored Einstein's approaches to unification. Einstein's dream of unifying other laws of physics with gravity motivates modern quests for a theory of everything and in particular string theory, where geometrical fields emerge in a unified quantum-mechanical setting.
Wormholes
Main article: Wormhole
Einstein collaborated with others to produce a model of a wormhole. His motivation was to model elementary particles with charge as a solution of gravitational field equations, in line with the program outlined in the paper "Do Gravitational Fields play an Important Role in the Constitution of the Elementary Particles?". These solutions cut and pasted Schwarzschild black holes to make a bridge between two patches.
If one end of a wormhole was positively charged, the other end would be negatively charged. These properties led Einstein to believe that pairs of particles and antiparticles could be described in this way.
Einstein–Cartan theory
Main article: Einstein–Cartan theory
In order to incorporate spinning point particles into general relativity, the affine connection needed to be generalized to include an antisymmetric part, called the torsion. This modification was made by Einstein and Cartan in the 1920s.
Equations of motion
Main article: Einstein–Infeld–Hoffmann equations
The theory of general relativity has a fundamental law  – the Einstein equations which describe how space curves, the geodesic equation which describes how particles move may be derived from the Einstein equations.
Since the equations of general relativity are non-linear, a lump of energy made out of pure gravitational fields, like a black hole, would move on a trajectory which is determined by the Einstein equations themselves, not by a new law. So Einstein proposed that the path of a singular solution, like a black hole, would be determined to be a geodesic from general relativity itself.
This was established by Einstein, Infeld, and Hoffmann for pointlike objects without angular momentum, and by Roy Kerr for spinning objects.
Other investigations
Main article: Einstein's unsuccessful investigations
Einstein conducted other investigations that were unsuccessful and abandoned. These pertain to force, superconductivity, gravitational waves, and other research. Please see the main article for details.
Collaboration with other scientists

The 1927 Solvay Conference in Brussels, a gathering of the world's top physicists. Einstein in the center.
In addition to long time collaborators Leopold Infeld, Nathan Rosen, Peter Bergmann and others, Einstein also had some one-shot collaborations with various scientists.
Einstein–de Haas experiment
Main article: Einstein–de Haas effect
Einstein and De Haas demonstrated that magnetization is due to the motion of electrons, nowadays known to be the spin. In order to show this, they reversed the magnetization in an iron bar suspended on a torsion pendulum. They confirmed that this leads the bar to rotate, because the electron's angular momentum changes as the magnetization changes. This experiment needed to be sensitive, because the angular momentum associated with electrons is small, but it definitively established that electron motion of some kind is responsible for magnetization.
Schrödinger gas model
Einstein suggested to Erwin Schrödinger that he might be able to reproduce the statistics of a Bose–Einstein gas by considering a box. Then to each possible quantum motion of a particle in a box associate an independent harmonic oscillator. Quantizing these oscillators, each level will have an integer occupation number, which will be the number of particles in it.
This formulation is a form of second quantization, but it predates modern quantum mechanics. Erwin Schrödinger applied this to derive the thermodynamic properties of a semiclassical ideal gas. Schrödinger urged Einstein to add his name as co-author, although Einstein declined the invitation.[101]
Einstein refrigerator
Main article: Einstein refrigerator
In 1926, Einstein and his former student Leó Szilárd co-invented (and in 1930, patented) the Einstein refrigerator. This absorption refrigerator was then revolutionary for having no moving parts and using only heat as an input.[102] On 11 November 1930, U.S. Patent 1,781,541 was awarded to Albert Einstein and Leó Szilárd for the refrigerator. Their invention was not immediately put into commercial production, as the most promising of their patents were quickly bought up by the Swedish company Electrolux to protect its refrigeration technology from competition.[103]
Bohr versus Einstein
Main article: Bohr–Einstein debates

Einstein and Niels Bohr, 1925
The Bohr–Einstein debates were a series of public disputes about quantum mechanics between Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr who were two of its founders. Their debates are remembered because of their importance to the philosophy of science.[104][105][106]
Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen paradox
Main article: EPR paradox
In 1935, Einstein returned to the question of quantum mechanics. He considered how a measurement on one of two entangled particles would affect the other. He noted, along with his collaborators, that by performing different measurements on the distant particle, either of position or momentum, different properties of the entangled partner could be discovered without disturbing it in any way.
He then used a hypothesis of local realism to conclude that the other particle had these properties already determined. The principle he proposed is that if it is possible to determine what the answer to a position or momentum measurement would be, without in any way disturbing the particle, then the particle actually has values of position or momentum.
This principle distilled the essence of Einstein's objection to quantum mechanics. As a physical principle, it was shown to be incorrect when the Aspect experiment of 1982 confirmed Bell's theorem, which had been promulgated in 1964.
Political and religious views

Main articles: Albert Einstein's political views and Albert Einstein's religious views

Albert Einstein, seen here with his wife Elsa Einstein and Zionist leaders, including future President of Israel Chaim Weizmann, his wife Dr. Vera Weizmann, Menahem Ussishkin, and Ben-Zion Mossinson on arrival in New York City in 1921.
Albert Einstein's political view was in favor of socialism[107][108]; his political views emerged publicly in the middle of the 20th century due to his fame and reputation for genius. Einstein offered to and was called on to give judgments and opinions on matters often unrelated to theoretical physics or mathematics.[109]
Einstein's views about religious belief have been collected from interviews and original writings. These views covered Judaism, theological determinism, agnosticism, and humanism. He also wrote much about ethical culture, opting for Spinoza's god over belief in a personal god.[110]
Love of music

Einstein developed an appreciation of music at an early age. His mother played the piano reasonably well and wanted her son to learn the violin, not only to instill in him a love of music but also to help him assimilate German culture. According to conductor Leon Botstein, Einstein is said to have begun playing when he was five, but did not enjoy it at that age.[111]
When he turned thirteen, however, he discovered the violin sonatas of Mozart. "Einstein fell in love" with Mozart's music, notes Botstein, and learned to play music more willingly. According to Einstein, he taught himself to play by "ever practicing systematically," adding that "Love is a better teacher than a sense of duty."[111] At age seventeen, he was heard by a school examiner in Aarau as he played Beethoven's violin sonatas, the examiner stating afterward that his playing was "remarkable and revealing of 'great insight.'" What struck the examiner, writes Botstein, was that Einstein "displayed a deep love of the music, a quality that was and remains in short supply. Music possessed an unusual meaning for this student."[111]
Botstein notes that music assumed a pivotal and permanent role in Einstein's life from that period on. Although the idea of becoming a professional himself was not on his mind at any time, among those with whom Einstein played chamber music were a few professionals, and he performed for private audiences and friends. Chamber music also became a regular part of his social life while living in Bern, Zurich, and Berlin, where he played with Max Planck and his son, among others. In 1931, while engaged in research at California Institute of Technology, he visited the Zoellner family conservatory in Los Angeles and played some of Beethoven and Mozart's works with members of the Zoellner Quartet, recently retired from two decades of acclaimed touring all across the United States; Einstein later presented the family patriarch with an autographed photograph as a memento.[112][113] Near the end of his life, when the young Juilliard Quartet visited him in Princeton, he played his violin with them; although they slowed the tempo to accommodate his lesser technical abilities, Botstein notes the quartet was "impressed by Einstein's level of coordination and intonation."[111]
Non-scientific legacy

While travelling, Einstein wrote daily to his wife Elsa and adopted stepdaughters Margot and Ilse. The letters were included in the papers bequeathed to The Hebrew University. Margot Einstein permitted the personal letters to be made available to the public, but requested that it not be done until twenty years after her death (she died in 1986[114]). Barbara Wolff, of The Hebrew University's Albert Einstein Archives, told the BBC that there are about 3,500 pages of private correspondence written between 1912 and 1955.[115]
Einstein bequeathed the royalties from use of his image to The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Corbis, successor to The Roger Richman Agency, licenses the use of his name and associated imagery, as agent for the university.[116]
In popular culture

Main article: Albert Einstein in popular culture
In the period before World War II, Einstein was so well known in America that he would be stopped on the street by people wanting him to explain "that theory". He finally figured out a way to handle the incessant inquiries. He told his inquirers "Pardon me, sorry! Always I am mistaken for Professor Einstein."[117]
Einstein has been the subject of or inspiration for many novels, films, plays, and works of music.[118] He is a favorite model for depictions of mad scientists and absent-minded professors; his expressive face and distinctive hairstyle have been widely copied and exaggerated. Time magazine's Frederic Golden wrote that Einstein was "a cartoonist's dream come true".[119]
Awards and honors

Main article: Einstein's awards and honors
Einstein received numerous awards and honors, including the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Publications

The following publications by Albert Einstein are referenced in this article. A more complete list of his publications may be found at List of scientific publications by Albert Einstein.
Einstein, Albert (1901), "Folgerungen aus den Capillaritätserscheinungen (Conclusions Drawn from the Phenomena of Capillarity)", Annalen der Physik 4 (3): 513, Bibcode 1901AnP...309..513E, doi:10.1002/andp.19013090306
Einstein, Albert (1905a), "Über einen die Erzeugung und Verwandlung des Lichtes betreffenden heuristischen Gesichtspunkt (On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light)", Annalen der Physik 17 (6): 132–148, Bibcode 1905AnP...322..132E, doi:10.1002/andp.19053220607 This annus mirabilis paper on the photoelectric effect was received by Annalen der Physik 18 March.
Einstein, Albert (1905b), A new determination of molecular dimensions. This PhD thesis was completed 30 April and submitted 20 July.
Einstein, Albert (1905c), "On the Motion – Required by the Molecular Kinetic Theory of Heat – of Small Particles Suspended in a Stationary Liquid", Annalen der Physik 17 (8): 549–560, Bibcode 1905AnP...322..549E, doi:10.1002/andp.19053220806. This annus mirabilis paper on Brownian motion was received 11 May.
Einstein, Albert (1905d), "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies", Annalen der Physik 17 (10): 891–921, Bibcode 1905AnP...322..891E, doi:10.1002/andp.19053221004. This annus mirabilis paper on special relativity was received 30 June.
Einstein, Albert (1905e), "Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?", Annalen der Physik 18 (13): 639–641, Bibcode 1905AnP...323..639E, doi:10.1002/andp.19053231314. This annus mirabilis paper on mass-energy equivalence was received 27 September.
Einstein, Albert (1915), "Die Feldgleichungen der Gravitation (The Field Equations of Gravitation)", Königlich Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften: 844–847
Einstein, Albert (1917a), "Kosmologische Betrachtungen zur allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie (Cosmological Considerations in the General Theory of Relativity)", Königlich Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften
Einstein, Albert (1917b), "Zur Quantentheorie der Strahlung (On the Quantum Mechanics of Radiation)", Physikalische Zeitschrift 18: 121–128, Bibcode 1917PhyZ...18..121E
Einstein, Albert (11 July 1923), "Fundamental Ideas and Problems of the Theory of Relativity", Nobel Lectures, Physics 1901–1921, Amsterdam: Elsevier Publishing Company, archived from the original on 10 February 2007, retrieved 25 March 2007
Einstein, Albert (1924), "Quantentheorie des einatomigen idealen Gases (Quantum theory of monatomic ideal gases)", Sitzungsberichte der Preussichen Akademie der Wissenschaften Physikalisch-Mathematische Klasse: 261–267. First of a series of papers on this topic.
Einstein, Albert (1926), "Die Ursache der Mäanderbildung der Flussläufe und des sogenannten Baerschen Gesetzes", Die Naturwissenschaften 14 (11): 223–224, Bibcode 1926NW.....14..223E, doi:10.1007/BF01510300. On Baer's law and meanders in the courses of rivers.
Einstein, Albert; Podolsky, Boris; Rosen, Nathan (15 May 1935), "Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?", Physical Review 47 (10): 777–780, Bibcode 1935PhRv...47..777E, doi:10.1103/PhysRev.47.777
Einstein, Albert (1940), "On Science and Religion", Nature (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic) 146 (3706): 605, Bibcode 1940Natur.146..605E, doi:10.1038/146605a0, ISBN 0-7073-0453-9
Einstein, Albert et al. (4 December 1948), "To the editors", New York Times (Melville, NY: AIP, American Inst. of Physics), ISBN 0-7354-0359-7
Einstein, Albert (May 1949), "Why Socialism?", Monthly Review, archived from the original on 11 January 2006, retrieved 16 January 2006
Einstein, Albert (1950), "On the Generalized Theory of Gravitation", Scientific American CLXXXII (4): 13–17
Einstein, Albert (1954), Ideas and Opinions, New York: Random House, ISBN 0-517-00393-7
Einstein, Albert (1969) (in German), Albert Einstein, Hedwig und Max Born: Briefwechsel 1916–1955, Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, ISBN 3-88682-005-X
Einstein, Albert (1979), Autobiographical Notes, Paul Arthur Schilpp (Centennial ed.), Chicago: Open Court, ISBN 0-87548-352-6. The chasing a light beam thought experiment is described on pages 48–51.
Collected Papers: Stachel, John, Martin J. Klein, a. J. Kox, Michel Janssen, R. Schulmann, Diana Komos Buchwald and others (Eds.) (1987–2006), The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Vol. 1–10, Princeton University Press Further information about the volumes published so far can be found on the webpages of the Einstein Papers Project and on the Princeton University Press Einstein Page
See also

 Biography portal
 Physics portal
 Science portal
 Book: Albert Einstein
Wikipedia books are collections of articles that can be downloaded or ordered in print.
The Einstein Theory of Relativity (educational film about the theory of relativity)
German inventors and discoverers
Heinrich Burkhardt
Hermann Einstein
Historical Museum of Bern (Einstein museum)
History of gravitational theory
Introduction to special relativity
List of coupled cousins
Relativity priority dispute
Sticky bead argument
Summation convention
List of Jewish Nobel laureates
Notes

^ "Albert's intellectual growth was strongly fostered at home. His mother, a talented pianist, ensured the children's musical education. His father regularly read Schiller and Heine aloud to the family. Uncle Jakob challenged Albert with mathematical problems, which he solved with 'a deep feeling of happiness'." More significant were the weekly visits of Max Talmud from 1889 through 1894 during which time he introduced the boy to popular scientific texts that brought to an end a short-lived religious phase, convincing him that 'a lot in the Bible stories could not be true'. A textbook of plane geometry that he quickly worked through led on to an avid self-study of mathematics, several years ahead of the school curriculum. [18]
References

^ "Mohammad Raziuddin Siddiqui". Ias.ac.in. 2 January 1998. Archived from the original on 1 June 2004. Retrieved 3 April 2011.
^ Zahar, Élie (2001), Poincaré's Philosophy. From Conventionalism to Phenomenology, Carus Publishing Company, Chapter 2, p.41, ISBN 0-8126-9435-X.
^ Whittaker, E. (1955). "Albert Einstein. 1879-1955". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 1: 37–67. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1955.0005. JSTOR 769242. edit
^ David Bodanis, E = mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation (New York: Walker, 2000).
^ "The Nobel Prize in Physics 1921". Nobel Foundation. Archived from the original on 5 October 2008. Retrieved 6 March 2007.
^ a b "Scientific Background on the Nobel Prize in Physics 2011. The accelerating universe." (page 2) Nobelprize.org.
^ Hans-Josef, Küpper (2000). "Various things about Albert Einstein". einstein-website.de. Retrieved 18 July 2009.
^ a b Paul Arthur Schilpp, editor (1951), Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, Volume II, New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers (Harper Torchbook edition), pp. 730–746His non-scientific works include: About Zionism: Speeches and Lectures by Professor Albert Einstein (1930), "Why War?" (1933, co-authored by Sigmund Freud), The World As I See It (1934), Out of My Later Years (1950), and a book on science for the general reader, The Evolution of Physics (1938, co-authored by Leopold Infeld).
^ WordNet for Einstein.
^ a b c d "Albert Einstein – Biography". Nobel Foundation. Archived from the original on 6 March 2007. Retrieved 7 March 2007.
^ John J. Stachel (2002), Einstein from "B" to "Z", Springer, pp. 59–61, ISBN 978-0-8176-4143-6, retrieved 20 February 2011
^ a b "The Legend of the Dull-Witted Child Who Grew Up to Be a Genius". Albert Einstein archives. Retrieved 23 July 2012.
^ "Frequently asked questions". einstein-website.de. Retrieved 23 July 2012.
^ "Left Handed Einstein". Being Left Handed.com. Retrieved 23 July 2012.
^ Schilpp (Ed.), P. A. (1979), Albert Einstein – Autobiographical Notes, Open Court Publishing Company, pp. 8–9
^ M. Talmey, The Relativity Theory Simplified and the Formative Period of its Inventor. Falcon Press, 1932, pp. 161–164.
^ Dudley Herschbach, "Einstein as a Student", Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA, pp. 4–5, web: HarvardChem-Einstein-PDF
^ Einstein as a Student, pp. 3–5.
^ A. Fölsing, Albert Einstein, 1997, pp. 30-31.
^ Albert Einstein Collected Papers, vol. 1 (1987), doc. 5.
^ Mehra, Jagdish (2001), "Albert Einstein's first paper", The Golden Age of Physics, World Scientific, ISBN 981-02-4985-3
^ A. Fölsing, Albert Einstein, 1997, pp. 36-37.
^ Highfield & Carter (1993, pp. 21,31,56–57)
^ A. Fölsing, Albert Einstein, 1997, p. 40.
^ Collected Papers, vol. 1, docs. 21-27.
^ Albert Einstein Collected Papers, vol. 1, 1987, doc. 67.
^ Troemel-Ploetz, D., "Mileva Einstein-Maric: The Woman Who Did Einstein's Mathematics", Women's Studies Int. Forum, vol. 13, no. 5, pp. 415–432, 1990.
^ Walker, Evan Harris (February 1989) (PDF), Did Einstein Espouse his Spouse's Ideas?, Physics Today, retrieved 2012-07-24.
^ Pais, A., Einstein Lived Here, Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. 1–29.
^ Holton, G., Einstein, History, and Other Passions, Harvard University Press, 1996, pp. 177–193.
^ Stachel, J., Einstein from B to Z, Birkhäuser, 2002, pp. 26–38; 39–55. philoscience.unibe.ch
^ Martinez, A. A., "Handling evidence in history: the case of Einstein's Wife." School Science Review, 86 (316), March 2005, pp. 49–56. PDF
^ This conclusion is from Einstein's correspondence with Maric. Lieserl is first mentioned in a letter from Einstein to Maric (who was staying with her family in or near Novi Sad at the time of Lieserl's birth) dated 4 February 1902 (Collected papers Vol. 1, document 134).
^ Albrecht Fölsing (1998). Albert Einstein: A Biography. Penguin Group. ISBN 0-14-023719-4; see section I, II,
^ Highfield & Carter 1993, p. 216
^ Now the Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property, retrieved 16 October 2006. See also their FAQ about Einstein and the Institute
^ Peter Galison, "Einstein's Clocks: The Question of Time" Critical Inquiry 26, no. 2 (Winter 2000): 355–389.
^ Peter Galison, "Einstein's Clocks: The Question of Time" Critical Inquiry 26, no. 2 (Winter 2000).
^ Galison, Peter (2003), Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps: Empires of Time, New York: W.W. Norton, ISBN 0-393-02001-0
^ (Einstein 1905b)
^ "Eine Neue Bestimmung der Moleküldimensionen". ETH Zürich. 1905. Retrieved 26 September 2011.
^ "Universität Zürich: Geschichte". Uzh.ch. 2 December 2010. Retrieved 3 April 2011.
^ Kant, Horst. "Albert Einstein and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin". in Renn, Jürgen. "Albert Einstein – Chief Engineer of the Universe: One Hundred Authors for Einstein." Ed. Renn, Jürgen. Wiley-VCH. 2005. pp. 166–169. ISBN 3-527-40574-7
^ Calaprice, Alice; Lipscombe, Trevor (2005), Albert Einstein: a biography, Greenwood Publishing Group, p. xix, ISBN 0-313-33080-8, Timeline, p. xix
^ Heilbron, 2000, p. 84.
^ Andrzej, Stasiak (2003), "Myths in science", EMBO Reports 4 (3): 236, doi:10.1038/sj.embor.embor779, retrieved 31 March 2007
^ Earman, John; Glymour, Clark (1980). "Relativity and Eclipses: The British Eclipse Expeditions of 1919 and Their Predecessors". Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press) 11 (1): 49–85. ISSN 0890-9997.
^ Minkel, J. R. (6 March 2008). "Did Researchers Cook Data from the First Test of General Relativity?". Scientific American (New York: Nature Publishing).
^ Harper, William (1998). "Isaac Newton on Empirical Success and Scientific Method". In Earman, John; Norton, John. The Cosmos of Science: Essays of Exploration. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh. p. 81. ISBN 978-0-8229-3930-6. "It is not at all obvious that…the Glymour-Earman criticisms are accurate reflections of the evidential implications of the data."
^ Kennefick, Daniel (March 2009). "Testing relativity from the 1919 eclipse— a question of bias". Physics Today (College Park, MD: American Institute of Physics): 37–42. ISSN 0031-9228.
^ Hoffman and Dukas (1972), pp. 145–148; Fölsing (1997), pp. 499–508.
^ a b c d e Isaacson, Walter. Einstein: His Life and Universe, Simon & Schuster (2007)
^ a b c d e f g h i Isaacson, Walter. Einstein: His Life and Universe, Simon & Schuster (2007) pp. 407–410
^ Fölsing (1997), p. 659.
^ Isaacson (2007), p. 404.
^ Hoffman, B. (1972), pp. 165–171
^ Fölsing, A. (1997), pp. 666–677.
^ Clark (1971), p. 619.
^ Fölsing (1997), pp. 649, 678.
^ Clark (1971), p.642.
^ Fölsing (1997), pp. 686-687.
^ "In Brief". Institute for Advanced Study. Archived from the original on 29 March 2010. Retrieved 4 March 2010.
^ Evans-Pritchard, Ambrose (29 August 2010). "Obama could kill fossil fuels overnight with a nuclear dash for thorium". The Daily Telegraph (London).
^ Gosling, F.G. The Manhattan Project: Making the Atomic Bomb, U.S. Department of Energy, History Division (January, 1999) p. vii
^ Diehl, Sarah J.; Moltz, James Clay. Nuclear Weapons and Nonproliferation: a Reference Handbook, ABC-CLIO (2008) p. 218
^ a b Stern, Fritz. Essay, "Einstein's Germany", E = Einstein: His Life, His Thought, and His Influence on Our Culture, Sterling Publishing (2006) pp. 97–118
^ Einstein: The Life and Times by Ronald Clark. page 752
^ Fred Jerome, Rodger Taylor (2006) Einstein on Race and Racism Rutgers University Press, 2006.
^ Calaprice, Alice (2005) The new quotable Einstein. pp.148–149 Princeton University Press, 2005. See also Odyssey in Climate Modeling, Global Warming, and Advising Five Presidents
^ a b "ISRAEL: Einstein Declines". Time magazine. 1 December 1952. Retrieved 31 March 2010.
^ "Einstein in Princeton / Scientist, Humanitarian, Cultural Icon". Historical Society of Princeton. Archived from the original on 27 April 2010. Retrieved 31 March 2010.
^ The Case of the Scientist with a Pulsating Mass, 14 June 2002, retrieved 11 June 2007
^ Albert Einstein Archives (April 1955), "Draft of projected Telecast Israel Independence Day, April 1955 (last statement ever written)", Einstein Archives Online, archived from the original on 13 March 2007, retrieved 14 March 2007
^ Cohen, J.R.; Graver, L.M. (November 1995), "The ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm of Albert Einstein", Surgery, Gynecology & Obstetrics 170 (5): 455–8, PMID 2183375.
^ The Long, Strange Journey of Einstein's Brain, National Public Radio, retrieved 3 October 2007
^ O'Connor, J.J.; Robertson, E.F. (1997), "Albert Einstein", The MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St. Andrews
^ "Dr. Albert Einstein Dies in Sleep at 76. World Mourns Loss of Great Scientist", New York Times, 19 April 1955, "Princeton, New Jersey, 18 April 1955. Dr. Albert Einstein, one of the great thinkers of the ages, died in his sleep here early today."
^ a b "Einstein archive at the Instituut-Lorentz". Instituut-Lorentz. 2005. Retrieved on 21 November 2005.
^ Das, Ashok (2003). Lectures on quantum mechanics. Hindustan Book Agency. p. 59. ISBN 81-85931-41-0.
^ Spielberg, Nathan; Anderson, Bryon D. (1995). Seven ideas that shook the universe (2nd ed.). John Wiley & Sons. p. 263. ISBN 0-471-30606-1.
^ Major, Fouad G. (2007). The quantum beat: principles and applications of atomic clocks (2nd ed.). Springer. p. 142. ISBN 0-387-69533-8.
^ Lindsay, Robert Bruce; Margenau, Henry (1981). Foundations of physics. Ox Bow Press. p. 330. ISBN 0-918024-17-X.
^ a b Hans-Josef Kuepper. "List of Scientific Publications of Albert Einstein". Einstein-website.de. Retrieved 3 April 2011.
^ (Einstein 1905d)
^ Stachel, John J. (December 2001), Einstein from "B" to "Z", Einstein Studies, Vol. 9, Center for Einstein Studies, Boston University: Springer-Verlag New York, LLC, pp. vi, 15, 90, 131, 215, ISBN 978-0-8176-4143-6
^ For a discussion of the reception of relativity theory around the world, and the different controversies it encountered, see the articles in Thomas F. Glick, ed., The Comparative Reception of Relativity (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1987), ISBN 90-277-2498-9.
^ Pais, Abraham (1982), Subtle is the Lord. The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein, Oxford University Press, pp. 382–386, ISBN 0-19-853907-X
^ Einstein, Albert (1905), "Über einen die Erzeugung und Verwandlung des Lichtes betreffenden heuristischen Gesichtspunkt", Annalen der Physik 17 (6): 132–148, Bibcode 1905AnP...322..132E, doi:10.1002/andp.19053220607, retrieved 27 June 2009
^ (Einstein 1905a).
^ Celebrating Einstein "Solid Cold". U.S. DOE., Office of Scientific and Technical Information, 2011.
^ Pais, Abraham (1982), Subtle is the Lord. The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein, Oxford University Press, p. 522, ISBN 0-19-853907-X
^ Levenson, Thomas. "Einstein's Big Idea". Public Broadcasting Service. 2005. Retrieved on 25 February 2006.
^ Albert Einstein, Nobel lecture in 1921
^ van Dongen, Jeroen (2010) Einstein's Unification Cambridge University Press, p.23.
^ (Einstein 1917a)
^ Video: The Elegant Universe: Part 1 | Watch NOVA Online | PBS Video. Video.pbs.org. Retrieved on 11 May 2012.
^ (Einstein 1917b)
^ (Einstein 1924)
^ Cornell and Wieman Share 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics, 9 October 2001, archived from the original on 10 June 2007, retrieved 11 June 2007
^ (Einstein 1950)
^ Moore, Walter (1989), Schrödinger: Life and Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-43767-9
^ Goettling, Gary. Einstein's refrigerator Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine. 1998. Retrieved on 21 November 2005. Leó Szilárd, a Hungarian physicist who later worked on the Manhattan Project, is credited with the discovery of the chain reaction
^ In September 2008 it was reported that Malcolm McCulloch of Oxford University was heading a three-year project to develop more robust appliances that could be used in locales lacking electricity, and that his team had completed a prototype Einstein refrigerator. He was quoted as saying that improving the design and changing the types of gases used might allow the design's efficiency to be quadrupled.Alok, Jha (21 September 2008), "Einstein fridge design can help global cooling", The Guardian (UK), archived from the original on 24 January 2011, retrieved 22 February 2011
^ Bohr N. "Discussions with Einstein on Epistemological Problems in Atomic Physics". The Value of Knowledge: A Miniature Library of Philosophy. Marxists Internet Archive. Archived from the original on 13 September 2010. Retrieved 30 August 2010. From Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist (1949), publ. Cambridge University Press, 1949. Niels Bohr's report of conversations with Einstein.
^ (Einstein 1969). A reprint of this book was published by Edition Erbrich in 1982, ISBN 3-88682-005-X
^ (Einstein 1935)
^ Einstein, Albert (May 1949). "Why Socialism?". Monthly Review (New York City) 1 (1). Retrieved 29 July 2012.
^ David E. Rowe and Robert Schulmann (08). David A., Walsh. ed. "What Were Einstein's Politics?". George Mason University's History News Network (George Mason University). Retrieved 29 July 2012.
^ Clark, Ronald W. (1971), Einstein: The Life and Times, Avon, ISBN 0-380-44123-3
^ Dukas, Helen (1981). Albert Einstein the Human Side. Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 43. Einstein Archives 59-494[dead link]
^ a b c d Botstein, Leon; Galison, Peter; Holton, Gerald James; Schweber, Silvan S. Einstein for the 21st century: His Legacy in Science, Art, and Modern Culture, Princeton Univ. Press (2008) pp. 161-164
^ Cariaga, Daniel, "Not Taking It with You: A Tale of Two Estates," Los Angeles Times, 22 December 1985. Retrieved April 2012.
^ Auction listing by RR Auction, auction closed 13 October 2010.
^ "Obituary". New York Times. 12 July 1986. Retrieved 3 April 2011.
^ "Letters Reveal Einstein Love Life", BBC News (BBC), 11 July 2006, retrieved 14 March 2007
^ Einstein, Corbis Rights Representation, archived from the original on 19 August 2008, retrieved 8 August 2008
^ The New Yorker April 1939 pg 69 Disguise
^ McTee, Cindy. "Einstein's Dream for orchestra". Cindymctee.com.
^ Golden, Frederic (3 January 2000), "Person of the Century: Albert Einstein", Time, archived from the original on 21 February 2006, retrieved 25 February 2006
Further reading

Brian, Denis (1996). Einstein: A Life. New York: John Wiley.
Clark, Ronald (1971). Einstein: The Life and Times. New York: Avon Books.
Fölsing, Albrecht (1997): Albert Einstein: A Biography. New York: Penguin Viking. (Translated and abridged from the German by Ewald Osers.) ISBN 978-0670855452
Highfield, Roger; Carter, Paul (1993). The Private Lives of Albert Einstein. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 978-0-571-16744-9.
Hoffmann, Banesh, with the collaboration of Helen Dukas (1972): Albert Einstein: Creator and Rebel. London: Hart-Davis, MacGibbon Ltd. ISBN 978-0670111817
Isaacson, Walter (2007): Einstein: His Life and Universe. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, New York. ISBN 978-0-7432-6473-0
Moring, Gary (2004): The complete idiot's guide to understanding Einstein ( 1st ed. 2000). Indianapolis IN: Alpha books (Macmillan USA). ISBN 0-02-863180-3
Pais, Abraham (1982): Subtle is the Lord: The science and the life of Albert Einstein. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0198539070. The definitive biography to date.
Pais, Abraham (1994): Einstein Lived Here. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-192-80672-6
Parker, Barry (2000): Einstein's Brainchild: Relativity Made Relatively Easy!. Prometheus Books. Illustrated by Lori Scoffield-Beer. A review of Einstein's career and accomplishments, written for the lay public. ISBN 978-1591025221
Schweber, Sylvan S. (2008): Einstein and Oppenheimer: The Meaning of Genius. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-02828-9.
Oppenheimer, J.R. (1971): "On Albert Einstein," p. 8–12 in Science and synthesis: an international colloquium organized by Unesco on the tenth anniversary of the death of Albert Einstein and Teilhard de Chardin, Springer-Verlag, 1971, 208 pp. (Lecture delivered at the UNESCO House in Paris on 13 December 1965.) Also published in The New York Review of Books, 17 March 1966, On Albert Einstein by Robert Oppenheimer
External links

Find more about Albert Einstein on Wikipedia's sister projects:
 Definitions and translations from Wiktionary
 Images and media from Commons
 Learning resources from Wikiversity
 News stories from Wikinews
 Quotations from Wikiquote
 Source texts from Wikisource
 Textbooks from Wikibooks
Ideas and Opinions, Einstein's letters and speeches, Full text, Crown Publishers (1954) 384 pages
Einstein's Scholar Google profile
Works by Albert Einstein (public domain in Canada)
The MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St Andrews, Scotland, April 1997, retrieved 14 June 2009
Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein, Monthly Review, May 1949
Einstein's Personal Correspondence: Religion, Politics, The Holocaust, and Philosophy Shapell Manuscript Foundation
FBI file on Albert Einstein
Nobelprize.org Biography:Albert Einstein
The Einstein You Never Knew — slideshow by Life magazine
Albert Einstein — videos
Science Odyssey People And Discoveries
MIT OpenCourseWare STS.042J/8.225J: Einstein, Oppenheimer, Feynman: Physics in the 20th century — free study course that explores the changing roles of physics and physicists during the 20th century
List of publications from Google Scholar.
Albert Einstein Archives Online (80,000+ Documents) (MSNBC - 19 March 2012)
[show] v t e
Albert Einstein
[show] v t e
Copley Medallists
[show] v t e
Nobel Laureates in Physics (1901–1925)
[show] v t e
Philosophy of science
Authority control: PND: 118529579 | LCCN: n79022889 | VIAF: 75121530 | WorldCat
View page ratings
Rate this page
What's this?
Trustworthy
Objective
Complete
Well-written
I am highly knowledgeable about this topic (optional)

Submit ratings
Categories: 1879 births1955 deaths20th-century Swiss peopleAcademics of Charles University in PragueAlbert EinsteinAmerican physicistsCosmologistsDeaths from abdominal aortic aneurysmEinstein familyETH Zurich alumniETH Zurich facultyGerman emigrants to SwitzerlandGerman Jews who emigrated to the United States to escape NazismGerman physicistsInstitute for Advanced Study facultyJewish agnosticsJewish physicistsLeiden University facultyNobel laureates in PhysicsPatent examinersPeople from UlmStateless personsSwiss emigrants to the United StatesSwiss physicistsTheoretical physicistsPhilosophers of sciencePacifists
Create accountLog inArticleTalkReadView sourceView history

Main page
Contents
Featured content
Current events
Random article
Donate to Wikipedia
Wikipedia Shop
Interaction
Help
About Wikipedia
Community portal
Recent changes
Contact Wikipedia
Toolbox
Print/export
Languages
Afrikaans
Alemannisch
????
Ænglisc
???????
Aragonés
??????
Asturianu
Aymar aru
Az?rbaycanca
Bamanankan
?????
Bân-lâm-gú
Basa Banyumasan
??????????
??????????? (???????????)?
Bikol Central
?????????
Bosanski
Brezhoneg
Català
???????
Cesky
Chavacano de Zamboanga
Corsu
Cymraeg
Dansk
Deutsch
Diné bizaad
Eesti
????????
Español
Esperanto
Estremeñu
Euskara
?????
Fiji Hindi
Français
Frysk
Gaeilge
Gaelg
Gàidhlig
Galego
??
???????
???
Hawai`i
???????
??????
Hrvatski
Ido
Igbo
Ilokano
????????????? ???????
Bahasa Indonesia
Interlingua
????
Íslenska
Italiano
?????
Basa Jawa
?????
Kapampangan
???????
???????
Kiswahili
Kreyòl ayisyen
Kurdî
????????
Ladino
?????
Latina
Latviešu
Lëtzebuergesch
Lietuviu
Ligure
Lojban
Lumbaart
Magyar
??????????
Malagasy
??????
?????
?????????
????
????????
Bahasa Melayu
Mirandés
??????
??????????
Nahuatl
Nederlands
Nedersaksisch
??????
???
?norsk (bokmål)?
?norsk (nynorsk)?
Novial
Occitan
????
O?zbekcha
??????
Pangasinan
??????
????
?????????
Picard
Piemontèis
Tok Pisin
Plattdüütsch
Polski
Português
Qaraqalpaqsha
Ripoarisch
Româna
Runa Simi
??????????
???????
???? ????
Sámegiella
Sardu
Scots
Shqip
Sicilianu
?????
Simple English
Slovencina
Slovenšcina
Slunski
Soomaaliga
?????
?????? / srpski
Srpskohrvatski / ??????????????
Basa Sunda
Suomi
Svenska
Tagalog
?????
???????/tatarça
??????
???
Türkçe
??????????
????
???????? / Uyghurche
Vahcuengh
Vèneto
Vepsän kel’
Ti?ng Vi?t
Volapük
Võro
Walon
Winaray
Wolof
??????
Yorùbá
??
Zazaki
Žemaiteška
??
This page was last modified on 9 August 2012 at 15:25.
Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. See Terms of use for details.
Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.
Contact us
Privacy policyAbout WikipediaDisclaimersMobile view

HomeA-Z IndexFAQPressContact Us
Nobel Prizes
Alfred Nobel
Educational
Video Player
Nobel Organizations

Search
Home / Nobel Prizes / Nobel Prize in Physics / Albert Einstein - Biography
About the Nobel Prizes
Facts and Lists
Nobel Prize in Physics
All Nobel Prizes in Physics
Facts on the Nobel Prize in Physics
Prize Awarder for the Nobel Prize in Physics
Nomination and Selection of Physics Laureates
Nobel Medal for Physics
Articles in Physics
Video Interviews
Video Nobel Lectures
Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Nobel Prize in Medicine
Nobel Prize in Literature
Nobel Peace Prize
Prize in Economic Sciences
Nobel Laureates Have Their Say
Nobel Prize Award Ceremonies
Nomination and Selection of Nobel Laureates

 

19012011

Prize category: 

 

The Nobel Prize in Physics 1921
Albert Einstein
The Nobel Prize in Physics 1921
Albert Einstein
Biography
Albert Einstein was born at Ulm, in Württemberg, Germany, on March 14, 1879. Six weeks later the family moved to Munich, where he later on began his schooling at the Luitpold Gymnasium. Later, they moved to Italy and Albert continued his education at Aarau, Switzerland and in 1896 he entered the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich to be trained as a teacher in physics and mathematics. In 1901, the year he gained his diploma, he acquired Swiss citizenship and, as he was unable to find a teaching post, he accepted a position as technical assistant in the Swiss Patent Office. In 1905 he obtained his doctor's degree.

During his stay at the Patent Office, and in his spare time, he produced much of his remarkable work and in 1908 he was appointed Privatdozent in Berne. In 1909 he became Professor Extraordinary at Zurich, in 1911 Professor of Theoretical Physics at Prague, returning to Zurich in the following year to fill a similar post. In 1914 he was appointed Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Physical Institute and Professor in the University of Berlin. He became a German citizen in 1914 and remained in Berlin until 1933 when he renounced his citizenship for political reasons and emigrated to America to take the position of Professor of Theoretical Physics at Princeton*. He became a United States citizen in 1940 and retired from his post in 1945.

After World War II, Einstein was a leading figure in the World Government Movement, he was offered the Presidency of the State of Israel, which he declined, and he collaborated with Dr. Chaim Weizmann in establishing the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Einstein always appeared to have a clear view of the problems of physics and the determination to solve them. He had a strategy of his own and was able to visualize the main stages on the way to his goal. He regarded his major achievements as mere stepping-stones for the next advance.

At the start of his scientific work, Einstein realized the inadequacies of Newtonian mechanics and his special theory of relativity stemmed from an attempt to reconcile the laws of mechanics with the laws of the electromagnetic field. He dealt with classical problems of statistical mechanics and problems in which they were merged with quantum theory: this led to an explanation of the Brownian movement of molecules. He investigated the thermal properties of light with a low radiation density and his observations laid the foundation of the photon theory of light.

In his early days in Berlin, Einstein postulated that the correct interpretation of the special theory of relativity must also furnish a theory of gravitation and in 1916 he published his paper on the general theory of relativity. During this time he also contributed to the problems of the theory of radiation and statistical mechanics.

In the 1920's, Einstein embarked on the construction of unified field theories, although he continued to work on the probabilistic interpretation of quantum theory, and he persevered with this work in America. He contributed to statistical mechanics by his development of the quantum theory of a monatomic gas and he has also accomplished valuable work in connection with atomic transition probabilities and relativistic cosmology.

After his retirement he continued to work towards the unification of the basic concepts of physics, taking the opposite approach, geometrisation, to the majority of physicists.

Einstein's researches are, of course, well chronicled and his more important works include Special Theory of Relativity (1905), Relativity (English translations, 1920 and 1950), General Theory of Relativity (1916), Investigations on Theory of Brownian Movement (1926), and The Evolution of Physics (1938). Among his non-scientific works, About Zionism (1930), Why War? (1933), My Philosophy (1934), and Out of My Later Years (1950) are perhaps the most important.

Albert Einstein received honorary doctorate degrees in science, medicine and philosophy from many European and American universities. During the 1920's he lectured in Europe, America and the Far East and he was awarded Fellowships or Memberships of all the leading scientific academies throughout the world. He gained numerous awards in recognition of his work, including the Copley Medal of the Royal Society of London in 1925, and the Franklin Medal of the Franklin Institute in 1935.

Einstein's gifts inevitably resulted in his dwelling much in intellectual solitude and, for relaxation, music played an important part in his life. He married Mileva Maric in 1903 and they had a daughter and two sons; their marriage was dissolved in 1919 and in the same year he married his cousin, Elsa Löwenthal, who died in 1936. He died on April 18, 1955 at Princeton, New Jersey.

From Nobel Lectures, Physics 1901-1921, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1967

This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and first published in the book series Les Prix Nobel. It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.

* Albert Einstein was formally associated with the Institute for Advanced Study located in Princeton, New Jersey.

 

Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 1922
TO CITE THIS PAGE:
MLA style: "Albert Einstein - Biography". Nobelprize.org. 11 Aug 2012 http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1921/einstein-bio.html/
RELATED DOCUMENTS:
ARTICLE

PHYSICS
The Nobel Prize in Physics
Read more about the Nobel Prize in Physics 1901-2000

EDUCATIONAL

NOBEL PRIZES IN PHYSICS
Relativity
Einstein was far from being the only person who contributed to the development of the theory of special relativity. However, he was the one who put everything together.

RECOMMENDED:
EVENTS

2012 NOBEL WEEK DIALOGUE
The Genetic Revolution and its Impact on Society
A new free event on 9 December with discussions on genetics and genomics

FACTS AND LISTS

2011 NOBEL PRIZES
Who Are They? What Did They Do?
See a list of the thirteen Nobel Laureates of 2011

ANNOUNCEMENTS

2012 NOBEL PRIZES
Prize Announcement Dates
Watch the schedule for the announcements of the 2012 Nobel Prizes

FOLLOW US
Youtube
Facebook
Twitter
Nobelprize.org Monthly
RSS
About Nobelprize.org
Privacy Policy
Terms of Use
Technical Support
Copyright © Nobel Media AB 2012
HomeA-Z IndexFAQPressContact Us

HomeA-Z IndexFAQPressContact Us
Nobel Prizes
Alfred Nobel
Educational
Video Player
Nobel Organizations

Search
Home / Nobel Prizes / Nobel Prize in Physics / Albert Einstein - Biography
About the Nobel Prizes
Facts and Lists
Nobel Prize in Physics
All Nobel Prizes in Physics
Facts on the Nobel Prize in Physics
Prize Awarder for the Nobel Prize in Physics
Nomination and Selection of Physics Laureates
Nobel Medal for Physics
Articles in Physics
Video Interviews
Video Nobel Lectures
Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Nobel Prize in Medicine
Nobel Prize in Literature
Nobel Peace Prize
Prize in Economic Sciences
Nobel Laureates Have Their Say
Nobel Prize Award Ceremonies
Nomination and Selection of Nobel Laureates

 

19012011

Prize category: 

 

The Nobel Prize in Physics 1921
Albert Einstein
The Nobel Prize in Physics 1921
Albert Einstein
Biography
Albert Einstein was born at Ulm, in Württemberg, Germany, on March 14, 1879. Six weeks later the family moved to Munich, where he later on began his schooling at the Luitpold Gymnasium. Later, they moved to Italy and Albert continued his education at Aarau, Switzerland and in 1896 he entered the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich to be trained as a teacher in physics and mathematics. In 1901, the year he gained his diploma, he acquired Swiss citizenship and, as he was unable to find a teaching post, he accepted a position as technical assistant in the Swiss Patent Office. In 1905 he obtained his doctor's degree.

During his stay at the Patent Office, and in his spare time, he produced much of his remarkable work and in 1908 he was appointed Privatdozent in Berne. In 1909 he became Professor Extraordinary at Zurich, in 1911 Professor of Theoretical Physics at Prague, returning to Zurich in the following year to fill a similar post. In 1914 he was appointed Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Physical Institute and Professor in the University of Berlin. He became a German citizen in 1914 and remained in Berlin until 1933 when he renounced his citizenship for political reasons and emigrated to America to take the position of Professor of Theoretical Physics at Princeton*. He became a United States citizen in 1940 and retired from his post in 1945.

After World War II, Einstein was a leading figure in the World Government Movement, he was offered the Presidency of the State of Israel, which he declined, and he collaborated with Dr. Chaim Weizmann in establishing the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Einstein always appeared to have a clear view of the problems of physics and the determination to solve them. He had a strategy of his own and was able to visualize the main stages on the way to his goal. He regarded his major achievements as mere stepping-stones for the next advance.

At the start of his scientific work, Einstein realized the inadequacies of Newtonian mechanics and his special theory of relativity stemmed from an attempt to reconcile the laws of mechanics with the laws of the electromagnetic field. He dealt with classical problems of statistical mechanics and problems in which they were merged with quantum theory: this led to an explanation of the Brownian movement of molecules. He investigated the thermal properties of light with a low radiation density and his observations laid the foundation of the photon theory of light.

In his early days in Berlin, Einstein postulated that the correct interpretation of the special theory of relativity must also furnish a theory of gravitation and in 1916 he published his paper on the general theory of relativity. During this time he also contributed to the problems of the theory of radiation and statistical mechanics.

In the 1920's, Einstein embarked on the construction of unified field theories, although he continued to work on the probabilistic interpretation of quantum theory, and he persevered with this work in America. He contributed to statistical mechanics by his development of the quantum theory of a monatomic gas and he has also accomplished valuable work in connection with atomic transition probabilities and relativistic cosmology.

After his retirement he continued to work towards the unification of the basic concepts of physics, taking the opposite approach, geometrisation, to the majority of physicists.

Einstein's researches are, of course, well chronicled and his more important works include Special Theory of Relativity (1905), Relativity (English translations, 1920 and 1950), General Theory of Relativity (1916), Investigations on Theory of Brownian Movement (1926), and The Evolution of Physics (1938). Among his non-scientific works, About Zionism (1930), Why War? (1933), My Philosophy (1934), and Out of My Later Years (1950) are perhaps the most important.

Albert Einstein received honorary doctorate degrees in science, medicine and philosophy from many European and American universities. During the 1920's he lectured in Europe, America and the Far East and he was awarded Fellowships or Memberships of all the leading scientific academies throughout the world. He gained numerous awards in recognition of his work, including the Copley Medal of the Royal Society of London in 1925, and the Franklin Medal of the Franklin Institute in 1935.

Einstein's gifts inevitably resulted in his dwelling much in intellectual solitude and, for relaxation, music played an important part in his life. He married Mileva Maric in 1903 and they had a daughter and two sons; their marriage was dissolved in 1919 and in the same year he married his cousin, Elsa Löwenthal, who died in 1936. He died on April 18, 1955 at Princeton, New Jersey.

From Nobel Lectures, Physics 1901-1921, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1967

This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and first published in the book series Les Prix Nobel. It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.

* Albert Einstein was formally associated with the Institute for Advanced Study located in Princeton, New Jersey.

 

Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 1922
TO CITE THIS PAGE:
MLA style: "Albert Einstein - Biography". Nobelprize.org. 11 Aug 2012 http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1921/einstein-bio.html/
RELATED DOCUMENTS:
ARTICLE

PHYSICS
The Nobel Prize in Physics
Read more about the Nobel Prize in Physics 1901-2000

EDUCATIONAL

NOBEL PRIZES IN PHYSICS
Relativity
Einstein was far from being the only person who contributed to the development of the theory of special relativity. However, he was the one who put everything together.

RECOMMENDED:
EVENTS

2012 NOBEL WEEK DIALOGUE
The Genetic Revolution and its Impact on Society
A new free event on 9 December with discussions on genetics and genomics

FACTS AND LISTS

2011 NOBEL PRIZES
Who Are They? What Did They Do?
See a list of the thirteen Nobel Laureates of 2011

ANNOUNCEMENTS

2012 NOBEL PRIZES
Prize Announcement Dates
Watch the schedule for the announcements of the 2012 Nobel Prizes

FOLLOW US
Youtube
Facebook
Twitter
Nobelprize.org Monthly
RSS
About Nobelprize.org
Privacy Policy
Terms of Use
Technical Support
Copyright © Nobel Media AB 2012
HomeA-Z IndexFAQPressContact Us
The Long Good Read
The Long Good Read
Articles hand picked twice daily from the Guardian

David Hasselhoff: ‘If we have to go with the Hoff to pay the rent, let’s go with the Hoff’

First published online by Emma Brockes.

 

David Hasselhoff, psyched from jetlag and a morning can of Red Bull, bounces into the living room of his home in LA, where his dog Henry and I have been waiting. “I’m David!” he says and, sure enough, the height, the hair, the tan, it’s all there, plus a pair of turquoise moccasins and the giddy air of the over-caffeinated. In the room with us: a 12ft-long, fibreglass model of the actor in his red Baywatch shorts; a Baywatch pinball machine; the mounted heads of various stuffed animals; and a photo of his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He hands me a copy of his new album, This Time Around, and calls Nick, his assistant, to cart off the dog. “Henry loves women,” he says. Oh, Hoff!

I have to admit it: I’m fairly giddy myself. For those of us who grew up on Knight Rider, Hasselhoff, 60, is and for ever will be the man with the backlit bouffant, leading us each Saturday night on a shadowy flight into the dangerous world of a man who does not exist. Baywatch, the drinking, the inexhaustible hilarity of the phrase “famous in Germany” – none of that matters. What matters is the man, and the man is here.

It must be odd for the Hoff, moving between the sincere adoration of his fans in the German-speaking world – the gold discs on his wall are all from Germany and Austria – to the English-speaking world, where he is no less loved, but in a different way. Hoff understands the embrace to be partly ironic, and that it doesn’t preclude affection. He also benefits, as stars of his ilk must, from an endearing range of blind spots. In the course of our conversation, and with no malice intended, he will refer to his Welsh girlfriend’s parents as “hobbits”, compare the relative thinness of his two daughters, liken a room full of fans to zombies and summarise Hitler’s impact on Germany in the language of a failed relationship. But first, the singing.

Reading this on mobile? Click here to view
“I want to do the music I want to do,” says Hoff, who has moved lately from rock anthems to show tunes. “In Germany, I was singing everything from … ” he breaks off and shout-sings: “I’VE BEEN LOOKING FOR FREEDOM!”

I jump in my chair.

“Which is a big anthem and huge hit. Kind of almost a Bruce Springsteen … “

Was that the one he did when the Berlin Wall came down? (Memorably, Hoff played at the Wall in 1989.)

“Yeah.” He moves through several more song snippets, interrupting himself to shout “WE LOVE YOU HOFF!” to demonstrate a typical response from his audience. There is a nice rendition of What I Did For Love, A Chorus Line, and a few lines from The Producers, which Hoff’s agent had counselled against – “I don’t think you should do Hitler, it’s deadly,” he said – but the Hoff put him straight. “I said, what the fuck are you talking about? This is from The Producers, one of the greatest musicals. We’re mocking him. It’s not a tribute to Hitler, it’s a gay Hitler.”

Does he do that song in Germany? The Hoff stares at me incredulously.

“The show was a monster hit in Germany! The people of Germany hate Hitler more than the Americans hate Hitler! He screwed up their whole life. So.”

To round off the show, he does a number from the musical Jekyll and Hyde, a rousing gothic anthem in the style of Meat Loaf, in which he plays both protagonists. He leaps to his feet to show me the moves.

“I had two wigs on. One wig for Jekyll, Jekyll was left, and Hyde was. Wait – Hyde was right and Jekyll was – Jekyll was right and Hyde was left. And then it gets really insane.”

In slightly worse circumstances, Hasselhoff might have been another Charlie Sheen. He is doing shows in Edinburgh and London this summer, in which he does skits on Knight Rider and Baywatch, sings songs from his albums and conducts a jokey Q and A with the audience. Cannibalising one’s own image like this nods to the so-bad-it’s-good interpretation of his work, inviting a measure of condescension and there is a pre-emptive defensiveness to the Hoff that I can imagine tipping into bitterness. I’m sure he was horrible to deal with when he was drinking. But on the day I meet him, he is goofy and sweet and gives the impression of being a nice guy, albeit one who uses the “royal we”. “It all started,” says Hoff, “when we were eight years old and doing it for fun, not trying to make a living.” He looks at me guilessly. Oh, Hoff.

He is currently dating a 32-year-old Welsh woman called Hayley, whom he met at a hotel in Cardiff when he was filming Britain’s Got Talent. “Hayley’s from Glynneath, which is near Merthyr Tydfil?” says the Hoff. For their first date, he whisked her away to a spa in Switzerland – “really nice and healthy and clean cut. Because I’m older than her and I didn’t want her to think this was just about getting, you know, having … sex. It was about, I really like this girl.”

When they met, Hayley was working in Debenhams. Now she is with him in LA. So she has moved in?

The Hoff looks alarmed. “She’s moved, yeah, uh, no. Yes. We’re both – we’re back and forth.”

The Hoff has been married twice and has two grownup daughters with his second wife, Pamela. It was one of his daughters who, in an effort to shame him into sobriety, filmed him drunk on a hotel room floor five years ago, the video of which turned up on YouTube. It worked; the Hoff says he is now sober. The fly-on-the-wall documentary about him and his family was cancelled after two episodes because the producers were “hoping that my ex-wife would come over, or that I was going to fall off the wagon. And I didn’t. We have a pretty normal family, a lot of love. We’re not hoarders, or drug addicts.”

Reading this on mobile? Click here to view
His father was in sales and the family frequently moved around while the Hoff was growing up. He was close to his family; he gets his drive and sociability from his father, he says, who taught him the importance of being nice to everyone. After studying theatre at the California Institute of the Arts, he won a role in the soap opera The Young and the Restless and, in 1982, went straight from there on to Knight Rider. Baywatch first aired in 1989 and was the more profitable show – certainly for the Hoff, who had the acumen to buy back the rights from NBC and make a fortune on the reruns. “Maybe it’s not curing cancer,” he says, “but it’s about saving lives, about heroes, and good-looking people and women in bathing suits and what’s wrong with that when you’re at the beach and the weather is the way it is?”

He gives it some more thought. “Over in the UK and in Wales, it’s nice to turn on the TV and see Baywatch.”

Until 10 years ago, he was a TV star in the conventional manner. And then one day he received a phone call from a journalist at a newspaper in Sydney. Something odd was going on in offices around the city.

“They said there is an epidemic of emails going back and forth between secretaries, using your name – “the Hoff” – in different situations. I said, what do you mean? They sent me the emails. So, Brave-Hoff, Some Like It Hoff, the Wizard of Hoff, every possible Hoffism you could think of. Irreverent ones, like whack Hoff, fuck Hoff. There were 400 of them. I have them for my show. When people walk in, I have them flash up on the screens. They are pretty funny.”

Whatever got this started – some rare confluence in Hasselhoff of cheese, chest hair and good-natured sincerity – he saw the commercial potential immediately and started playing up to his kitschy new image. Now, when people come to his shows, he invites them to “party, Hoff-style”. I wonder what that means, given his sobriety. “Mad rock’n'roll fun,” he says.

Does he get a buzz these days from being the most sober guy in the room?

“You know I just feel – I don’t like to go to clubs, or concerts, I like to be on stage. When you’re on stage, you’re in control. No one can get to you. I can invite them on and send them off.”

He looks suddenly crestfallen. “If someone says something negative, I – I, it’s fine, I can play that game as well.”

His phone goes and Hoff yells through the door: “HEY NICK, SOMEONE JUST TEXTED ME, SORT IT OUT WILL YOU?”

Nick appears. “That was me. Texting you the address of where you need to be at 2pm.”

“Oh.”

He has to be disciplined about exercise. It’s always a bad sign, he says, when he stops going to the gym.

“I once didn’t work out for six weeks. It took me for ever to get the weight off. My daughter – one daughter is naturally thin, the other is constantly working out and I see the pain that she goes through. She works more than anybody. She’s so beautiful, she’s got a gorgeous porcelain face. [When she models] she’s smart enough to work for the plus-sizes.”

His daughters find his music corny – “techno-pop” is more to their liking – but now and then a song will appeal to them. Most of his fans are in their 30s, although since Knight Rider and Baywatch have been reshown around the world, a new generation of Hoff fans is emerging. And, says the Hoff, he discovered something amazing while performing in Germany recently. “We have this huge gay following!”

I glance at his album cover, in which the Hoff sits on a gold throne, shirt unbuttoned almost to his waist, a large celtic cross on a leather thong around his neck.

“They said I’m like the new Cher!” He looks mystified.

He is pragmatic about his appeal. Would he rather be a straightforward TV star, without the irony? Of course. “But if we have to go with the Hoff to pay the rent, let’s go with the Hoff.”

Reading this on mobile? Click here to view
And he is canny about business. He is doing panto again this Christmas; is in an ad campaign for Mr Lean, a brand of snack food, and has a Hoff video game coming out. The 12ft replica is from the SpongeBob movie he did. For Hoff-hair authenticity, it is covered in yak-hair. (“Somewhere,” says the Hoff, “there is a very bald yak.”) He would like to do a Bollywood spinoff of Baywatch – “Bombaywatch”.

“I think, OK; I’ve got the money for retirement over here. I’ve got the money to take care of the ex and the kids. And I’ve got my rent money.”

He looks suddenly tired. The problem is he gets bored– “don’t you get bored?” He worries he doesn’t have enough Twitter followers – 430,000 when “Justin Bieber has millions.” He thinks about how to stay in the public eye. “I know places I can go to have a nice trendy lunch and keep current in the press,” he says. That’s when he advises Hayley to “put on your little nice outfit”. Likewise, “where to be grungy, [where] nobody bothers. I know where there’s the best beach, where there’s whales. She’s been on jetskis with me. For my birthday I’m trying to go diving with whale sharks. They’re really big, but they’re real docile.”

He wants to go on a university tour in the US, giving motivational seminars in which his message will be: “life isn’t fair. That’s my key. When you realise that life isn’t fair, you don’t act out, you don’t get overly wasted, you don’t get self-indulgent. You just move forward.”

He frowns. “You can create your own environment! You can go and do a rock show!” With sudden, heartbreaking bafflement he says, “I mean, they dress up in discos as me. We went to one in Hertfordshire and there were 1,200 people dressed up as me. They told me they loved me. And at first I thought, these guys are making fun of me. But they’re not. They’re really not.” He says quietly. “They think it’s retro and cool.”

We go into the kitchen. A potbellied pig snuffles at the door to get in. A cockatoo called Peaches squawks in a cage. Hayley says a cheerful hello. He is grateful to her family, he says, for putting up with a lot of press intrusion, particularly her parents – “they’re like little hobbits” – who made him feel so welcome in Wales. “I love adventure,” says the Hoff, and tells me about the time he hired a car and drove to Mumbles on the Welsh coast.

As a favour to Hayley’s sister, Hoff attended the Greggs Bakery Christmas party last year (“I think we were the thinnest people there”) and almost caused a riot. “Can you image walking into a room of 500 people and everybody got up and started coming at me like the Night of the Living Dead, holding their cell phones?” For an hour he worked the tables, signing autographs and posing for photos. He was, I imagine, happy as a clam.

“If I could be James Bond,” he says, ”great. And if not,” – a good-natured shrug – “I’ll just see what comes along.”

David Hasselhoff performs at the Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, 21-27 August. edfringe.com

Filed under: Television & radio by admin
Roll up for the financial crisis tour

First published online by Tom Meltzer.

 

Our tour guide for the morning looks every inch the old-fashioned stereotype of a jolly City gent. His outfit could almost be a store-bought costume: the bright red braces, the wide polka-dot tie, even the carefully folded red handkerchief protruding from the left breast pocket of his suit. But Justin Urquhart Stewart is not a costumed actor, and this is no ordinary themed tour. He is a banker of more than two decades’ experience, and the kind of distant City of London bigwig who, as a rule, people outside the world of finance don’t get a chance to question.

Debt and The City: A Political Tour is a sort of safari of the financial crisis. Over six hours, I and my fellow six tour-goers will travel from the cold stone steps of the Royal Exchange down ancient alleyways, over bridges and up to glass-walled conference rooms in mirrored corporate lifts. Our quest to understand what went wrong will take us to the far corners of the Square Mile. Along the way we will meet bankers, property consultants and financial journalists, and discover the joys of securitisation, the Glass-Steagall Act and collateralised debt obligations. As tourist itineraries go, I will admit, it’s pretty dry.

Stewart is the first of today’s eight speakers, here to give us a potted history of the British financial sector. He leads us through the City’s narrow alleys, past plaques marking the sites of the coffee shops that served as meeting places for the bankers and merchants of centuries past. We learn that the financial crisis is a well-established national tradition, recurring under many if not most of our past monarchs. “By the time we get to Edward I,” he says, “England is already in debt.”

“The history lesson is really to reinforce that it’s not new, what’s happening,” explains tour director Nicholas Wood. A former journalist, Wood spent five years as the New York Times correspondent for the Balkans before leaving to set up Political Tours in 2009. In the past year he has led excursions of knowledge-hungry tourists to Libya, Kosovo and North Korea, but today’s financial crash course is his first in the UK. It will serve as a prototype for a two-day tour of the City that he plans to run from early October.You could call it information tourism. “Basically,” says Wood, “the simplest thought behind it is: if you have art tours and history tours why can’t you have serious political tours? It’s about how you piece it all together, the complexities behind it. It’s saying: ‘Look, banking clearly serves a purpose, so how did we get here?’ It’s very easy to pin it on the bankers but in actual fact there’s a whole frame of people. We were happy to take the cheap credit and see our house prices grow, politicians were happy to take the taxes.”

We follow Stewart to the original site of the London Stock Exchange – now, fittingly, a luxury shopping centre – where he introduces us to two old and vital distinctions in the world of banking. First, between market jobbers (“the people making the price, like bookies at a race course”) and stockbrokers (“who go round trying to get the best price”), and second, between commercial and investment banks, both of which were kept separate for decades, but collapsed into one with the “Big Bang” of 1986.

Combining commercial and investment banks, we learn, was never a good idea. “When you put those two together,” Stewart tells us, “it is a bit like mixing nitrogen and glycerine. One is more aggressive than the other, and it doesn’t work, it never has.” But he goes on to explain that Big Bang was just the first step on the road to our current crisis. If Thatcher’s government is in part to blame, then Bill Clinton’s is even more so; driven by a desire to let every American own their own home, it was Clinton’s decision to create the ill-fated sub-prime mortgage system.

“The whole idea,” explains Stewart, “was to spread them all around the world to spread the risk of it. They were spread in the same way as if you take a nice fresh cowpat and hit it with a shovel very hard. They went everywhere. That’s why all the banks were sitting there not trusting each other, because no one knew who had the debt. And remember, the basis of banking anywhere in the world is trust. If you lose that, the system fails, and that’s what London is going through right now. If you have a 10-year boom, you then have 10 years of lean. We’ve got at least another seven years of this to work our way through.”

Today’s tour-goers are a varied bunch. Several have already taken Wood’s flagship eight-day political tour of Kosovo, among them retired equity analyst Elizabeth Balsom. She’s enthusiastic about the experience: “I think one of the pluses was that everybody there was very interested, and knowledgeable, and wanted to know more. We all already knew the background.”

The expectation that tour-goers will already know quite a bit can, of course, make it all a little daunting for the true layperson. Student Ben Forrest, 24, here with his dad Mike, a bike shop owner, admits to having struggled to keep up in places. “To start with we were doing fine. Because some of the other people here are quite familiar with the terms they’re asking questions that are sometimes a little bit over my head. But then I’m coming from a background of having no experience in this field at all.”

Things are about to get a whole lot more baffling. With our introductory history over, we head to the offices of Stewart’s firm Seven Investment Management to get stuck in to the technical details. Senior portfolio manager Chris Darbyshire introduces us to securitisation, the process that saw sub-prime mortgages bundled together in packages and sold as bonds, first in small groups of properties from single states, then, bundled again, in America-wide financial lucky dips called collateralised debt obligations (CDOs). These, in turn, were bundled world-wide: the dreaded CDOs squared.

The youngest attendee is 21-year-old business and politics student Jean-Michel Mbala. He is here through community group SE1 United, who work to raise aspirations among young people in Lambeth and Southwark. The two-day tours will cost £400 a head, but Wood plans to set aside two places on each for members of NGOs and non-profit organisations. Another graduate of the Kosovo tour, Mbala is here today with a career in mind: “I want to do finance. I’ve done an internship at Morgan Stanley three years ago. It opened up my eyes to that sort of world. There’s good and bad, but it helped me pay off my debt.”

There is, says Wood, no average political tourist: “In North Korea we had a guy who runs a cheese business in Gloucester, a market trader. Then we’ve had the former CEO of an American bank. I think it’s more of a mentality. It’s an inquiring mind.”

Having just about wrapped our heads around CDOs, we’re whisked away to rooftop restaurant Coq D’Argent for a fancy lunch and another lecture. Business journalist Kate Walsh is our guide to the original media scapegoats for the crisis: hedge funds. “It was quite convenient to blame the hedge funds,” she explains, as the rest of us tuck in to our meals. “They were a very easy target, in that they’re all super-rich, a lot of them were American, and they were presented as the bad people. They were blamed for what was happening to our banking system, which in reality was complete rubbish.”

Finally, we cross the river to the offices of accounting firm Ernst & Young, a high tower on the south bank of the Thames, peering out across the river through glass walls at the Tower of London. We are here to meet one of the foremost experts on financial regulation in the country. Formerly a department head at the Financial Services Authority, John Liver is both a partner at Ernst & Young and head of its global regulatory reform team. He gives us a condensed and candid account of the changes needed: “We are in a situation now where we as taxpayers have supported our banking industry to the tune of probably $15tn, more than a trillion of that in the UK. There is no more public money, so we’ve got to do something different. Something different is radical change in the financial services industry.”

Liver reels off a list of forthcoming reforms, at lightning speed; derivatives are to become more transparent, safeguards to be strengthened, institutions disentangled so that one can fail without bringing down the others. There is, he says, “a whole raft of regulation saying banks should rely less on ratings agencies” on its way. He finishes on a reassuring note. “You’ll see an industry in three years’ time that’s an awful lot different to that of two years ago.”

The tour over, we traipse out into the street, a little better informed, if also a little overloaded. I ask Wood what the future looks like for his political safaris. “I want to do a tour that looks at the spending cuts, and what their implications are,” he says. “Let’s take a city like Birmingham or Cardiff that’s tremendously dependent on state spending. How do you implement cuts there? The basic building block of any of our tours – and this is the only exception – is to go to the community and ask: how do you live? It’s about going to a community and trying to dissect it.”

Dissecting the City in a day may not be anyone’s idea of fun. But afterwards I realise that – for better or for worse – I now have quite a bit more sympathy for the bankers. When the rules of the game have been tinkered with, it feels daft just to hate the players.

Want to go on a Political Tour? Go to politicaltours.com

Filed under: Business by admin
Will Self: ‘I don’t write for readers’

First published online by Elizabeth Day.

 

Will Self greets me on his doorstep, trailing a small child and an even smaller dog. It could be, of course, that their smallness is accentuated by Self’s impressive height: at 6ft 5in, he moves with the languid grace of a man accustomed to folding himself into constrained spaces. “Oh, sorry, you were meant to have been let in,” he says in a lugubrious monotone, clear blue eyes flicking this way and that. He speaks without smiling and yet you get the sense that he is perpetually on the brink of making some brilliant joke, comprehensible only to himself. Self opens the front door and ushers me inside. “Go on up,” he says, nodding towards the staircase. “You’ll know which room is mine.”

There are three storeys to the tastefully decorated Georgian townhouse in Stockwell, south London that Self shares with his wife, the journalist Deborah Orr, and their children – Ivan, 14, and Luther, 10. The walls are painted in muted aubergines and greys; books line the shelves and everything is orderly without being twee.

Self’s study, by contrast, is a resolutely untidy attic room exploding with paper. The walls are smothered with a complex mosaic of overlapping yellow Post-It notes. Every spare inch is covered with Blu-Tacked scraps: drawings by Self’s children, images of unknown Edwardians taken from Ancestry.com, and – in one easily overlooked corner – an advertisement for sanitary towels from a turn-of-the-century magazine.

It is, perhaps, not surprising that Self should need to work in a state of such organised chaos. His latest novel, Umbrella, is a dazzling feat of imagination and structure: a sprawling, lyrical, stream-of-consciousness narrative that squares up to modernism and brings it kicking and screaming into the 21st century (the title is taken from a James Joyce quotation: “A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella”).

The book is stomach-lurchingly ambitious in scope, spanning 92 years and examining the social legacy of the first world war, anti-psychiatry, the relativity of madness and the impact of technology on the human body.

There are three interwoven strands. In 1918 Audrey Dearth, a munitions worker, is incarcerated at Friern hospital after falling victim to encephalitis lethargica, a brain disease that swept through Europe in the aftermath of the first world war and left some of its victims speechless and motionless. In 1971 she is treated by psychiatrist Dr Zack Busner, who wakes her from her stupor with a new drug. By 2010 the asylum has been turned into a luxury apartment complex and Busner travels waywardly across north London in search of the truth about his past encounter with his former patient.

There is no straightforward chronological narrative: the three time zones are spliced together in intriguing, interconnected ways, sometimes within the space of a single paragraph. It is a portrait of an age but also of a city. Just as Joyce revealed the sprawling subtlety of Dublin in Ulysses, so Self undresses London, layer by layer, in all its pulsating complexity.

No wonder he needed all those Post-It notes.

“I don’t really write for readers,” Self says when he appears, bearing a packet of coffee. He lights a compact gas camping stove on the corner of his desk and puts a stainless steel espresso maker on to boil. “I think that’s the defining characteristic of being serious as a writer. I mean, I’ve said in the past I write for myself. That’s probably some kind of insane egotism but I actually think that’s the only way to proceed – to write what you think you have to write. I write desperately trying to keep myself amused or engaged in what I’m doing and in the world. And if people like it, great, and if they don’t like it, well, that’s that – what can you do? You can’t go round and hold a gun to their head.”

As it happens, Self is pleased to discover I did like the book. “It makes a difference,” he says. “My publishers did look a bit grim when it came in. I think they felt it was resolutely uncommercial and wouldn’t find readers. But you know…”

He drifts off. Five days after we meet, Umbrella is longlisted for the Man Booker prize. It turns out some other people must like it too.

At 50, Self has carved out a reputation for himself as one of the UK’s most uncompromising and interesting novelists. He was still in his 20s when he published his first book, a collection of short stories, under the title The Quantity Theory of Insanity. The book won praise from Doris Lessing and Salman Rushdie and scooped the Geoffrey Faber Memorial prize in 1993.

“It was published, as Cocteau said, to a terrifying baptism of caresses,” Self recalls. “I didn’t get a single negative review. For the one year, between the publication of the first book and the publication of the second book, I couldn’t put a foot wrong.”

Since 1991 there have been six subsequent collections of short stories, seven compilations of Self’s non-fiction writing, one illustrated novella and eight more novels (Umbrella is his ninth) as well as a slew of journalistic assignments. Earlier this year he became the professor of contemporary thought at Brunel University and has just written an undergraduate module for the course.

Does he ever get writer’s block?

“No. I get what I call ‘everythingitis’… where I get obsessed with the idea that everything has to be in the book.”

His novels defy easy categorisation and one senses it is partly for this reason that he has never fully been embraced by the reading public or attained the popular heights of his near contemporary, Martin Amis. In My Idea of Fun (1993), ostensibly a story about a lonely boy growing up in a caravan park, Self created a sinister alternate universe peopled by menacing characters from children’s jokes, including a grotesque version of The Fat Controller.

In How the Dead Live (2000) he charted the afterlife of Lily Bloom, an elderly woman who was moved to live in a London suburb after her death, accompanied by an Aboriginal spirit guide. The Book of Dave, published six years later, was the story of a London cab driver in the throes of a mental breakdown who wrote a book of rantings that was rediscovered after 500 years and used as the sacred foundation for a new religion.

If there is a connecting thread in his fiction, it is, perhaps, a capacity for antic experimentation and a desire – even a compulsion – not to be boring.

“I have no patience with naturalistic fiction, really, I just find it dull,” says Self. He cites JG Ballard as his most formative influence and confesses he doesn’t read modern novels, partly because he’s worried that if he reads something exceptional “it will fuck with my head and I’ll get discouraged”.

And yet he seems exhausted by his own single-mindedness. “I really don’t say this for effect or because it’s false modesty, but every book I write feels like a failure to me,” he says, “and the failures feel worse as I get older. And I don’t even like it in myself that I’m not more catholic [in taste].

“It’s only really in the last decade or so that I’ve started to engage seriously with what I think the implications of modernism are in terms of the novel, and I wish I didn’t have to, frankly, [because] I don’t write to get readers but you can more or less guarantee that you’ll start shedding them at that point.” He emits a low, rich, rumbling laugh. “And I feel isolated enough as it is. Everybody loves, you know, what’s-his-face, beardy guy…”

Alan Hollinghurst?

“Alan Hollinghurst!” he cries, gratefully. “Everybody loves Alan’s books. Tout le monde. And I can’t read them, so… Everyone goes: ‘Ohhh, The Line of Beauty,’” he says, doing an excellent impression of a literary luvvie. “You’d be inclined to think, if you pick up The Line of Beauty and think: ‘OK, so I don’t actually need to go on with this’, [that] the deficiency lay in you. You’d have to be very courageous to think: ‘They’re all wrong, this is not where the party is.’”

For Self, the party is definitely elsewhere. It’s just that his party might not sound much fun to someone in search of an engrossing beach read. Umbrella, after all, is predicated on the modernist belief that it is only in the rejection of conventional linear structure and unity of plot that essential truth will be found.

But it is hard not to admire Self’s determination to stick to his principles. “You can’t go on pretending that the writer is an invisible deity who moves around characters in the simple past,” he says. “I just can’t do that stuff. It’s lies. The world isn’t like that any more. The world is really strange. It’s not to be explained by ‘He went to the pub’. You cannot capture what’s going on with that form, to my way of thinking. You can create a divertissement, you can create a very fine entertainment, but you can’t reach any closer to any kind of truth about what it is to exist.”

The coffee pot boils, no doubt in a deliberate attempt to impose dull, naturalistic order on the contemplation of what it means to exist. Self unfurls himself from his ergonomic computer stool and gingerly removes the pot from the stove using a grubby towel.

“It’s a great privilege to be allowed to have a filthy garret room,” he says as he pours me a deliciously strong cup of black coffee. (Later he will tell me he uses a Robusta “peasant” blend bought from his local newsagents, which tastes smoother than the more expensive Arabica we’re used to drinking. Self’s conversation is full of such interesting digressions, the product of a restless mind accumulating facts like magpies do glitter.)

Usually the window above his desk overlooks the street outside, affording Self an uninterrupted view of the local crack dealers. Today, however, the entire facade of the house is obscured by scaffolding – the result of his roof dramatically collapsing without warning in May after a sudden rise in temperature.

“I was in the front room downstairs looking out the window. The boys and I were at home and it was like – do you remember those old Ray Harryhausen films where the special effects are quite crap, there’s a definite sense of planes shifting against each other? – it was like that. All this masonry and brick just went past the window, with great rumbling and dust clouding.”

Self got his children out on to the street and no one was hurt. “If Deborah had been working in the front garden all day, she’d have been dead.”

Death and illness have been much on Self’s mind of late. Orr was diagnosed with breast cancer in June 2010 and underwent a mastectomy in August, followed by a gruelling course of chemotherapy. Self doesn’t like talking about this – there is an occlusion in the eyes, a quietness when the topic is broached.

“I think she’s all right,” he says. “I mean, you’d have to ask her really, wouldn’t you? She’s not technically in remission yet but she’s not got cancer again so we’ll see.”

It is clear, although he never explicitly states it, that he adores Orr. One of the great achievements of Umbrella is Self’s ability to write a convincing female protagonist. Unlike many of the great male novelists of his generation who have been accused of ignoring the female experience in their work, Self seems entirely at ease with the female psyche.

“Yeah, well, I’m quite girly,” he says. “I like women, my friends are women. I don’t have many male friends – never have.

“I always start with physicality when I’m writing as a woman. So I always have a vagina and think about having periods. I always start with an embodiment. And I think when I read men writing about women, they never seem to have thought about that. They’ve never thought: actually, you’ve got a cycle, you’re different. So if I do succeed at all, that’s what it’s down to.”

In the winter of 2010, a few months after his wife’s diagnosis, Self noticed his hands becoming swollen and livid. It transpired he was suffering from polycythemia vera, a potentially fatal blood disorder in which the bone marrow produces too many red blood cells. The treatment requires the regular siphoning off of blood from the veins through a process called venesection.

“It’s not bad actually,” he says. “I had a pint out yesterday. Last year I was having two pints a week taken out and… it felt very traumatic. But they’ve sort of stabilised it and it’s now only every four to six weeks.”

In an essay he wrote for Granta last October, Self explained that part of the trauma of the treatment stemmed from his well-documented experiences of drug addiction. “I first stuck a needle in my arm in the summer of 1979,” he wrote. “I was 17 years old. I often think back with a protective tenderness towards my younger self and wish I were somehow able to dissuade him from such a mutilation, from breaking the blood-air barrier in that crazy way.”

Why did he start injecting?

“I arrived at it through being very, very unhappy,” he says now. “You can never run your life through again and say, ‘Right, now let’s put you in a different environment and see whether you’re still [unhappy].’ Do you know what I mean? There is no counter-life in that way. I suspect it’s a bit of nature, a bit of nurture, like most things.”

Self was raised in Hampstead Garden Suburb. His mother was a Jewish American who worked as a publisher’s assistant, his father a professor of public administration at the London School of Economics. His parents divorced when Self was 18 and his father later emigrated to Australia.

When Self started doing hard drugs his mother sent him to a psychiatrist – giving rise to one of the recurring obsessions of his novels. Zack Busner, the psychoanalyst in Umbrella, is a familiar figure, having appeared in several of Self’s previous works as a self-promoter intent on making his name at the cost of true engagement with his patients.

“My mother loved psychiatry,” says Self. “You’ve got to remember that, in the immediate postwar period when my mum was a young woman, Freud hit America like a film star. The whole nation went belly-up to it. For her, attempting to treat mental distress in some way, shape or form was just the done thing – [it] absolutely proved you were a cultured person.”

Self, by contrast, was deeply influenced by the work of RD Laing: “That idea, really embodied in anti-psychiatry, that madness was just a different way of being, man, and let’s all just hang out. And that just merged in my own head with getting off my face on drugs.”

For years he injected heroin and also took cocaine and amphetamines. He went to Oxford to read PPE, graduating with a third after spending much of his spare time “hanging out” with schizophrenic outpatients from a local hospital. There was a brief period of cold turkey in the 1980s but he continued to use until a spectacular fall from grace in 1997 when he was found snorting heroin on John Major’s jet while covering the election campaign for this newspaper.

Is his creative impulse allied to an innate self-destructiveness?

“Not any more. When I stopped drinking and doing drugs I let go of that… If I’m frank, one of the reasons I stopped eventually was because I could feel I would be unable to write. Which sounds awful because, of course, I should say I stopped for my family but it’s a very, very all-consuming thing, the old writing.”

Now that he has four children of his own – his two eldest, Alexis, 22, and Madeleine, 19, are from his first marriage to Kate Chancellor – does he worry they could have inherited his capacity for unhappiness?

“Put it this way: none of them seems to be as radically unhappy as I was. And for that, I’m grateful.”

Although Self had an ambivalent relationship with his parents, much of the inspiration for Umbrella came from his own family history. In the book, Audrey’s older brother, Albert, a brilliant mathematician who ran the Woolwich Arsenal, and her younger brother, Stanley, who dies in the trenches, are directly based on Self’s paternal grandfather and great-uncle.

“My grandfather was a polymath and savant,” says Self. ” My grandparents lived in Brighton, and if you came back from the front he’d say, ‘I calculate your pace to be 26 inches, therefore you took 2,923 paces.’

“In a kind of tedious middle-aged way I was doing a bit of family history and saw that Albert had a younger brother, Stanley, which was never spoken of when I was a child. He’s in the 1911 census, and I thought, ‘Hmm, he must have died in the first world war.’”

There seems to be a current vogue for first world war novels and TV adaptations. Did he watch Downton Abbey?

“I certainly watched a bit of the first series and could enjoy it just for the stage-dressing… But by the time it got to the second series it was so kind of leaden and formulaic that it was impossible to watch.”

I’m not particularly astonished to hear Self didn’t take to the light campery of prime-time period television. He is not a man who likes to make things easy for himself. At one point, eager to explain how he tackled the extensive research for Umbrella, he leaps up to show me a black notebook. It is filled with yet more scribbled Post-It notes organised into sub-categories under separate headings for “Metaphors”, “Tropes” and “Ideas”. He explains that the entire novel is shaped like an umbrella – with curved spokes of narrative radiating outwards from a central scene.

He is already beavering away at his next novel, the working rubric for which is, he tells me, “Jaws without the shark”. He rolls a cigarette and lights it, taking a drag and blowing out smoke with a wry smile, aware of how absurd this might sound. For someone with such an inquisitive drive, he is surprisingly easy to be around – solicitous, funny and kind. He would say, of course, that the world cannot be understood through simple observation. He might be right: I’m not sure anything could fully explain what goes on in Will Self’s brain.

Still, he makes a great cup of coffee.

Umbrella is published by Bloomsbury on 30 August.

Filed under: Books by admin
J Mascis: ‘I never took it that seriously’

First published online by Paul Lester.

 

Hi, J. Where are you?

At the K-West hotel in West London. I’m in London doing interviews for the new Dinosaur Jr album (1).

Ah, yes. I Bet On Sky. It’s got guitars on it. Lots of them. Have you ever considered making a dubstep album?

Well, somebody made an electronic Dinosaur Jr album this year with lots of songs from [1987's] You’re Living All Over Me and [1988's] Bug (2) so … it could be done. But I probably wouldn’t do too much electronic stuff. I listen to oldies like Kraftwerk, but nothing new. Reggae and dub I like, but I haven’t dived in yet. Atari Teenage Riot sampled one of our songs.

There’s a track on your new album called Rude. What’s the rudest thing you’ve ever said to anybody?

“You’re fucked.” To somebody’s mom. I was 19.

Why did you tell her that?

Cos she was fucked.

In what way was she fucked?

I’d stayed over the night at her house and she basically tortured me. She’d walk around coughing and at dinner time she said: “What do you wanna eat?” and I said: “I don’t care,” so she said: “If I put some shit on a plate, would you eat that?” I said: “No, probably not.”

Talking of excrement … You once played a show with legendary coprophiliac GG Allin. What was that like?

He was nice. Until he got onstage. Then he flipped a switch. He took a lot of drugs, and Ex-Lax (3). It was quite ugly. He rammed the mic up his butt, cut himself everywhere, he was covered in blood and shit within minutes. They threw him out of the club after four songs.

He was described as “the most spectacular degenerate in rock’n'roll history”. Do you have a moral position on degeneracy of that order?

A moral position? It was quite an unpleasant experience.

Can such behaviour be defended on artistic grounds?

Sure. I mean, it definitely had an effect on people. No one was near the stage. Everyone was against the back wall of the club. He [Allin] had a song called I’m Gonna Rape You and he’d say, “This is where I go out in the crowd and rape the girl so keep playing the guitar solo till I get back onstage.” The fact is, he wouldn’t have to because these girls were happy to give themselves to him.

You were voted the 86th best guitarist in a Rolling Stone poll. Do you know who you were sandwiched between?

I forget.

Andy Summers of The Police and James Hetfield of Metallica. How good are you on guitar? Up there with the greats?

Er, no.

Dinosaur Jr were the Chuck Berry to Sonic Youth’s Elvis. Discuss.

 

That doesn’t sound right.

Nirvana, Pixies, Dinosaur Jr and Sonic Youth are the four horsemen of the grunge apocalypse, though, aren’t they?

Right.

Which was the most important in the development of American rock?

Nirvana, I guess.

Really?

They’re the Beatles to Sonic Youth’s… Deep Purple (4).

Do you ever consider the importance of Dinosaur Jr in the scheme of things?

No.

Are you the godfather of alternative rock?

I don’t know… [laughs]. All labels are offensive in some way.

Was “grunge” offensive?

Not really, but I think of Mudhoney as grunge and everybody else is part-grunge. Our initial concept for Dinosaur was “ear-bleeding country”.

Have you ever played the Grand Ole Opry? (5)

No, but if we did play to country audiences I’m sure they’d be appalled.

Are you really the slow- and soft-talking stoner slacker of early-’90s renown, or were you just winding journalists up and when the interviews were over you’d talk at a regular pace and volume?

Yeah, I mean … obviously I seem stoned all the time and talk slow. I think that’s what it is. But I didn’t even realise I talked slow until people started telling me.

Were you like that at school?

I didn’t feel like I was quiet. When journalists started writing about it, then you realise what people think you’re doing.

Did that make you want to do it more to annoy them?

No.

You’re the son of a dentist. Did you get free treatment?

Oh yeah, but it’s strange. You know how they say, “The cobbler’s son has no shoes”? It’s kind of like that scenario. Dad didn’t really want to ever see anybody in the family. Like, my mom would make appointments under fake names. So you’re in a weird position. You can’t go to another dentist, but your dad doesn’t really want to deal with it.

Is it true that Brits have terrible teeth compared to Americans?

I’ve noticed that in the past, definitely. I don’t know about now.

How are yours? Capped and whitened?

I have a couple of gold teeth. I had braces for a year but I didn’t wear the retainer.

Your relationship with your Dinosaur Jr bandmate Lou Barlow was famously fractured. (6) How are relations since your 2005 reunion?

Um … ok.

Are there bands you wish could have worked things out like you two did? The Smiths, say?

I can’t recommend it for anyone. People have to do what they want to do. I wanted to see The Birthday Party [again], but the bassplayer died.

Your wife is from Germany, and your surname is Italian. Did this cause problems during the recent European semi-finals?

I don’t know. No. I don’t care. Does my wife care? A little bit. Not too much.

How’s your German these days?

Not too good. My wife’s family are from Berlin. I’m going there next week.

German is a language uniquely demanding of force and decibels, isn’t it?

That’s not true. Our first roadie was German and he mumbled a lot.

What comedy are you into?

I like Curb Your Enthusiasm. Mighty Boosh.

Americans always like British comedy, and vice versa (7).

I love Larry David and Louis CK

Have you ever met Larry David?

I’ve come close. “Oh, Larry David was here!” That’s happened a few times.

You used to say Bug was your worst album. Which was your best?

You’re Living All Over Me. That’s the one where everything came together.

Have you spent 25 years trying to recreate the feeling you had on that album, or is that not possible?

Yeah, it’s impossible. When the stars align and everything comes together. And, you know, we had a goal, which was to get on SST Records (8). So we made that record on SST. Where do you go when you’ve achieved your goal?

Do you have a new goal?

No. That was the last one. [Chuckles]

You have a four-year-old son. Do you think your son may well rebel against your slacker reputation by becoming a solicitor or doctor?

It’s hard to tell what he’ll do to rebel. I don’t want to think about it. It’s got to be bad.

On the Rollercoaster tour of 1991, which you did with My Bloody Valentine, Blur, The Jesus And Mary Chain and Dinosaur Jr, who was most fun to hang around with?

Blur probably. They were definitely a lot more fun than any other band, for sure.

Really? You didn’t find Damon [Albarn] to be a pompous blowhard?

Yeah. But you only realised that after. Not at the time. Just in subsequent years.

Damon was the one with the reputation for being loud and getting the other members of Blur embroiled in fights on the road.

Yeah, I can see that. There was a bit of “say one thing to your face and another [behind your back]…” The Mary Chain were way more socially retarded than Dinosaur, which was interesting. It took them a whole tour to do much talking. They were reclusive and seemed petrified of people.

So it could have been one of those rare occasions when you might have been tempted to turn to someone and say, “For God’s sake, man, speak up and be a bit more forthcoming!”?

Right …

Have you ever got tired of people comparing your vocal and guitar style to Neil Young?

Yeah.

Have you ever met him?

Yeah. It was great. He said he was a fan of ours at the time – it was ’93.

Have you ever had an uncomfortable experience, meeting a hero of yours?

Yeah. Glenn Danzig(9). He was just, you know… He wasn’t very friendly.

Isn’t it part of the deal, though, for musicians to behave all rock star-y, rude and aloof?

No, I didn’t like it.

Can you be cool and not a jerk?

Sure. I mean, I think most people who think I’m a jerk are really hyper and if I don’t answer them fast enough at that moment they’ve already written me off as an asshole before I even speak.

If you Google your name, one of the first things that comes up is “Five Awesomely Awkward J Mascis Interviews” (10)

Right.

There’s one where a mumsy-looking woman called Maureen grills you

Yeah, she’s my friend’s mum. She’s the lady I mentioned earlier who I told: “You’re fucked”! We’ve become friends. She’s pretty funny!

Your reunion albums have been good. Can you think of a reunion where the albums have sucked?

Yeah. It seems like most of them. I thought the Gang Of Four one was weird, where they re-recorded songs from Entertainment!. I never heard it, but I thought it was bizarre. They started doing it [the comeback] when we did [circa 2005] and they were really good live and I had hopes that they would do something, or keep going, but that seemed like a weird move.

You were featured on the cover of Spin magazine once next to the proclamation, “J Mascis Is God”. What did you think when you saw that?

I was mortified.

Wasn’t there a tiny bit of pleasure in being compared to an all-powerful deity?

No.

What are your views on who the real God is?

I’m not sure.

But it’s not you?

No.

Has it ever been you?

No.

You once said, “Interviews are stupid. I have nothing to say about the album.” Do you still feel the same way?

Yeah [laughs].

Does that kind of deification make you want to debunk the interview situation?

Oh yeah. You know. I never took it that seriously.

Would that be your epitaph: “I Never Took It That Seriously”?

No.

Gene Simmons recently told me what his would be: “Thank You And Good Night”.

Wasn’t Bukowski’s “Don’t Try”? (11) That wouldn’t be mine, but I like that one.

Footnotes

(1) I Bet On Sky is released by PIAS on September 17
Back to article

(2) A project launched by Brett Nelson of Built To Spill in which renowned rockers do electronic versions of their own songs.
Back to article

(3) “A Trusted Treatment For Constipation For 100 Years” .
Back to article

(4) Great band and all, but Deep Purple weren’t particularly associated with grunge, or US alt rock. More of that Mascis irony.
Back to article

(5) Aka “the spiritual home of country music”
Back to article

(6) Between splitting up and reuniting in 2005, Lou Barlow and Dinosaur bandmate Murphy were alleged to have called Mascis, among other things, an “asshole”, a “dick,” and a “Nazi”
Back to article

(7) Possibly the most famous example of an American lionising UK comedy is Snoop Dogg’s patronage of Benny Hill.
Back to article

(8) Label home of Black Flag, Meat Puppets and, briefly, Sonic Youth.
Back to article

(9) The metal legend is obviously prone to hissy fits – at the Bonnaroo festival in June he had to be held back by security from attacking photographers
Back to article

(10) One such interview included this typically terse exchange:

You really don’t like to play guitar?”

“No.”

“Why do you do it?”

“Dunno.”

Back to article

(11) Poet laureate of American lowlife. Was more loquacious than Mascis.
Back to article

Filed under: Music by admin
The philosopher making the moral case for US drones: ‘There’s no downside’

First published online by Rory Carroll in Monterey.

 

At first sight, Bradley Strawser resembles a humanities professor from central casting. He has a beard, wears jeans, quotes Augustine and calls himself, only half in jest, a hippie. He opposes capital punishment and Guantánamo Bay, calls the Iraq invasion unjust and scorns neo-conservative foreign policy hawks. “Whatever a neocon is, I’m the opposite.”

His office overlooks a placid campus in Monterey, an oasis of California sun and Pacific zephyrs, and he lives up the road in Carmel, a forested beauty spot with an arts colony aura. Strawser has published works on metaphysics and Plato and is especially fond of Immanuel Kant.

Strawser is also, it turns out, an outspoken and unique advocate for what is becoming arguably the US’s single most controversial policy: drone strikes. Strawser has plunged into the churning, anguished debate by arguing the US is not only entitled but morally obliged to use drones.

“It’s all upside. There’s no downside. Both ethically and normatively, there’s a tremendous value,” he says. “You’re not risking the pilot. The pilot is safe. And all the empirical evidence shows that drones tend to be more accurate. We need to shift the burden of the argument to the other side. Why not do this? The positive reasons are overwhelming at this point. This is the future of all air warfare. At least for the US.”

His forceful defence of the military use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), as drones are also called, is largely the reason he has landed a tenure-track post as assistant professor of philosophy at Monterey’s Naval Postgraduate School, an elite college which gives master’s and PhD courses to military officers, academics and policymakers.

The newly created post, part of the school’s defence analysis department, underlines a belief that drones and military ethics are set to become ever more fraught topics in Washington, Islamabad, Kabul and other capitals. “The school wanted a voice in that conversation, so they hired me. My job talk was on the ethics of drones. It’s what I’ve become most known for.”

Strawser, 33, a married father of two young children, just moved here from his previous post as resident research fellow at the Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership in Annapolis, Maryland. He has yet to unpack boxes and properly furnish his office but there is little doubt he will be a vocal, and in some quarters reviled, voice in the debate.

He has edited a book – Killing By Remote Control: The Ethics of an Unmanned Military – to be published soon by Oxford University Press. Drones, controlled by air force operators in Nevada and New Mexico who track targets on screens, have become Washington’s main weapon against Islamist militants in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. The US reportedly has 7,000 drones operating – more than manned aircraft – and 12,000 more on the ground.

Strained relations

The American Civil Liberties Union estimates strikes have killed 4,000 people, a significant number of them civilians, since 2002, with the tempo sharply accelerating under President Barack Obama.

Figures from the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism show that CIA drones stuck Pakistan 75 times in 2011, causing up to 655 fatalities, including as many as 126 civilians.

Pakistani authorities reported that 19 people died last Friday in an attack in the Dattakhel region in North Waziristan, further straining relations with Washington which has ignored protests from Islamabad.

Christof Heyns, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, recently said some strikes may constitute “war crimes” and that they would encourage other states to flout long-established human rights standards. Jimmy Carter, the former president, echoed unease amid reports detailing White House “kill lists”.

“The US can no longer speak with moral authority on human rights,” Carter said.

Strawser, who calls himself “doveish” on foreign policy, has proven an unexpected and forthright champion for the barrage of Hellfire missiles. His background may partly explain it. He is a self-described “army brat”, the son of an academic father who worked on air force computer systems, and grew up on air force bases.

After obtaining a bachelor’s degree in history and English, he followed his father’s footsteps and served seven years in the air force as an administrator – he did not see combat – before taking graduate night courses and “falling in love” with philosophy. He taught ethics courses while obtaining a PhD. His dissertation was on just war and moral responsibility, a recurring topic in his work.

Strawser now lives in the same town as Clint Eastwood and may soon become known as philosophy’s answer to Dirty Harry. With an affable tone, he methodically blasts objections to the drone strikes taking place 7,000 miles away. “When I started studying this topic I didn’t know this would be my conclusion. But that’s where my analysis led me.”

‘What matters to me is whether the cause itself is justified’

One objection sometimes posited is that there is something wrong or ignoble in killing through such lopsided asymmetry. “I share the kind of gut feeling that there’s something odd about that. But I don’t see the ethical problem. What matters to me is whether the cause itself is justified. Because if the operation is justified and is the right thing to do – and by the way I’m not claiming all US military strikes are – then asymmetry doesn’t matter.”

In an analogous case of police officers in a shootout with bank robbers you would want the former to have bullet-proof vests, Strawser says. “It’s a moral gain, not a moral problem.”

Another objection is that risk-free remote killing degrades traditional conceptions of valour. “You hear that from within the military and the average American on the street. That’s a real concern, I share it. But when you speak to these pilots – or operators, there’s a debate over the correct term – they’ll tell you it’s a very stressful job. Several of them have had PTSD. Think about
what they see all day … you’re watching people die on your screen.”

“I think it does take a certain type of intellectual bravery and perhaps some moral courage to fly drones in good conscience and believe in the mission you’re doing. We are called cowards for this. Coward or not, if it’s the right thing to do, to not risk a soldier when you don’t have to, and you think the cause is just, I just feel that that normative force is too powerful to overcome.”

Strawser makes an analogy of not risking human bomb disposal teams if robots could do their job just as well.

Strawser said a third objection, that drones encouraged unjust operations by reducing the financial and political cost to the US, was serious but surmountable. “There could be an upside. There are cases when we should go to war and we don’t, especially in humanitarian case like Rwanda. More generally, this objection is highly predictive about our future moral behaviour. It’s like saying: I’m going to do something which I know is wrong now to prevent me from doing something wrong later.”

Strawser says cases where drone strikes allegedly killed innocents would be unjustified, but did not render the technology illegitimate. “If the policy to begin with is wrong then of course we shouldn’t do it. It’s irrelevant if we use drones, a sniper rifle or a crossbow.” He says he considers poison gas and nuclear weapons inherently wrong because they did not discriminate – unlike drones.

“The question is whether drones will tempt us to do wrong things. But it doesn’t seem so because we have cases where drones were used justly and it seems they actually improve our ability to behave justly. Literally every action they do is recorded. For a difficult decision (operators) can even wait and bring other people into the room. There’s more room for checks and oversights. That to me seems a normative gain.”

Straswer says he understands why many shuddered over revelations of the so-called White House “kill lists” but believes it, in fact, shows accountability at the highest level, unlike Abu Ghraib, when authorities pinned blame on lower ranks.

He acknowledges why many called the strikes assassinations, or extra-judicial killings, but says they could be deemed “necessary and proportionate” to save lives. “People can make themselves liable to be killed by a drone strike in defence of the non-liable people they are threatening.”

Strawser is at pains to stress he is no hawk. But if a particular operation was just, and if using a drone could avert risk to a pilot without compromising the operation, the US had a duty to use drones, he says.

“The cost-savings, the ethical gain by better protecting the war fighter, increased capability: add all that together.”

In the fall, Strawser will start teaching military ethics to classes which are likely to include colonels, generals, admirals, diplomats and policy-makers. He worries that hawks could adopt his arguments about drones without taking account of his caveats. “It’s the thought that keeps me up at night. Because if my arguments were going to be misused..” The voice trails off and he shakes his head.

“In that case you could say maybe I should just keep quiet.”

Silence is unlikely. Strawser and the Naval school are mutually delighted with the appointment. “I wanted to be a working philosopher and here I am. Ridiculous good fortune.”

Filed under: World News by admin
How rave music conquered America

First published online by Simon Reynolds.

 

For anyone who lived through the 90s, the electronic dance music (EDM) explosion in America has an uncanny air of history-repeats about it. Massive gatherings of dancing youths dressed in garish freakadelic clothes? DJs treated like rock stars? Teenagers dropping dead from druggy excess? Didn’t this all happen once already? But the phenomenon isn’t so much deja vu as a rebranding coup. What were once called “raves” are now termed “festivals”; EDM is what we used to know by the name of techno. Even the drugs have been rebranded: “molly,” the big new chemical craze, is just ecstasy in powder form (and reputedly purer and stronger) as opposed to pills.

The main difference between then and now is the sheer scale of the phenomenon. Earlier this summer Electric Daisy Carnival (EDC), the most famous of the new wave of whatever-you-do-don’t-call-them-raves, drew 320,000 people to Las Vegas Motor Speedway over the course of three days. The crowds are lured to EDC and to similar dance-fests like Ultra, Electric Zoo, and IDentity not just by the headliner-piled-upon-headliner bills of superstar DJs but by the no-expense-spared spectacle of LED graphics, projection mapping and other cutting-edge visual technology.

Why did it take so long – 20 years – for techno-rave to conquer the American mainstream? Commentators sometimes compare the delay to the 15-year gap between Never Mind the Bollocks and Nevermind: 1991 as the Year Punk Broke America. But in both cases that’s a simplistic view of history: the Clash were stars in America by 1980 along with other New Wave acts, and likewise electronic dance music made a series of incursions into the US pop charts over the last two decades, only to be returned each time to the underground.

In the early 90s, KLF and C&C Music Factory, Deelite and Crystal Waters took house into the Billboard Top 40, while raves both illegal and commercial sprouted on the east and west coasts – an escalation that climaxed with 1993's Rave America, which drew 17,000 to the Californian amusement park Knots Berry Farm. Then came a lull until the electronica buzz of 1997, when MTV threw its weight behind the Prodigy, the Chemical Brothers, and Underworld. In the immediate years that followed, Fatboy Slim and Moby achieved ubiquity in TV commercials and movie soundtracks, while trance music of the fluffy Paul van Dyk/Paul Oakenfold type spurred a resurgence of raves in southern California, which by the turn of the millennium reached the 20-40,000 range.

Once again, the momentum dissipated. Radio remained hostile to electronic dance music unless it had a conventional pop song structure and vocals (as with the Prodigy’s punk-rave or Madonna’s coopting of trance on Ray of Light ). Major labels couldn’t work out how to develop electronic acts into albums-selling career artists. The next downturn for electronic music was drastic and for a while seemed terminal. Thanks to nu-metal and cool-hair bands like the Strokes and the White Stripes, rock was in the ascendant again; guitars once more sold more than turntables, a reversal of how things were trending in the 90s. In California, always America’s rave stronghold, large-scale parties all but disappeared, while all across the country, clubs moved to smaller premises and weekly events went monthly. The period from 2004-5 was the nadir: some American DJs even emigrated to Berlin, where the work prospects were better.

Watch footage from Electric Daisy Carnival:

How did the US electronic dance scene claw its way back? Basically, by doing its best to shed the word “rave” and all its associations: drugged-up kids slumped on dancefloors, hospitalisations, and the statistically rare but reputation-tarnishing deaths. Repeatedly through the 90s, governments at the state and city level enacted laws and policies designed to stamp out what concerned parents and alarmist newspapers typically called “drug supermarkets”. In Chicago, people who threw a party for friends in their own loft apartment, with no paid admission and the DJing performed by the host, could find themselves ticketed for a $10,000 fine. In New Orleans, laws originally drafted to close down crack houses were used against raves and clubs where drug taking was taking place, regardless of whether the promoter or owner was involved in selling the substances.

“The association of techno with ecstasy, we really had to overcome that stigma,” says Gary Richards of the LA-based promotions company Hard Events. “If you approach a venue owner or local authority for permits and you use the word ‘rave’, your business model is doomed.” Richards went further than most, actually banning from his Hard Festivals such rave-era “silly stuff” as glow-sticks, dummies, and cuddly toys.

The word “festival” itself represents an attempt by promoters to draw line between today’s EDM and 90s rave. From bluegrass and folk to indie and heavy metal, music festivals take place all over the US. Some have their own problems with excessive drug/alcohol use and rowdy, mob-like behaviour (remember the arson and riots at Woodstock in 1999?). But festivals don’t have the media stigma or face the punitive legislation and policing that raves do. Older and shrewder by the late 2000s, the early 90s pioneers involved in Hard Events and Insomniac (the company behind Electric Daisy Carnival) learned how to work with the system, going through the bureaucratic hoops required to get permits, and providing the level of intensive security, entrance searches and overall safety provisions that would give political cover to their local government enablers. In contrast with the 90s ethos of throwing raves in exotic and out-of-the-way places such as abandoned buildings, remote farms, and desert wilderness, promoters deliberately sought out in-plain-sight sites: ultra-mainstream venues like sports stadiums and motor sports courses.

The big breakthrough came with the 2010 Electric Daisy Carnival, for which Insomniac’s Pasquale Rotella secured the LA Memorial Coliseum: an iconic football stadium that is home to the USC Trojans and also hosted the Olympics. Yet this moment of crossover triumph for the resurgent EDM movement almost turned to catastrophe: Insomniac’s bid for respectability was dealt a near-fatal blow with the ecstasy-related death of a 15-year-old girl who somehow managed to bypass the Electric Daisy’s age restrictions and get into the event. The outcry that ensued forced EDC out of Los Angeles altogether. Insomniac now stage the Carnival in Las Vegas, a much more congenial and permissive environment that has lately become the Ibiza of North America, a place where superstar deejays like Tiesto have residencies.

“I would never want our scene to grow out of something tragic,” says Rotella. “But all that media attention was something that opened people’s eyes to how big this scene was getting. It did, I believe, assist in the explosion. Because we were pulling 130,000 people and no one knew. ” He points out that before the Coliseum, there were no other dance festivals in the US on anything like that scale. Now there’s half a dozen.

Whether or not the 2010 Electric Daisy Carnival really proves there’s no such thing as bad publicity, it’s equally true that the event showed that the link between EDM and drugs still existed. Because it wasn’t just one unlucky teenager. According to the LA Times, “about 120 [EDC] attendees were taken to hospitals, mostly for drug intoxication.”

Madonna was recently lambasted for coming onstage at Ultra in Miami and asking the EDM horde: “how many people have seen Molly?” With casuistic adroitness she subsequently made out that she wasn’t really referring to the popular powdered form of MDMA but to the dance track Have You Seen Molly? Except that tune is blatantly a drug-is-the-love song in the 90s rave tradition of Ebeneezer Goode, Let Me Be Your Fantasy and Sesame’s Treet: it features a GPS-style robot-woman saying: “Please help me find Molly/She makes my life happier, more exciting/She makes me want to dance.”

“Molly is short for ‘molecule’,” explains Nathan Messer of DanceSafe, an organization that provides guidance and pill-testing at raves all across North America. “It’s sold in sachets or baggies. Because pressed pills had gotten so diluted with adulterants, everybody wants the powder.” Molly’s reputation for purity and strength was deserved for a long while, but inevitably dealers have started to cut the powder with other substances.

However determined and stringent promoters might be in their attempts to prevent drugs getting into their events, supply tends to find a way to meet up with demand. According to Messer, the super-size festivals have their own special problems when it comes to drug safety. On the one hand, kids buy dubious substances from dealers they don’t know and are unlikely to see again given the size of the venue. On the other, there are no pill-testing facilities: promoters won’t have anything to do with outfits such as DanceSafe, because that would be a tacit admission that problems still exist, opening them to the risk of permits being denied or even having equipment confiscated.

“We provide Wonderland. You don’t need drugs,” insists Rotella. He talks up the “experience” aspect of Electric Daisy Carnival, from its dazzling barrage of state-of-the-art lighting to its dance troupes whose costumes are pitched midway between harlequin and hooker. “It’s about giving people that fantasy; that storybook experience. I want to create celebrations. EDC is like New Year’s Eve; like Mardi Gras.” Rotella says he has got no interest in becoming a concert promoter, putting on events where big name performers are the main draw. “You can see the big DJs in clubs any time. We’re doing ‘destination festivals’.” But he also stresses the role played by the audience: “I like to say our headliners are the fans. They get dressed up.”

And how! At Electric Daisy Carnival and similar dance festivals, the look has evolved from the child-like “candy raver” of the 1990s, with their pigtails and cuddly toys and pacifiers (dummies), to a slick and sexified yet also kitschy-surreal image midway between Venice Beach and Cirque Du Soleil, Willy Wonka and a Gay Pride parade: girls in Daisy Dukes and bikini tops (or even bare breasts daubed in glittery body paint) but who also wear tutus, giant furry boots in turquoise and hot pink, and fairy wings.

What the EDC ravers most recall are the “nutbags” and “mentalists” who flocked to Gatecrasher, the Sheffield club that was the focus of the trance boom of the late 90s. Not only is the music they dance to similar (a rehash-mash of trance, house and electro) but the style is a similar mix of child-like, cyberdelic-futurist, and fancy dress.

Right from the early days, there’s always been a carnivalesque side to rave culture, from the free party sound systems with names like Circus Warp to the commercial UK raves with their bouncy castles, gyroscope rides, and merry-go-rounds. Clubs, likewise, featured all sorts of eye-candy, from lasers and intelligent lighting to trip-tastic projections of cyber-kitsch graphics. The flicker and dazzle was conducive to hallucinatory drugs and the hi-tech fun ‘n’ frolics found the perfect interzone between futurism and regression to childhood. The new electronic dance festivals in America have taken this side of rave to the next level.

Daft Punk’s set at the Coachella festival in 2006, where they performed inside a huge glowing pyramid, is often cited as a turning point. Soon performers like Deadmau5 were pouring as much effort and money into LED panels and beat-synchronised animated graphics as they did into their music.

What’s different about this new breed of audio-visual entertainer is that what they offer are “custom-branded visuals predesigned to fit specific songs”. So says Drew Best, a prime mover in the US dubstep scene with his Los Angeles club/label Smog, but also the motion-graphics designer behind the fledgling company Pattern & Noise. In the old days, Best explains, what a VJ (video jockey) or lighting director did was provide improvised accompaniment to the DJ’s set. But nowadays Deadmau5 will get a designer such as Best, who worked on the former’s recent tour, to create “Pacman-type ghosts” to go with the track Ghosts ‘N’ Stuff or a “Tron-style” factory with clanking pistons to accompany Professional Griefers. The leading performers on the EDM scene are engaged in fierce competition to out-dazzle each other. Skrillex’s Skrill Cell combined projection mapping and motion capture. “Skrillex wore a suit and he had CG characters rigged to it, these 20 foot monsters on a giant wall behind him,” explains Best. “The monsters would match Skrillex’s every movement as he deejayed onstage.”

Watch Deadmau5 live in the UK:

This A/V glitz-blitz costs a lot, but then artists at the Deadmau5 level earn a lot: as much as $1m for a festival appearance, while hardest-gigging-man-in-EDM Skrillex is reportedly worth $15m. With day tickets selling at around $125 and well over 300,000 attending over three days, the Las Vegas EDC must have grossed in the region of $40m. The big money is attracting even bigger money: the mogul Robert FX Sillerman declared his intent to spend $1bn acquiring companies in the EDM field, while Live Nation, America’s leading concert promotions company, recently purchased outright Hard Events.

The increasingly bread-head and circus-like aspects of EDM have provoked a backlash from those who feel dance culture is swapping underground intimacy in favour of soul-less bombast that stuns and stupefies audiences into slack-jawed submission. The Wall Street Journal, of all places, recently railed against “The Dumbing Down of Electronic Dance Music” . Long time west coast rave watcher Dennis Romero penned a caustic verdict for LA Weekly on this June’s Vegas EDC: “A press-play parade of millionaires going through the motions.” DanceSafe’s Messer, a veteran of the idealistic PLUR (peace, love, unity, respect) oriented rave underground of the 90s, complains that the dance festivals offer a “packaged, containerised experience … These events are all about raging hard, getting as fucked up as you can. Not necessarily even about dancing, just being a face in this giant extravaganza.”

At the core of many of the complaints is the belief that these entertainment spectaculars are tyrannical in their inflexibility. “There’s a lot of stuff that’s preprogrammed,” says Drew Best. “The tracks in a Deadmau5 set precisely trigger the visual and lighting systems. All the imagery is absolutely on beat, and that beat is 128 bpm. If you see Deadmau5 several times in a row, you might see the same show.” Earlier this year Deadmau5 incited a furore with his candid admission that everybody at his level basically presses “play” and his assertion that the true artistry comes into play in the recording studio beforehand, not on the stage. In other words, he’s a producer who chooses to publicly represent his sound in person, but not a DJ in the traditional sense: a selector who responds to the mood of the crowd. EDM today has come a long way from the early days of house and techno, when sound was privileged over vision, an ethos enshrined in the title of the 1992 Madhouse compilation A Basement, a Red Light, and a Feeling. In those murky, atmospheric clubs, the deejay booth was often tucked away in a corner rather than placed up on a stage: dancers weren’t meant to all be looking in one direction, they were meant to get lost in music, and in the collective intimacy of the dancefloor .

While festivals like Electric Daisy Carnival have amplified the fantasy and fancy dress side of 90s rave, other sectors in the resurgent scene have gone in the opposite direction, concentrating on the music. Hard Festival’s Richards wanted to lose the “goofy fashion” side of rave that EDC revels in. “Why do we have to dress up like idiots to listen to this music? All those girls in the furry boots, they look like Clydesdale horses!” As “hard” suggests, Richards presents electronic music as modern rock: an old spirit encased in new digital flesh.

It’s a strategy he pursued through the record industry for years. First he worked at Rick Rubin’s American label, at a time circa 1992 when the Def Jam co-founder was briefly convinced that techno was the new punk, or the new hip hop: a revolution waiting to take the country by storm. Then Richards ran his own major label imprint 1500 Records. But just like with his stint at American, he struggled to find a way to sell electronic music through the conventional rock channels. By 2005, that was becoming irrelevant, as the industry was struggling to sell records in any genre. So with perfect timing, Richards formed Hard, a live promotions company, catching the rising tide of live performances and festivals. And it’s through the live experience – something that can’t be shared or bookmarked for later listening, that you have to be present for in real-time – that EDM has really achieved lift-off. Even artists who sell a goodly number of MP3s and make an impression on the Billboard Top 40, such as Skrillex, make the bulk of their income from live shows.

As much as EDM’s spread owes a huge deal to the internet and the circulation of DJ mixes and YouTubed tracks via social media and message boards, what’s striking about the rise of the leading artists is how much it depends on the old-fashioned rock biz grind of touring. Blood Company, the management team behind Skrillex, specialise in hardcore metal bands such as Atreyu and Revoker. “They used the same strategy with Skrillex, which is putting the band on a bus and going to every town in America,” says Drew Best. Last autumn, Skrillex’s two-month Mothership tour played 55 dates across the US. “He took my partner at Smog, the DJ and producer 12th Planet, with him and they were stopping at middle-American cities and college towns that aren’t even on the radar of your electronic booking agents, whose typical approach is to fly artists such as the Chemical Brothers in to the major cities plus a couple of pre-existing festivals.”

In some ways it’s odd that no one thought to try this kind of grass-roots, hard-slog approach to breaking electronic artists before. “Performers such as Skrillex are incredibly efficient touring operations compared to rock bands, ” says Matt Adell of Beatport, the online music retailer that’s something like the deejay’s equivalent to iTunes. “It’s less expensive than a rock group because there’s just one performer, there’s much less gear and it’s easier to set up because there’s no live microphones. So the support team required is so much smaller.” Hoping to retrace the path to success taken by Skrillex, Blood Company now have several other electronic acts on their roster, including American dubstep artists the Juggernaut and J Rabbit.

Paralleling the rocktronica approach of Gary Richards, the rise of dubstep in America represents a countervailing force of hardness and darkness at odds with the escapist fantasy side of EDM developed by the mega-festivals. Best points to a September 2006 Radio One show by Mary Ann Hobbs as a critical moment in dubstep’s dissemination through North America. “Dubstep Warz was this session where she had all the key DJs on the scene playing tracks, but more importantly talking about the music and the culture. It really painted a picture of what dubstep meant. That show was traded throughout the Internet, to the point where it’s almost a cliche to say that it influenced you. Hobbs also talked about Dubstepforum in that broadcast. At that point it had a few hundred users. But subsequently it just grew and grew until it now has a million.”

The internet helped to obliterate the time-lag that always used to hamper the US outposts of UK-based scenes like jungle. Because of the dubplate system, whereby the leading British drum & bass DJs played the latest sounds months before their official release, by the time American deejays got hold of the tracks as expensive imports, the UK scene was already six months into the future. But dubstep, as the first fully networked dance scene, is globally synchronized: sound-files are traded more freely and new tracks gets edited out of DJ mixes on pirate radio and posted as YouTube by fans.

By 2007, not only was dubstep accessible in a way that jungle, UK garage and grime had never been, but the music itself was getting more accessible: increasingly in your face, full-on, and hard-riffing. In its formative years, dubstep had been a connoisseur’s sound: deep and dark, moody and meditational, appealing to an audience largely composed of former junglists and 90s-rave veterans. Gradually the sound gathered new, younger recruits, proving particularly popular with students. DJs such as Skream and Plastician found themselves playing bigger halls and, consciously or unconsciously, started gearing both their sets and their own productions to what would make a big crowd go nuts. Some observers say the ban on smoking in clubs played its role: with a sly, discreet spliff no longer an option, punters switched to pills and energy levels accordingly rose. Whatever the case, dubstep transformed into a big-room, peak hour sound: proper rave music.

New populist heroes such as Caspa and Rusko emerged, amping up the aggression levels and intensifying the wobble basslines that drove dancers crazy. In the early dubstep, the bass drop was a tectonic quake of sub-low frequencies. But now it shifted into the mid-range, with intricately edited, brutally baroque basslines that contorted and backfired like the solo of a lobotomized guitarist. Multiple bass-patterns and bass-timbres were layered to form a churning slurry, like a chainsaw shearing through sewage. Track titles and artist names played up the expulsive and repulsive aspect of the new style (Stenchman’s discography includes Puking Over and The Taste of Vomit) and fans enthused about “filthstep”. These abject-yet-inorganic basslines largely stemmed from a single music-making program, Massive. Made by Native Instruments, it’s a synthesizer plug-in that sits in a producer’s laptop or digital audio workstation and allows him or her to slather different synth-textures together to make the sickest, slimiest bassline.

Listen to The Taste of Vomit by Stenchman:

The Massive sound basically made dubstep massive in the US. A key moment was another widely circulated mix, this time created by the Vancouver-based deejay Excision for the 2008 Shambalaya festival. “Excision isolated the most aggressive, industrial sounding tracks around,” says Best. “Nothing but the hardest dubstep. People here ate that up.”

Meanwhile, many original dubstep believers were recoiling from the rowdy, macho atmosphere that had descended on the scene. “Brostep” was the derisive term coined to discourage the masculinist tendency, mock it out of existence. According to Best, “bro” brings to mind steroid-stacked frat boys and truck-driving dudes into Monster Energy drinks. But the term began to be embraced as a positive identity. “I’ve actually been sent demo tracks by people who say: ‘I make brostep.’”

Ultimately dubstep’s drift towards harder-and-crazier sounds proved unstoppable. In the UK, many of the scene’s guardians refused to go along with it and dispersed into the milder, semi-experimental or house-ified realms of “post-dubstep”. But in America, outfits like Smog embraced the new direction. For Best, dubstep was moving in to claim the space abandoned by rock, through its retreat during the 2000s into either antiquarian retro irrelevance or the non-visceral gentility of indie, all wordsmith craft and over-embellished arrangements. That space was the perennial demand for a tough, aggressive but forward-looking sound for the release of pent-up frustration.

Choosing venues for their increasingly frequent and well-attended dubstep events, Smog deliberately gravitated to Los Angeles’s rock’n'roll venues. “Before I’d done drum’n'bass nights and whenever we’d booked into anywhere polished, it always ended in flames. Bathrooms got trashed, mirrors had tags etched into them. When we started doing Smog, it was same kind of aggressive crowd, so we avoided fancy nights with a dress code and bottle service and went for dark, gritty basement bars. Then a punk rock club called the Echo hooked up with us. Next thing you know at our Smog nights, there’s kids moshing and deejays stage-diving.”

Nu-skool dubstep has become a locus for generational identity in America, says Best. “The mid-range bass sound just captured the attention of young people. It’s like the high-pitched, aggravating sound of a guitar solo in the 70s. Something your parents are going to hate.” A video on YouTube, Elders React to Dubstep, plays on this idea: various old folk, exposed to a barrage of bass-screech, offer comments such as “incomprehensible”, “like Jackass in a bottle”, and, revealingly, “it make me feel like the future is now”. They also suggest genre names for the music, one of which is even better than brostep: metalla-purge.

Watch Elders React to Dubstep:

Although not a dubstep artist per se, Skrillex incorporates elements from the genre into his own eclectic brand of high-energy electro-dance. (The name Skrillex could almost be onomatopoeia for brostep’s shredded, twisting bass lines.) According to Best, Skrillex attended some of the early Smog nights and noticed the rock-of-the-future vibe, which resonated with his own background as the singer in the screamo band From First to Last.

“In America now, Skrillex is the biggest thing since Nirvana,” says Best. “You’re witnessing a whole new cultural revolution happening.” He thinks the rocktronica tendency is set to intensify with the emergence of artists like Knife Party (two former members of Pendulum, the Australian outfit who turned drum’n'bass into a new form of arena rock) and Mosquito (“Daft Punk meets Prodigy meets Skrillex”). Then there’s a figure like Bassnectar, who can play the big carnival-style festivals but also takes his gnarly-but-trippy version of dubstep to events like Electric Forest, where he’ll play on the same bill as jam bands like String Cheese Incident. Descendants of the Deadhead culture that was left in the lurch when the Grateful Dead expired, jam band fans have turned onto dubstep in a huge way.

Right now the EDM scene is an uneasy coalition between the slamming rocktronica of Skrillex and Bassnectar and the fluffy feel-good trance-house of DJs like Avicii, Kaskade, Swedish House Mafia, and Steve Aoki. On one side, there’s Hard’s Gary Richards who wants to push electronic music even further away from rave’s disreputable and daft past. On the other, there’s Electric Daisy Carnival, which has preserved not just rave’s hands-in-the-air euphoria but some of its subcultural ritual aspects too.

Rituals like “tutting”, which evolved out of the glove-dances performed by American ravers in the 90s but which now enhances the intricate hand-movements with glowing and flickering LED fingertips. Tutting is both a competitive form of creative expression (breakdancing for hands) and a practice inextricably entwined with drug culture (it’s kids putting on mini-lightshows for their tripped-out companions). Hard’s Gary Richards can’t stand the glove-dance phenomenon: “I’m like, ‘look at the stage, not your friend’s fingers”. But by suppressing this element from his events, he’s effectively reducing the participatory aspects of rave that gave it so much of its charm and distinctiveness as a subculture.

“Without the people, it’s nothing,” says Pasquale Rotella. “The day it’s turns into just a concert, I’m not going to be inspired anymore.” What the success of Electric Daisy Carnival shows is that if you provide people with a forum in which they can experience a sense of collectivity and occasion along with sheer sensory overload, they don’t really care whether it’s “underground” or not. Rotella says his dream and long-term plan is to build “an adult Disneyland.”

Simon Reynolds is the author of books including Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture and Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past

Filed under: Music by admin
Forced marriage blights the lives of scores of learning disabled people

First published online by Frances Ryan.

 

Six years after her marriage finally ended, Sufia Ahmed has stopped biting her arms and using razors to cut herself. Her mother says she feels guilty, stressing repeatedly that she never would have forced her daughter to marry if she had known what would happen to her.

Ahmed, 33, had no idea what was going on when her family’s community decided she was a good match for a man who had recently arrived from India. He needed a visa, and, as Ahmed has a learning disability, it was felt no one else would want to marry her.

“Mum knows best,” Ahmed recalls. “[I thought] she’d marry me to a nice man. I would get married and be like my sister. I hoped my husband would think I’m pretty.”

Instead, a year into the marriage, her husband was taking all of her benefits and sending the money to his family, who lived abroad, and was regularly beating and raping her. When she became pregnant, his continued abuse caused her to miscarry, she says.

Ahmed’s is not an isolated incident. More than 50 cases of people with learning disabilities forced into marriage were reported to the government’s Forced Marriage Unit (FMU) last year. Many say they were repeatedly raped until they became pregnant. Many routinely faced physical and emotional abuse.

Rachael Clawson, a social work academic at the University of Nottingham, who worked with the Ann Craft Trust to carry out the research, says these figures are “the tip of the iceberg”. According to her understanding of the issue, hundreds of adults with a learning disability, such as Ahmed, could have been forced into marriage and abused.

“All types of abuse of people with learning disabilities are under-reported … and there is no reason to think the abuse of forced marriage would be any different. It is likely to be vastly under reported,” she says.

It is the first time that a practice hitherto associated with honour in Asian communities or with immigration issues has been found to endanger people with learning disabilities. In 2011, there were 1,468 instances where the FMU gave advice or support related to a possible forced marriage. Of these, 66 instances involved those with disabilities, of which 56 had learning disabilities.

“People with a learning disability can be particularly vulnerable to forced marriage,” says Mark Goldring, chief executive of learning disability charity Mencap. “[Those] with a learning disability have a right to develop personal relationships, like anyone else … but the issue here is that incidences of forced marriage can involve people who are unlikely to have the capacity to consent to such a relationship.”

Any marriage where either party does not have the capacity to consent is legally classified as forced. However, Clawson found that many parents of children with a learning disability do not know this is the case. “They didn’t even realise what they were doing was forced marriage, ” she says. Some parents even told health professionals of their plans.

Although all the forced marriages she researched were from within communities where there is a cultural tradition of forced marriage, including families of Pakistani or Indian origin, and others from the Middle East, Africa and Europe, obtaining a visa for a foreign spouse was notably low down on the list of motivations. The main reason most parents gave for forcing their daughters, and sons, to marry was to provide them with a carer, says Clawson.

Mandy Sanghera, a human rights activist who over 20 years has dealt with more than 200 cases in the UK and Canada of people with a learning disability being forced to marry, and who worked on the FMU study, says for parents of adults with learning disabilities, forced marriage is often an act of desperation.

“Many are struggling with their caring responsibilities due to old age, poor health and even not being able to manage their child’s behaviour or disability,” she says. “Parents will try to access services such as education, health and social care without getting anywhere. Out of desperation, they’ll [even] take their child abroad to get a spouse-cum-carer.”

The stigma around disability in some communities is also a factor in many of the cases studied, according to Clawson. Marriage can be seen as a way to “normalise” people with learning disabilities. Others believe that taking on the role of husband or wife will somehow “cure” the disabled person, she says.

Sanghera is emphatic that such cultural beliefs are no excuse. “Even if families have the right intention, they are breaking the law,” she says. “No one has the right to make life-changing decisions on another person’s behalf.”

Teertha Gupta, a QC and barrister specialising in family law and forced marriage, says that as a result of forcing their children into marriages, parents are often “aiding and abetting” their subsequent abuse. “They are really forcing them into marriage. But also potential sexual offences are being committed … for an individual who doesn’t, who cannot, consent to sexual relations – [which parents are] aiding and abetting,” he told BBC Radio 4's Face the Facts, which explores the issue in a programme broadcast on Wednesday.

Ahmed remembers begging for the abuse to stop. “I don’t like this game. I don’t want to play any more,” she says she told her husband. She couldn’t understand why it was happening. It continued for three years until, having acquired UK residency, her husband left.

In many marriages the spouse without the learning disability is the victim. The person may be unaware they are marrying someone who is unable to consent, Clawson points out. They are often used by their in-laws for chores and forced to care for elderly relatives, as well as their partner.

But the trap is much harder to escape for the spouse with the learning disability. The same factors that make people with learning disabilities vulnerable to being forced into marriage can make it difficult for them to leave. They are often reliant on their abusers for care. They may already be isolated and lack the communication skills to disclose their abuse. Ahmed’s situation only came to light when she was hospitalised for a miscarriage.

Worryingly, health visitors often fail to detect the warning signs, Clawson found. “Professionals are less likely to recognise abuse with people with learning difficulties for a whole range of different reasons such as reliance on the parent to speak on the disabled person’s behalf,” she says. In Ahmed’s case, her mother remained silent because she was worried about the family’s honour being disgraced should the abuse be disclosed.

David Cameron confirmed in June that forcing someone to marry is to become a criminal offence in England and Wales, leaving parents who coerce their children into a marriage facing the prospect of prison. The announcement included a £500,000 fund to help schools and other agencies to spot early signs of a forced marriage, and a major summer campaign to raise awareness of the risk of forced marriage abroad.

The FMU, which is a joint initiative between the Home Office and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, says it is working with the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services to emphasise the issue of people with learning disabilities being forced into marriages. A Home Office spokesman says the government aims to “ensure this issue is continually highlighted among those with responsibility for safeguarding vulnerable adults”.

The reality is, even if abuse is detected, victims face real difficulties getting out. There is just one refuge in the UK equipped to support forced marriage victims who have learning disabilities. “There is a terrible lack of options for people with learning disabilities who are escaping abuse and forced marriages,” says Asha Jama, manager of Beverley Lewis House refuge, east London.

The problem, she says, is “compounded by social care cuts. Statutory authorities are placing [victims] in a supported living service or care home. These services are not geared up to provide the specialist support needed to address the abuse the woman has faced.”

As a result of her abuse, Ahmed’s mental health deteriorated and she began to self-harm. “I have ruined my daughter’s life,” says her mother. “I will live with the guilt of what I put her through. Sufia put up with the abuse for my izzat [honour]. I am the one picking up the pieces. Where is my community now?”

• Some names have been changed. Face the Facts is on BBC Radio 4 on 1 August at 12.30pm and repeated on 5 August at 9pm

Filed under: Society by admin
Next Page »
Advertisement

(unless you have ad-blocking turned on)

 

Subscribe

Subscribe to the rss feed

Follow thelonggoodread on twitter

Recent Posts

David Hasselhoff: ‘If we have to go with the Hoff to pay the rent, let’s go with the Hoff’
Roll up for the financial crisis tour
Will Self: ‘I don’t write for readers’
J Mascis: ‘I never took it that seriously’
The philosopher making the moral case for US drones: ‘There’s no downside’
How rave music conquered America
Forced marriage blights the lives of scores of learning disabled people
The A-Z of Gore Vidal
World Bank’s Jim Yong Kim: ‘I want to eradicate poverty’
Stewart Lee: the slow death of the Edinburgh Fringe
Why social media isn’t the magic bullet for self-epublished authors
Enceladus: home of alien lifeforms?
James Kelman: ‘Why is my work so upsetting for people?’
Shirley Conran: all hail the queen of the bonkbuster
Read More

longform.org

Give me something to read

@longreads

@IfYouOnly

Instapaper

Categories

Art and design (53)  Books (106)  Business (30) Comment is Free (56)  Culture (44) Education (18)  Environment (59)  Film (109) Football (9)  Law (8)  Life and Style (139) Media (22)  Money (20)  Music (148) Politics (24)  Science (55)  Society (67) Sport (25)  Stage (26)  Technology (59) Television & radio (43)  Travel (28) UK news (35)  Uncategorized (34) World News (140)
Tags

Art Art and design Books Business Comedy Crime Culture Drama Economics Education Environment Europe Family Fashion Fiction Film Financial crisis Food & drink Global development Health Health & wellbeing Indie Internet Law Life and Style Media Money Music Parents and parenting Politics Pop and rock Science Society Sport Stage Technology Television Television & radio Theatre Travel UK news United States US politics Women World news
Theme: Adapted twitter bootstrap + jQuery.
Content © Copyright 2011 The Long Good Read | All Rights Reserved.
Longreads
 Follow us on Twitter
Search Our Archive

e.g. Top 10 Longreads of 2011, Steve Jobs, tech, fiction

All Article Lengths
Search
Our Picks
Community Picks
 
DeAndre McCullough (1977-2012)
The creator of The Wire remembers a young man whose life as a 15-year-old drug dealer in Baltimore was depicted in his book The Corner:

"At first, he was content with the book we wrote about his world. By the time The Corner was published it was something of an epitaph for people who were already casualties. Not just DeAndre’s father, but Boo, Bread, Fat Curt, his cousin Dinky, Miss Ella from the rec center. The book was an argument that these lives were not without meaning, that they, too, were complete human beings in the balance. He liked that someone — anyone — thought the people of Fayette Street mattered.

"In time, though, he confessed to hating the last line of the narrative, the one in which he is defined as a street dealer and addict at the moment after taking his first adult charge in a raid on a stash house on South Gilmor Street. There was a burden in that, and he grew tired of its weight.

"'That isn’t the end of the story,' he complained to me years later. 'You don’t know that the story ends that way.'"
AUTHOR:David Simon
SOURCE:davidsimon.com
PUBLISHED: Aug. 3, 2012
LENGTH: 6 minutes (1660 words)
Read Later Share
David Rakoff's 'Half Empty' Worldview Is Full Of Wit
An interview with the humorist and essayist about his book, Half Empty, his Academy Award-winning short film, and his recurrence of cancer:

"GROSS: You were diagnosed with cancer in your 20s. Now you're in your 40s and have a cancer diagnosis again. Are you dealing with it emotionally differently now in your 40s than you did in your 20s?

"Mr. RAKOFF: Yes, I think I am. I think - well, first of all, the cancer that I had in my 20s was, I even referred to it as the dilettante cancer. You know, it was Hodgkin's lymphoma, eminently curable and just a whole different ballgame from what I've got now.

"And I was a little less interested in knowing about the cancer back then in my 20s. I was sort of like, well, do whatever you need to do. I'm just going to sit here and lie back and think of England."
AUTHOR:Terry Gross
SOURCE:NPR
PUBLISHED: Sept. 21, 2010
LENGTH: 28 minutes (7017 words)
Read Later Share
Cyborg America: Inside the Strange New World of Basement Body Hackers
A writer meets with "grinders"—people who are obsessed with human enhancement through the manipulation of their body with technology—and then decides to implant a magnet in his finger:

"I chatted with Warwick from his office at The University of Reading, stacked floor to ceiling with books and papers. He has light brown hair that falls over his forehead and an easy laugh. With his long sleeve shirt on, you would never know that his arm is full of complex machinery. The unit allows Warwick to manipulate a robot hand, a mirror of his own fingers and flesh. What’s more, the impulse could flow both ways. Warwick’s wife, Irena, had a simpler cybernetic implant done on herself. When someone grasped her hand, Prof. Warwick was able to experience the same sensation in his hand, from across the Atlantic. It was, Warwick writes, a sort of cybernetic telepathy, or empathy, in which his nerves were made to feel what she felt, via bits of data travelling over the internet."
AUTHOR:Ben Popper
SOURCE:The Verge
PUBLISHED: Aug. 8, 2012
LENGTH: 20 minutes (5016 words)
Read Later Share
More Longreads …
Featured Curators

travelreads
presented by Virgin Atlantic
Discover the best articles on travel destinations and explore before you go.
View Travelreads
PrevNext
Virgin AtlanticGawker
Topics to Explore

Fiction
Comedy
Tech
Obama
Steve Jobs
Education
Interview
Science
Religion
Russia
Brooklyn
Murder
Love
Military
Hollywood
Journalism
San Francisco
Gay Marriage
Review
Oral History
Featured Posts

The Longreads Ebook: Get Our Collection of the Best Stories of the Past Year
With Longreads: Best of 2011 you get our favorite stories from publications including New York magazine, GQ, The New York Times, Lapham's Quarterly, Popular Mechanics, This Recording and The Awl. It makes a great gift to introduce your friends to Longreads, and money from the sales will be shared with the creators.
Read Later Share
Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week: Bruce Springsteen, women's health care in Texas, coping with the loss of a spouse, the Bo Xilai scandal, Olympian Hope Solo, fiction by Alexandra Thom, and a guest pick by Brian Kahn.
Read Later Share
Outside Magazine's Reading Picks: All-Things Olympic Games
Story recommendations about the Olympic Games, featuring Vanity Fair, The Fortnightly Review, The New Yorker, plus more
Read Later Share
Mother Jones's Editor Picks: Stories on the 'Genetics of Life'
The best recent long-form reportage on genetics. Featuring The New York Times, The Atlantic, and more
Read Later Share
From our partners

Save Your Longreads with the New Pocket
Read It Later is now Pocket—and a proud partner of Longreads. Save your favorite stories to Pocket for iPhone, iPad, Android and Kindle Fire. It's free.
Learn more about how it works
Publisher partner

New in This Week's
New York Magazine
From his new home base in Brooklyn, British novelist and firebrand Martin Amis talks to David Wallace-Wells about sex, porn, rioting, the difference between London and New York, and the dwindling fortunes of postmodernist literature and American empire.
Read the story
Featured Longreaders

lincourtl
Jesus Minimus, rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com
2 weeks, 3 days ago
brainpicker
Amy Winehouse: 1983 - 2011 by Jenny Eliscu, www.rollingstone.com
2 weeks, 3 days ago
mandywarhol
We Are Alive by David Remnick, www.newyorker.com
2 weeks, 3 days ago
DAMIENJOYCE
Guns N' Roses' 'Appetite for Destruction': Filthy, Sexy, Cool by Brian Hiatt, www.rollingstone.com
2 weeks, 3 days ago
matt_cardin
Sleepless in America: A $32.4 Billion Business, www.thefiscaltimes.com
2 weeks, 3 days ago
hriefs
Desperately Seeking Mitt by Wells Tower, m.gq.com
2 weeks, 3 days ago
vandelizer
American Baby Names Are Somehow Getting Even Worse, deadspin.com
2 weeks, 3 days ago
RJ_Young
Drive ins, ndepth.newsok.com
2 weeks, 3 days ago
Support Longreads

Become a Longreads Member for just $3 per month
Follow us on Twitter
Follow us on Tumblr
Visit Longreads on Facebook

Like Longreads on Facebook
Get the Longreads weekly email:
Sign up
Home
About
FAQ
Membership
Brands
Press
Team
Contact
RSS Feed
© 2012 Longreads Design by Kjell Reigstad
}

Albert Einstein
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Einstein" redirects here. For other uses, see Einstein (disambiguation).

Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein in 1921
Born 14 March 1879
Ulm, Kingdom of Württemberg, German Empire
Died 18 April 1955 (aged 76)
Princeton, New Jersey, United States
Residence Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, United Kingdom, United States
Citizenship 
Württemberg/Germany (1879–1896)
Stateless (1896–1901)
Switzerland (1901–1955)
Austria (1911–1912)
Germany (1914–1933)
United States (1940–1955)
Fields Physics
Institutions 
Swiss Patent Office (Bern)
University of Zurich
Charles University in Prague
ETH Zurich
Prussian Academy of Sciences
Kaiser Wilhelm Institute
University of Leiden
Institute for Advanced Study
Alma mater 
ETH Zurich
University of Zurich
Doctoral advisor Alfred Kleiner
Other academic advisors Heinrich Friedrich Weber
Notable students 
Ernst G. Straus
Nathan Rosen
Leó Szilárd
Raziuddin Siddiqui[1]
Known for 
General relativity and special relativity
Photoelectric effect
Mass-energy equivalence
Theory of Brownian Motion
Einstein field equations
Bose–Einstein statistics
Bose-Einstein condensate
Bose–Einstein correlations
Unified Field Theory
EPR paradox
Notable awards 
Nobel Prize in Physics (1921)
Matteucci Medal (1921)
Copley Medal (1925)
Max Planck Medal (1929)
Time Person of the Century (1999)
Spouse Mileva Maric (1903–1919)
Elsa Löwenthal (1919–1936)
Signature

Albert Einstein ( /'ælb?rt 'a?nsta?n/; German: ['alb?t 'a?n?ta?n] ( listen); 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the general theory of relativity, effecting a revolution in physics. For this achievement, Einstein is often regarded as the father of modern physics[2][3] and the most influential physicist of the 20th century. While best known for his mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc2 (which has been dubbed "the world's most famous equation"),[4] he received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect".[5] The latter was pivotal in establishing quantum theory within physics.
Near the beginning of his career, Einstein thought that Newtonian mechanics was no longer enough to reconcile the laws of classical mechanics with the laws of the electromagnetic field. This led to the development of his special theory of relativity. He realized, however, that the principle of relativity could also be extended to gravitational fields, and with his subsequent theory of gravitation in 1916, he published a paper on the general theory of relativity. He continued to deal with problems of statistical mechanics and quantum theory, which led to his explanations of particle theory and the motion of molecules. He also investigated the thermal properties of light which laid the foundation of the photon theory of light. In 1917, Einstein applied the general theory of relativity to model the structure of the universe as a whole.[6]
He was visiting the United States when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, and did not go back to Germany, where he had been a professor at the Berlin Academy of Sciences. He settled in the U.S., becoming a citizen in 1940.[7] On the eve of World War II, he helped alert President Franklin D. Roosevelt that Germany might be developing an atomic weapon, and recommended that the U.S. begin similar research; this eventually led to what would become the Manhattan Project. Einstein was in support of defending the Allied forces, but largely denounced using the new discovery of nuclear fission as a weapon. Later, together with Bertrand Russell, Einstein signed the Russell–Einstein Manifesto, which highlighted the danger of nuclear weapons. Einstein was affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, until his death in 1955.
Einstein published more than 300 scientific papers along with over 150 non-scientific works.[6][8] His great intelligence and originality have made the word "Einstein" synonymous with genius.[9]
Contents  [hide]
1 Biography
1.1 Early life and education
1.2 Marriages and children
1.3 Patent office
1.4 Academic career
1.5 Travels abroad
1.6 Emigration to U.S. in 1933
1.6.1 World War II and the Manhattan Project
1.6.2 U.S. citizenship
1.7 Death
2 Scientific career
2.1 1905 - Annus Mirabilis papers
2.2 Thermodynamic fluctuations and statistical physics
2.3 General principles
2.4 Theory of relativity and E = mc²
2.5 Photons and energy quanta
2.6 Quantized atomic vibrations
2.7 Adiabatic principle and action-angle variables
2.8 Wave–particle duality
2.9 Theory of critical opalescence
2.10 Zero-point energy
2.11 General relativity and the Equivalence Principle
2.12 Hole argument and Entwurf theory
2.13 Cosmology
2.14 Modern quantum theory
2.15 Bose–Einstein statistics
2.16 Energy momentum pseudotensor
2.17 Unified field theory
2.18 Wormholes
2.19 Einstein–Cartan theory
2.20 Equations of motion
2.21 Other investigations
2.22 Collaboration with other scientists
2.22.1 Einstein–de Haas experiment
2.22.2 Schrödinger gas model
2.22.3 Einstein refrigerator
2.23 Bohr versus Einstein
2.24 Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen paradox
3 Political and religious views
4 Love of music
5 Non-scientific legacy
6 In popular culture
7 Awards and honors
8 Publications
9 See also
10 Notes
11 References
12 Further reading
13 External links
Biography

Early life and education

Einstein at the age of three in 1882

Albert Einstein in 1893 (age 14)

Einstein's matriculation certificate at the age of 17, showing his final grades from the Aargau Kantonsschule (on a scale of 1-6).
Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, in the Kingdom of Württemberg in the German Empire on 14 March 1879.[10] His father was Hermann Einstein, a salesman and engineer. His mother was Pauline Einstein (née Koch). In 1880, the family moved to Munich, where his father and his uncle founded Elektrotechnische Fabrik J. Einstein & Cie, a company that manufactured electrical equipment based on direct current.[10]
The Einsteins were non-observant Jews. Albert attended a Catholic elementary school from the age of five for three years. Later, at the age of eight, Einstein was transferred to the Luitpold Gymnasium where he received advanced primary and secondary school education until he left Germany seven years later.[11] Although it has been thought that Einstein had early speech difficulties, this is disputed by the Albert Einstein Archives, and he excelled at the first school that he attended.[12] He was right handed;[12][13] there appears to be no evidence for the widespread popular belief[14] that he was left handed.
His father once showed him a pocket compass; Einstein realized that there must be something causing the needle to move, despite the apparent "empty space".[15] As he grew, Einstein built models and mechanical devices for fun and began to show a talent for mathematics.[10] When Einstein was ten years old, Max Talmud (later changed to Max Talmey), a poor Jewish medical student from Poland, was introduced to the Einstein family by his brother, and during weekly visits over the next five years, he gave the boy popular books on science, mathematical texts and philosophical writings. These included Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Euclid's Elements (which Einstein called the "holy little geometry book").[16][17][fn 1]
In 1894, his father's company failed: direct current (DC) lost the War of Currents to alternating current (AC). In search of business, the Einstein family moved to Italy, first to Milan and then, a few months later, to Pavia. When the family moved to Pavia, Einstein stayed in Munich to finish his studies at the Luitpold Gymnasium. His father intended for him to pursue electrical engineering, but Einstein clashed with authorities and resented the school's regimen and teaching method. He later wrote that the spirit of learning and creative thought were lost in strict rote learning. At the end of December 1894, he travelled to Italy to join his family in Pavia, convincing the school to let him go by using a doctor's note.[19] It was during his time in Italy that he wrote a short essay with the title "On the Investigation of the State of the Ether in a Magnetic Field."[20][21]
In late summer 1895, at the age of sixteen, Einstein sat the entrance examinations for the Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Zurich (later the Eidgenössische Polytechnische Schule). He failed to reach the required standard in several subjects, but obtained exceptional grades in physics and mathematics.[22] On the advice of the Principal of the Polytechnic, he attended the Aargau Cantonal School in Aarau, Switzerland, in 1895-96 to complete his secondary schooling. While lodging with the family of Professor Jost Winteler, he fell in love with Winteler's daughter, Marie. (His sister Maja later married the Wintelers' son, Paul.)[23] In January 1896, with his father's approval, he renounced his citizenship in the German Kingdom of Württemberg to avoid military service.[24] In September 1896, he passed the Swiss Matura with mostly good grades (including a top grade of 6 in physics and mathematical subjects, on a scale of 1-6),[25] and, though only seventeen, enrolled in the four-year mathematics and physics teaching diploma program at the ETH Zurich. Marie Winteler moved to Olsberg, Switzerland for a teaching post.
Einstein's future wife, Mileva Maric, also enrolled at the Polytechnic that same year, the only woman among the six students in the mathematics and physics section of the teaching diploma course. Over the next few years, Einstein and Maric's friendship developed into romance, and they read books together on extra-curricular physics in which Einstein was taking an increasing interest. In 1900, Einstein was awarded the Zurich Polytechnic teaching diploma, but Maric failed the examination with a poor grade in the mathematics component, theory of functions.[26] There have been claims that Maric collaborated with Einstein on his celebrated 1905 papers,[27][28] but historians of physics who have studied the issue find no evidence that she made any substantive contributions.[29][30][31][32]
Marriages and children
Main article: Einstein family
In early 1902, Einstein and Maric had a daughter they named Lieserl in their correspondence, who was born in Novi Sad where Maric's parents lived.[33] Her full name is not known, and her fate is uncertain after 1903.[34]
Einstein and Maric married in January 1903. In May 1904, the couple's first son, Hans Albert Einstein, was born in Bern, Switzerland. Their second son, Eduard, was born in Zurich in July 1910. In 1914, Einstein moved to Berlin, while his wife remained in Zurich with their sons. They divorced on 14 February 1919, having lived apart for five years.
Einstein married Elsa Löwenthal (née Einstein) on 2 June 1919, after having had a relationship with her since 1912. She was his first cousin maternally and his second cousin paternally. In 1933, they emigrated to the United States. In 1935, Elsa Einstein was diagnosed with heart and kidney problems and died in December 1936.[35]
Patent office

Left to right: Conrad Habicht, Maurice Solovine and Einstein, who founded the Olympia Academy

Einstein's home in Bern
After graduating, Einstein spent almost two frustrating years searching for a teaching post, but a former classmate's father helped him secure a job in Bern, at the Federal Office for Intellectual Property, the patent office, as an assistant examiner.[36] He evaluated patent applications for electromagnetic devices. In 1903, Einstein's position at the Swiss Patent Office became permanent, although he was passed over for promotion until he "fully mastered machine technology".[37]
Much of his work at the patent office related to questions about transmission of electric signals and electrical-mechanical synchronization of time, two technical problems that show up conspicuously in the thought experiments that eventually led Einstein to his radical conclusions about the nature of light and the fundamental connection between space and time.[38]
With a few friends he met in Bern, Einstein started a small discussion group, self-mockingly named "The Olympia Academy", which met regularly to discuss science and philosophy. Their readings included the works of Henri Poincaré, Ernst Mach, and David Hume, which influenced his scientific and philosophical outlook.
Academic career

Einstein's official 1921 portrait after receiving the Nobel Prize in Physics.
During 1901, the paper "Folgerungen aus den Kapillarität Erscheinungen" ("Conclusions from the Capillarity Phenomena") was published in the prestigious Annalen der Physik.[39] On 30 April 1905, Einstein completed his thesis, with Alfred Kleiner, Professor of Experimental Physics, serving as pro-forma advisor. Einstein was awarded a PhD by the University of Zurich. His dissertation was entitled "A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions".[40][41] That same year, which has been called Einstein's annus mirabilis (miracle year), he published four groundbreaking papers, on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity, and the equivalence of matter and energy, which were to bring him to the notice of the academic world.
By 1908, he was recognized as a leading scientist, and he was appointed lecturer at the University of Bern. The following year, he quit the patent office and the lectureship to take the position of physics docent [42] at the University of Zurich. He became a full professor at Karl-Ferdinand University in Prague in 1911. In 1914, he returned to Germany after being appointed director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics (1914–1932)[43] and a professor at the Humboldt University of Berlin, with a special clause in his contract that freed him from most teaching obligations. He became a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. In 1916, Einstein was appointed president of the German Physical Society (1916–1918).[44][45]
During 1911, he had calculated that, based on his new theory of general relativity, light from another star would be bent by the Sun's gravity. That prediction was claimed confirmed by observations made by a British expedition led by Sir Arthur Eddington during the solar eclipse of 29 May 1919. International media reports of this made Einstein world famous. On 7 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".[46] Much later, questions were raised whether the measurements had been accurate enough to support Einstein's theory. In 1980 historians John Earman and Clark Glymour published an analysis suggesting that Eddington had suppressed unfavorable results.[47] The two reviewers found possible flaws in Eddington's selection of data, but their doubts, although widely quoted and, indeed, now with a "mythical" status almost equivalent to the status of the original observations, have not been confirmed.[48][49] Eddington's selection from the data seems valid and his team indeed made astronomical measurements verifying the theory.[50]
In 1921, Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his explanation of the photoelectric effect, as relativity was considered still somewhat controversial. He also received the Copley Medal from the Royal Society in 1925.
Travels abroad
Einstein visited New York City for the first time on 2 April 1921, where he received an official welcome by the Mayor, followed by three weeks of lectures and receptions. He went on to deliver several lectures at Columbia University and Princeton University, and in Washington he accompanied representatives of the National Academy of Science on a visit to the White House. On his return to Europe he was the guest of the British statesman and philosopher Viscount Haldane in London, where he met several renowned scientific, intellectual and political figures, and delivered a lecture at Kings College.[51]
In 1922, he traveled throughout Asia and later to Palestine, as part of a six-month excursion and speaking tour. His travels included Singapore, Ceylon, and Japan, where he gave a series of lectures to thousands of Japanese. His first lecture in Tokyo lasted four hours, after which he met the emperor and empress at the Imperial Palace where thousands came to watch. Einstein later gave his impressions of the Japanese in a letter to his sons:[52]:307 "Of all the people I have met, I like the Japanese most, as they are modest, intelligent, considerate, and have a feel for art."[52]:308
On his return voyage, he also visited Palestine for 12 days in what would become his only visit to that region. "He was greeted with great British pomp, as if he were a head of state rather than a theoretical physicist", writes Isaacson. This included a cannon salute upon his arrival at the residence of the British high commissioner, Sir Herbert Samuel. During one reception given to him, the building was "stormed by throngs who wanted to hear him". In Einstein's talk to the audience, he expressed his happiness over the event:
I consider this the greatest day of my life. Before, I have always found something to regret in the Jewish soul, and that is the forgetfulness of its own people. Today, I have been made happy by the sight of the Jewish people learning to recognize themselves and to make themselves recognized as a force in the world.[53]:308
Emigration to U.S. in 1933

Cartoon of Einstein, who has shed his "Pacifism" wings, standing next to a pillar labeled "World Peace." He is rolling up his sleeves and holding a sword labeled "Preparedness" (circa 1933).
In February 1933 while on a visit to the United States, Einstein decided not to return to Germany due to the rise to power of the Nazis under Germany's new chancellor.[54][55] He visited American universities in early 1933 where he undertook his third two-month visiting professorship at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He and his wife Elsa returned by ship to Belgium at the end of March. During the voyage they were informed that their cottage was raided by the Nazis and his small recreational boat was confiscated. Upon landing in Antwerp on March 28th, he immediately went to the German consulate where he turned in his passport and formally renounced his German citizenship.[53]
In early April, he learned that the new German government had passed laws barring Jews from holding any official positions, including teaching at universities.[53] A month later, Einstein's works were among those targeted by Nazi book burnings, and Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels proclaimed, "Jewish intellectualism is dead."[53] Einstein also learned that his name was on a list of assassination targets, with a "$5,000 bounty on his head."[53] One German magazine included him in a list of enemies of the German regime with the phrase, "not yet hanged".[53]
He resided in Belgium for some months, before temporarily living in England.[56][57] In a letter to his friend, physicist Max Born, who also emigrated from Germany and lived in England, Einstein wrote, ". . . I must confess that the degree of their brutality and cowardice came as something of a surprise."[53]
In October 1933 he returned to the U.S. and took up a position at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey, that required his presence for six months each year.[58][59] He was still undecided on his future (he had offers from European universities, including Oxford), but in 1935 he arrived at the decision to remain permanently in the United States and apply for citizenship.[60][61] His affiliation with the Institute for Advance Studies would last until his death in 1955.[62] He was one of the four first selected (two of the others being John von Neumann and Kurt Gödel) at the new Institute, where he soon developed a close friendship with Gödel. The two would take long walks together discussing their work. His last assistant was Bruria Kaufman, who later became a renowned physicist. During this period, Einstein tried to develop a unified field theory and to refute the accepted interpretation of quantum physics, both unsuccessfully.
Other scientists also fled to America. Among them were Nobel laureates and professors of theoretical physics. With so many other Jewish scientists now forced by circumstances to live in America, often working side by side, Einstein wrote to a friend, "For me the most beautiful thing is to be in contact with a few fine Jews—a few millennia of a civilized past do mean something after all." In another letter he writes, "In my whole life I have never felt so Jewish as now."[53]

World War II and the Manhattan Project

Photograph of Albert Einstein (1947)
In 1939, a group of Hungarian scientists that included emigre physicist Leó Szilárd attempted to alert Washington of ongoing Nazi atomic bomb research. The group's warnings were discounted.[63] Einstein and Szilárd, along with other refugees such as Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner, "regarded it as their responsibility to alert Americans to the possibility that German scientists might win the race to build an atomic bomb, and to warn that Hitler would be more than willing to resort to such a weapon."[52]:630[64] In the summer of 1939, a few months before the beginning of World War II in Europe, Einstein was persuaded to lend his prestige by writing a letter with Szilárd to President Franklin D. Roosevelt to alert him of the possibility. The letter also recommended that the U.S. government pay attention to and become directly involved in uranium research and associated chain reaction research.
The letter is believed to be "arguably the key stimulus for the U.S. adoption of serious investigations into nuclear weapons on the eve of the U.S. entry into World War II".[65] President Roosevelt could not take the risk of allowing Hitler to possess atomic bombs first. As a result of Einstein's letter and his meetings with Roosevelt, the U.S. entered the "race" to develop the bomb, drawing on its "immense material, financial, and scientific resources" to initiate the Manhattan Project. It became the only country to successfully develop an atomic bomb during World War II.
For Einstein, "war was a disease . . . [and] he called for resistance to war." But in 1933, after Hitler assumed full power in Germany, "he renounced pacifism altogether . . . In fact, he urged the Western powers to prepare themselves against another German onslaught."[66]:110 In 1954, a year before his death, Einstein said to his old friend, Linus Pauling, "I made one great mistake in my life — when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be made; but there was some justification — the danger that the Germans would make them..."[67]
U.S. citizenship

Einstein accepting U.S. citizenship, 1940
Einstein became an American citizen in 1940. Not long after settling into his career at Princeton, he expressed his appreciation of the "meritocracy" in American culture when compared to Europe. According to Isaacson, he recognized the "right of individuals to say and think what they pleased", without social barriers, and as result, the individual was "encouraged" to be more creative, a trait he valued from his own early education. Einstein writes:
What makes the new arrival devoted to this country is the democratic trait among the people. No one humbles himself before another person or class. . . American youth has the good fortune not to have its outlook troubled by outworn traditions.[53]:432
As a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) at Princeton who campaigned for the civil rights of African Americans, Einstein corresponded with civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois, and in 1946 Einstein called racism America's "worst disease".[68] He later stated, "Race prejudice has unfortunately become an American tradition which is uncritically handed down from one generation to the next. The only remedies are enlightenment and education".[69]
After the death of Israel's first president, Chaim Weizmann, in November 1952, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion offered Einstein the position of President of Israel, a mostly ceremonial post.[70] The offer was presented by Israel's ambassador in Washington, Abba Eban, who explained that the offer "embodies the deepest respect which the Jewish people can repose in any of its sons".[52]:522 However, Einstein declined, and wrote in his response that he was "deeply moved", and "at once saddened and ashamed" that he could not accept it:
All my life I have dealt with objective matters, hence I lack both the natural aptitude and the experience to deal properly with people and to exercise official function. I am the more distressed over these circumstances because my relationship with the Jewish people became my strongest human tie once I achieved complete clarity about our precarious position among the nations of the world.[52]:522[70][71]
Death

The New York World-Telegram announces Einstein's death on 18 April 1955.
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.[72] 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.[73] 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."[74] He died in Princeton Hospital early the next morning at the age of 76, having continued to work until near the end.
During the autopsy, the pathologist of Princeton Hospital, Thomas Stoltz Harvey, removed Einstein's brain for preservation without the permission of his family, in the hope that the neuroscience of the future would be able to discover what made Einstein so intelligent.[75] Einstein's remains were cremated and his ashes were scattered at an undisclosed location.[76][77]
In his lecture at Einstein's memorial, nuclear physicist Robert Oppenheimer summarized his impression of him as a person: "He was almost wholly without sophistication and wholly without worldliness . . . There was always with him a wonderful purity at once childlike and profoundly stubborn."[66]
Scientific career

 

Albert Einstein in 1904

The photoelectric effect. Incoming photons on the left strike a metal plate (bottom), and eject electrons, depicted as flying off to the right.
Throughout his life, Einstein published hundreds of books and articles.[8][10] In addition to the work he did by himself he also collaborated with other scientists on additional projects including the Bose–Einstein statistics, the Einstein refrigerator and others.[78]
1905 - Annus Mirabilis papers
Main articles: Annus Mirabilis papers, Photoelectric effect, Special theory of relativity, and Mass–energy equivalence
The Annus Mirabilis papers are four articles pertaining to the photoelectric effect (which gave rise to quantum theory), Brownian motion, the special theory of relativity, and E = mc2 that Albert Einstein published in the Annalen der Physik scientific journal in 1905. These four works contributed substantially to the foundation of modern physics and changed views on space, time, and matter. The four papers are:
Title (translated) Area of focus Received Published Significance
On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light Photoelectric effect 18 March 9 June Resolved an unsolved puzzle by suggesting that energy is exchanged only in discrete amounts (quanta).[79] This idea was pivotal to the early development of quantum theory.[80]
On the Motion of Small Particles Suspended in a Stationary Liquid, as Required by the Molecular Kinetic Theory of Heat Brownian motion 11 May 18 July Explained empirical evidence for the atomic theory, supporting the application of statistical physics.
On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies Special relativity 30 June 26 September Reconciled Maxwell's equations for electricity and magnetism with the laws of mechanics by introducing major changes to mechanics close to the speed of light, resulting from analysis based on empirical evidence that the speed of light is independent of the motion of the observer.[81] Discredited the concept of a "luminiferous ether."[82]
Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content? Matter–energy equivalence 27 September 21 November Equivalence of matter and energy, E = mc2 (and by implication, the ability of gravity to "bend" light), the existence of "rest energy", and the basis of nuclear energy.
Thermodynamic fluctuations and statistical physics
Main articles: Statistical mechanics, thermal fluctuations, and statistical physics
Albert Einstein's first paper[83] submitted in 1900 to Annalen der Physik was on capillary attraction. It was published in 1901 with the title "Folgerungen aus den Kapillarität Erscheinungen," which translates as "Conclusions from the capillarity phenomena". Two papers he published in 1902–1903 (thermodynamics) attempted to interpret atomic phenomena from a statistical point of view. These papers were the foundation for the 1905 paper on Brownian motion, which showed that Brownian movement can be construed as firm evidence that molecules exist. His research in 1903 and 1904 was mainly concerned with the effect of finite atomic size on diffusion phenomena.[83]
General principles
He articulated the principle of relativity. This was understood by Hermann Minkowski to be a generalization of rotational invariance from space to space-time. Other principles postulated by Einstein and later vindicated are the principle of equivalence and the principle of adiabatic invariance of the quantum number.
Theory of relativity and E = mc²
Main article: History of special relativity
Einstein's "Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper" ("On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies") was received on 30 June 1905 and published 26 September of that same year. It reconciles Maxwell's equations for electricity and magnetism with the laws of mechanics, by introducing major changes to mechanics close to the speed of light. This later became known as Einstein's special theory of relativity.
Consequences of this include the time-space frame of a moving body appearing to slow down and contract (in the direction of motion) when measured in the frame of the observer. This paper also argued that the idea of a luminiferous aether – one of the leading theoretical entities in physics at the time – was superfluous.[84]
In his paper on mass–energy equivalence Einstein produced E = mc2 from his special relativity equations.[85] Einstein's 1905 work on relativity remained controversial for many years, but was accepted by leading physicists, starting with Max Planck.[86][87]
Photons and energy quanta
Main articles: Photon and Quantum
In a 1905 paper,[88] Einstein postulated that light itself consists of localized particles (quanta). Einstein's light quanta were nearly universally rejected by all physicists, including Max Planck and Niels Bohr. This idea only became universally accepted in 1919, with Robert Millikan's detailed experiments on the photoelectric effect, and with the measurement of Compton scattering.
Einstein concluded that each wave of frequency f is associated with a collection of photons with energy hf each, where h is Planck's constant. He does not say much more, because he is not sure how the particles are related to the wave. But he does suggest that this idea would explain certain experimental results, notably the photoelectric effect.[89]
Quantized atomic vibrations
Main article: Einstein solid
In 1907 Einstein proposed a model of matter where each atom in a lattice structure is an independent harmonic oscillator. In the Einstein model, each atom oscillates independently – a series of equally spaced quantized states for each oscillator. Einstein was aware that getting the frequency of the actual oscillations would be different, but he nevertheless proposed this theory because it was a particularly clear demonstration that quantum mechanics could solve the specific heat problem in classical mechanics. Peter Debye refined this model.[90]
Adiabatic principle and action-angle variables
Main article: Old quantum theory
Throughout the 1910s, quantum mechanics expanded in scope to cover many different systems. After Ernest Rutherford discovered the nucleus and proposed that electrons orbit like planets, Niels Bohr was able to show that the same quantum mechanical postulates introduced by Planck and developed by Einstein would explain the discrete motion of electrons in atoms, and the periodic table of the elements.
Einstein contributed to these developments by linking them with the 1898 arguments Wilhelm Wien had made. Wien had shown that the hypothesis of adiabatic invariance of a thermal equilibrium state allows all the blackbody curves at different temperature to be derived from one another by a simple shifting process. Einstein noted in 1911 that the same adiabatic principle shows that the quantity which is quantized in any mechanical motion must be an adiabatic invariant. Arnold Sommerfeld identified this adiabatic invariant as the action variable of classical mechanics. The law that the action variable is quantized was a basic principle of the quantum theory as it was known between 1900 and 1925.[citation needed]
Wave–particle duality

Einstein during his visit to the United States
Main article: Wave–particle duality
Although the patent office promoted Einstein to Technical Examiner Second Class in 1906, he had not given up on academia. In 1908, he became a privatdozent at the University of Bern.[91] In "über die Entwicklung unserer Anschauungen über das Wesen und die Konstitution der Strahlung" ("The Development of Our Views on the Composition and Essence of Radiation"), on the quantization of light, and in an earlier 1909 paper, Einstein showed that Max Planck's energy quanta must have well-defined momenta and act in some respects as independent, point-like particles. This paper introduced the photon concept (although the name photon was introduced later by Gilbert N. Lewis in 1926) and inspired the notion of wave–particle duality in quantum mechanics.
Theory of critical opalescence
Main article: Critical opalescence
Einstein returned to the problem of thermodynamic fluctuations, giving a treatment of the density variations in a fluid at its critical point. Ordinarily the density fluctuations are controlled by the second derivative of the free energy with respect to the density. At the critical point, this derivative is zero, leading to large fluctuations. The effect of density fluctuations is that light of all wavelengths is scattered, making the fluid look milky white. Einstein relates this to Raleigh scattering, which is what happens when the fluctuation size is much smaller than the wavelength, and which explains why the sky is blue.[92] Einstein quantitatively derived critical opalescence from a treatment of density fluctuations, and demonstrated how both the effect and Rayleigh scattering originate from the atomistic constitution of matter.
Zero-point energy
Main article: Zero-point energy
Einstein's physical intuition led him to note that Planck's oscillator energies had an incorrect zero point. He modified Planck's hypothesis by stating that the lowest energy state of an oscillator is equal to 1/2hf, to half the energy spacing between levels. This argument, which was made in 1913 in collaboration with Otto Stern, was based on the thermodynamics of a diatomic molecule which can split apart into two free atoms.
General relativity and the Equivalence Principle
Main article: History of general relativity
See also: Principle of equivalence, Theory of relativity, and Einstein field equations

Eddington's photograph of a solar eclipse.
General relativity (GR) is a theory of gravitation that was developed by Albert Einstein between 1907 and 1915. According to general relativity, the observed gravitational attraction between masses results from the warping of space and time 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 Albert 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.[93] So in 1908 he published an article on acceleration under special relativity. In that article, he argued that free fall is really inertial motion, and that for a freefalling observer the rules of special relativity must apply. This argument is called the Equivalence principle. In the same article, Einstein also predicted the phenomenon of gravitational time dilation. In 1911, Einstein published another article expanding on the 1907 article, in which additional effects such as the deflection of light by massive bodies were predicted.
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.
In June, 1913 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, after more than two years of intensive work Einstein abandoned the theory in November, 1915 after realizing that the hole argument was mistaken.[94]
Cosmology
Main article: Cosmology
In 1917, Einstein applied the General theory of relativity to model the structure of the universe as a whole. He wanted the universe to be eternal and unchanging, but this type of universe is not consistent with relativity. To fix this, Einstein modified the general theory by introducing a new notion, the cosmological constant. With a positive cosmological constant, the universe could be an eternal static sphere.[95]

Einstein in his office at the University of Berlin.
Einstein believed a spherical static universe is philosophically preferred, because it would obey Mach's principle. He had shown that general relativity incorporates Mach's principle to a certain extent in frame dragging by gravitomagnetic fields, but he knew that Mach's idea would not work if space goes on forever. In a closed universe, he believed that Mach's principle would hold. Mach's principle has generated much controversy over the years.
Modern quantum theory
Main article: Schrödinger equation
Einstein was displeased with quantum theory and mechanics, despite its acceptance by other physicists, stating "God doesn't play with dice." As Einstein passed away at the age of 76 he still would not accept quantum theory.[96] In 1917, at the height of his work on relativity, Einstein published an article in Physikalische Zeitschrift that proposed the possibility of stimulated emission, the physical process that makes possible the maser and the laser.[97] This article showed that the statistics of absorption and emission of light would only be consistent with Planck's distribution law if the emission of light into a mode with n photons would be enhanced statistically compared to the emission of light into an empty mode. This paper was enormously influential in the later development of quantum mechanics, because it was the first paper to show that the statistics of atomic transitions had simple laws. Einstein discovered Louis de Broglie's work, and supported his ideas, which were received skeptically at first. In another major paper from this era, Einstein gave a wave equation for de Broglie waves, which Einstein suggested was the Hamilton–Jacobi equation of mechanics. This paper would inspire Schrödinger's work of 1926.
Bose–Einstein statistics
Main article: Bose–Einstein condensation
In 1924, Einstein received a description of a statistical model from Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose, based on a counting method that assumed that light could be understood as a gas of indistinguishable particles. Einstein noted that Bose's statistics applied to some atoms as well as to the proposed light particles, and submitted his translation of Bose's paper to the Zeitschrift für Physik. Einstein also published his own articles describing the model and its implications, among them the Bose–Einstein condensate phenomenon that some particulates should appear at very low temperatures.[98] It was not until 1995 that the first such condensate was produced experimentally by Eric Allin Cornell and Carl Wieman using ultra-cooling equipment built at the NIST–JILA laboratory at the University of Colorado at Boulder.[99] Bose–Einstein statistics are now used to describe the behaviors of any assembly of bosons. Einstein's sketches for this project may be seen in the Einstein Archive in the library of the Leiden University.[78]
Energy momentum pseudotensor
Main article: Stress-energy-momentum pseudotensor
General relativity includes a dynamical spacetime, so it is difficult to see how to identify the conserved energy and momentum. Noether's theorem allows these quantities to be determined from a Lagrangian with translation invariance, but general covariance makes translation invariance into something of a gauge symmetry. The energy and momentum derived within general relativity by Noether's presecriptions do not make a real tensor for this reason.
Einstein argued that this is true for fundamental reasons, because the gravitational field could be made to vanish by a choice of coordinates. He maintained that the non-covariant energy momentum pseudotensor was in fact the best description of the energy momentum distribution in a gravitational field. This approach has been echoed by Lev Landau and Evgeny Lifshitz, and others, and has become standard.
The use of non-covariant objects like pseudotensors was heavily criticized in 1917 by Erwin Schrödinger and others.
Unified field theory
Main article: Classical unified field theories
Following his research on general relativity, Einstein entered into a series of attempts to generalize his geometric theory of gravitation to include electromagnetism as another aspect of a single entity. In 1950, he described his "unified field theory" in a Scientific American article entitled "On the Generalized Theory of Gravitation".[100] Although he continued to be lauded for his work, Einstein became increasingly isolated in his research, and his efforts were ultimately unsuccessful. In his pursuit of a unification of the fundamental forces, Einstein ignored some mainstream developments in physics, most notably the strong and weak nuclear forces, which were not well understood until many years after his death. Mainstream physics, in turn, largely ignored Einstein's approaches to unification. Einstein's dream of unifying other laws of physics with gravity motivates modern quests for a theory of everything and in particular string theory, where geometrical fields emerge in a unified quantum-mechanical setting.
Wormholes
Main article: Wormhole
Einstein collaborated with others to produce a model of a wormhole. His motivation was to model elementary particles with charge as a solution of gravitational field equations, in line with the program outlined in the paper "Do Gravitational Fields play an Important Role in the Constitution of the Elementary Particles?". These solutions cut and pasted Schwarzschild black holes to make a bridge between two patches.
If one end of a wormhole was positively charged, the other end would be negatively charged. These properties led Einstein to believe that pairs of particles and antiparticles could be described in this way.
Einstein–Cartan theory
Main article: Einstein–Cartan theory
In order to incorporate spinning point particles into general relativity, the affine connection needed to be generalized to include an antisymmetric part, called the torsion. This modification was made by Einstein and Cartan in the 1920s.
Equations of motion
Main article: Einstein–Infeld–Hoffmann equations
The theory of general relativity has a fundamental law  – the Einstein equations which describe how space curves, the geodesic equation which describes how particles move may be derived from the Einstein equations.
Since the equations of general relativity are non-linear, a lump of energy made out of pure gravitational fields, like a black hole, would move on a trajectory which is determined by the Einstein equations themselves, not by a new law. So Einstein proposed that the path of a singular solution, like a black hole, would be determined to be a geodesic from general relativity itself.
This was established by Einstein, Infeld, and Hoffmann for pointlike objects without angular momentum, and by Roy Kerr for spinning objects.
Other investigations
Main article: Einstein's unsuccessful investigations
Einstein conducted other investigations that were unsuccessful and abandoned. These pertain to force, superconductivity, gravitational waves, and other research. Please see the main article for details.
Collaboration with other scientists

The 1927 Solvay Conference in Brussels, a gathering of the world's top physicists. Einstein in the center.
In addition to long time collaborators Leopold Infeld, Nathan Rosen, Peter Bergmann and others, Einstein also had some one-shot collaborations with various scientists.
Einstein–de Haas experiment
Main article: Einstein–de Haas effect
Einstein and De Haas demonstrated that magnetization is due to the motion of electrons, nowadays known to be the spin. In order to show this, they reversed the magnetization in an iron bar suspended on a torsion pendulum. They confirmed that this leads the bar to rotate, because the electron's angular momentum changes as the magnetization changes. This experiment needed to be sensitive, because the angular momentum associated with electrons is small, but it definitively established that electron motion of some kind is responsible for magnetization.
Schrödinger gas model
Einstein suggested to Erwin Schrödinger that he might be able to reproduce the statistics of a Bose–Einstein gas by considering a box. Then to each possible quantum motion of a particle in a box associate an independent harmonic oscillator. Quantizing these oscillators, each level will have an integer occupation number, which will be the number of particles in it.
This formulation is a form of second quantization, but it predates modern quantum mechanics. Erwin Schrödinger applied this to derive the thermodynamic properties of a semiclassical ideal gas. Schrödinger urged Einstein to add his name as co-author, although Einstein declined the invitation.[101]
Einstein refrigerator
Main article: Einstein refrigerator
In 1926, Einstein and his former student Leó Szilárd co-invented (and in 1930, patented) the Einstein refrigerator. This absorption refrigerator was then revolutionary for having no moving parts and using only heat as an input.[102] On 11 November 1930, U.S. Patent 1,781,541 was awarded to Albert Einstein and Leó Szilárd for the refrigerator. Their invention was not immediately put into commercial production, as the most promising of their patents were quickly bought up by the Swedish company Electrolux to protect its refrigeration technology from competition.[103]
Bohr versus Einstein
Main article: Bohr–Einstein debates

Einstein and Niels Bohr, 1925
The Bohr–Einstein debates were a series of public disputes about quantum mechanics between Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr who were two of its founders. Their debates are remembered because of their importance to the philosophy of science.[104][105][106]
Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen paradox
Main article: EPR paradox
In 1935, Einstein returned to the question of quantum mechanics. He considered how a measurement on one of two entangled particles would affect the other. He noted, along with his collaborators, that by performing different measurements on the distant particle, either of position or momentum, different properties of the entangled partner could be discovered without disturbing it in any way.
He then used a hypothesis of local realism to conclude that the other particle had these properties already determined. The principle he proposed is that if it is possible to determine what the answer to a position or momentum measurement would be, without in any way disturbing the particle, then the particle actually has values of position or momentum.
This principle distilled the essence of Einstein's objection to quantum mechanics. As a physical principle, it was shown to be incorrect when the Aspect experiment of 1982 confirmed Bell's theorem, which had been promulgated in 1964.
Political and religious views

Main articles: Albert Einstein's political views and Albert Einstein's religious views

Albert Einstein, seen here with his wife Elsa Einstein and Zionist leaders, including future President of Israel Chaim Weizmann, his wife Dr. Vera Weizmann, Menahem Ussishkin, and Ben-Zion Mossinson on arrival in New York City in 1921.
Albert Einstein's political view was in favor of socialism[107][108]; his political views emerged publicly in the middle of the 20th century due to his fame and reputation for genius. Einstein offered to and was called on to give judgments and opinions on matters often unrelated to theoretical physics or mathematics.[109]
Einstein's views about religious belief have been collected from interviews and original writings. These views covered Judaism, theological determinism, agnosticism, and humanism. He also wrote much about ethical culture, opting for Spinoza's god over belief in a personal god.[110]
Love of music

Einstein developed an appreciation of music at an early age. His mother played the piano reasonably well and wanted her son to learn the violin, not only to instill in him a love of music but also to help him assimilate German culture. According to conductor Leon Botstein, Einstein is said to have begun playing when he was five, but did not enjoy it at that age.[111]
When he turned thirteen, however, he discovered the violin sonatas of Mozart. "Einstein fell in love" with Mozart's music, notes Botstein, and learned to play music more willingly. According to Einstein, he taught himself to play by "ever practicing systematically," adding that "Love is a better teacher than a sense of duty."[111] At age seventeen, he was heard by a school examiner in Aarau as he played Beethoven's violin sonatas, the examiner stating afterward that his playing was "remarkable and revealing of 'great insight.'" What struck the examiner, writes Botstein, was that Einstein "displayed a deep love of the music, a quality that was and remains in short supply. Music possessed an unusual meaning for this student."[111]
Botstein notes that music assumed a pivotal and permanent role in Einstein's life from that period on. Although the idea of becoming a professional himself was not on his mind at any time, among those with whom Einstein played chamber music were a few professionals, and he performed for private audiences and friends. Chamber music also became a regular part of his social life while living in Bern, Zurich, and Berlin, where he played with Max Planck and his son, among others. In 1931, while engaged in research at California Institute of Technology, he visited the Zoellner family conservatory in Los Angeles and played some of Beethoven and Mozart's works with members of the Zoellner Quartet, recently retired from two decades of acclaimed touring all across the United States; Einstein later presented the family patriarch with an autographed photograph as a memento.[112][113] Near the end of his life, when the young Juilliard Quartet visited him in Princeton, he played his violin with them; although they slowed the tempo to accommodate his lesser technical abilities, Botstein notes the quartet was "impressed by Einstein's level of coordination and intonation."[111]
Non-scientific legacy

While travelling, Einstein wrote daily to his wife Elsa and adopted stepdaughters Margot and Ilse. The letters were included in the papers bequeathed to The Hebrew University. Margot Einstein permitted the personal letters to be made available to the public, but requested that it not be done until twenty years after her death (she died in 1986[114]). Barbara Wolff, of The Hebrew University's Albert Einstein Archives, told the BBC that there are about 3,500 pages of private correspondence written between 1912 and 1955.[115]
Einstein bequeathed the royalties from use of his image to The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Corbis, successor to The Roger Richman Agency, licenses the use of his name and associated imagery, as agent for the university.[116]
In popular culture

Main article: Albert Einstein in popular culture
In the period before World War II, Einstein was so well known in America that he would be stopped on the street by people wanting him to explain "that theory". He finally figured out a way to handle the incessant inquiries. He told his inquirers "Pardon me, sorry! Always I am mistaken for Professor Einstein."[117]
Einstein has been the subject of or inspiration for many novels, films, plays, and works of music.[118] He is a favorite model for depictions of mad scientists and absent-minded professors; his expressive face and distinctive hairstyle have been widely copied and exaggerated. Time magazine's Frederic Golden wrote that Einstein was "a cartoonist's dream come true".[119]
Awards and honors

Main article: Einstein's awards and honors
Einstein received numerous awards and honors, including the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Publications

The following publications by Albert Einstein are referenced in this article. A more complete list of his publications may be found at List of scientific publications by Albert Einstein.
Einstein, Albert (1901), "Folgerungen aus den Capillaritätserscheinungen (Conclusions Drawn from the Phenomena of Capillarity)", Annalen der Physik 4 (3): 513, Bibcode 1901AnP...309..513E, doi:10.1002/andp.19013090306
Einstein, Albert (1905a), "Über einen die Erzeugung und Verwandlung des Lichtes betreffenden heuristischen Gesichtspunkt (On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light)", Annalen der Physik 17 (6): 132–148, Bibcode 1905AnP...322..132E, doi:10.1002/andp.19053220607 This annus mirabilis paper on the photoelectric effect was received by Annalen der Physik 18 March.
Einstein, Albert (1905b), A new determination of molecular dimensions. This PhD thesis was completed 30 April and submitted 20 July.
Einstein, Albert (1905c), "On the Motion – Required by the Molecular Kinetic Theory of Heat – of Small Particles Suspended in a Stationary Liquid", Annalen der Physik 17 (8): 549–560, Bibcode 1905AnP...322..549E, doi:10.1002/andp.19053220806. This annus mirabilis paper on Brownian motion was received 11 May.
Einstein, Albert (1905d), "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies", Annalen der Physik 17 (10): 891–921, Bibcode 1905AnP...322..891E, doi:10.1002/andp.19053221004. This annus mirabilis paper on special relativity was received 30 June.
Einstein, Albert (1905e), "Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?", Annalen der Physik 18 (13): 639–641, Bibcode 1905AnP...323..639E, doi:10.1002/andp.19053231314. This annus mirabilis paper on mass-energy equivalence was received 27 September.
Einstein, Albert (1915), "Die Feldgleichungen der Gravitation (The Field Equations of Gravitation)", Königlich Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften: 844–847
Einstein, Albert (1917a), "Kosmologische Betrachtungen zur allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie (Cosmological Considerations in the General Theory of Relativity)", Königlich Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften
Einstein, Albert (1917b), "Zur Quantentheorie der Strahlung (On the Quantum Mechanics of Radiation)", Physikalische Zeitschrift 18: 121–128, Bibcode 1917PhyZ...18..121E
Einstein, Albert (11 July 1923), "Fundamental Ideas and Problems of the Theory of Relativity", Nobel Lectures, Physics 1901–1921, Amsterdam: Elsevier Publishing Company, archived from the original on 10 February 2007, retrieved 25 March 2007
Einstein, Albert (1924), "Quantentheorie des einatomigen idealen Gases (Quantum theory of monatomic ideal gases)", Sitzungsberichte der Preussichen Akademie der Wissenschaften Physikalisch-Mathematische Klasse: 261–267. First of a series of papers on this topic.
Einstein, Albert (1926), "Die Ursache der Mäanderbildung der Flussläufe und des sogenannten Baerschen Gesetzes", Die Naturwissenschaften 14 (11): 223–224, Bibcode 1926NW.....14..223E, doi:10.1007/BF01510300. On Baer's law and meanders in the courses of rivers.
Einstein, Albert; Podolsky, Boris; Rosen, Nathan (15 May 1935), "Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?", Physical Review 47 (10): 777–780, Bibcode 1935PhRv...47..777E, doi:10.1103/PhysRev.47.777
Einstein, Albert (1940), "On Science and Religion", Nature (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic) 146 (3706): 605, Bibcode 1940Natur.146..605E, doi:10.1038/146605a0, ISBN 0-7073-0453-9
Einstein, Albert et al. (4 December 1948), "To the editors", New York Times (Melville, NY: AIP, American Inst. of Physics), ISBN 0-7354-0359-7
Einstein, Albert (May 1949), "Why Socialism?", Monthly Review, archived from the original on 11 January 2006, retrieved 16 January 2006
Einstein, Albert (1950), "On the Generalized Theory of Gravitation", Scientific American CLXXXII (4): 13–17
Einstein, Albert (1954), Ideas and Opinions, New York: Random House, ISBN 0-517-00393-7
Einstein, Albert (1969) (in German), Albert Einstein, Hedwig und Max Born: Briefwechsel 1916–1955, Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, ISBN 3-88682-005-X
Einstein, Albert (1979), Autobiographical Notes, Paul Arthur Schilpp (Centennial ed.), Chicago: Open Court, ISBN 0-87548-352-6. The chasing a light beam thought experiment is described on pages 48–51.
Collected Papers: Stachel, John, Martin J. Klein, a. J. Kox, Michel Janssen, R. Schulmann, Diana Komos Buchwald and others (Eds.) (1987–2006), The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Vol. 1–10, Princeton University Press Further information about the volumes published so far can be found on the webpages of the Einstein Papers Project and on the Princeton University Press Einstein Page
See also

 Biography portal
 Physics portal
 Science portal
 Book: Albert Einstein
Wikipedia books are collections of articles that can be downloaded or ordered in print.
The Einstein Theory of Relativity (educational film about the theory of relativity)
German inventors and discoverers
Heinrich Burkhardt
Hermann Einstein
Historical Museum of Bern (Einstein museum)
History of gravitational theory
Introduction to special relativity
List of coupled cousins
Relativity priority dispute
Sticky bead argument
Summation convention
List of Jewish Nobel laureates
Notes

^ "Albert's intellectual growth was strongly fostered at home. His mother, a talented pianist, ensured the children's musical education. His father regularly read Schiller and Heine aloud to the family. Uncle Jakob challenged Albert with mathematical problems, which he solved with 'a deep feeling of happiness'." More significant were the weekly visits of Max Talmud from 1889 through 1894 during which time he introduced the boy to popular scientific texts that brought to an end a short-lived religious phase, convincing him that 'a lot in the Bible stories could not be true'. A textbook of plane geometry that he quickly worked through led on to an avid self-study of mathematics, several years ahead of the school curriculum. [18]
References

^ "Mohammad Raziuddin Siddiqui". Ias.ac.in. 2 January 1998. Archived from the original on 1 June 2004. Retrieved 3 April 2011.
^ Zahar, Élie (2001), Poincaré's Philosophy. From Conventionalism to Phenomenology, Carus Publishing Company, Chapter 2, p.41, ISBN 0-8126-9435-X.
^ Whittaker, E. (1955). "Albert Einstein. 1879-1955". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 1: 37–67. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1955.0005. JSTOR 769242. edit
^ David Bodanis, E = mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation (New York: Walker, 2000).
^ "The Nobel Prize in Physics 1921". Nobel Foundation. Archived from the original on 5 October 2008. Retrieved 6 March 2007.
^ a b "Scientific Background on the Nobel Prize in Physics 2011. The accelerating universe." (page 2) Nobelprize.org.
^ Hans-Josef, Küpper (2000). "Various things about Albert Einstein". einstein-website.de. Retrieved 18 July 2009.
^ a b Paul Arthur Schilpp, editor (1951), Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, Volume II, New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers (Harper Torchbook edition), pp. 730–746His non-scientific works include: About Zionism: Speeches and Lectures by Professor Albert Einstein (1930), "Why War?" (1933, co-authored by Sigmund Freud), The World As I See It (1934), Out of My Later Years (1950), and a book on science for the general reader, The Evolution of Physics (1938, co-authored by Leopold Infeld).
^ WordNet for Einstein.
^ a b c d "Albert Einstein – Biography". Nobel Foundation. Archived from the original on 6 March 2007. Retrieved 7 March 2007.
^ John J. Stachel (2002), Einstein from "B" to "Z", Springer, pp. 59–61, ISBN 978-0-8176-4143-6, retrieved 20 February 2011
^ a b "The Legend of the Dull-Witted Child Who Grew Up to Be a Genius". Albert Einstein archives. Retrieved 23 July 2012.
^ "Frequently asked questions". einstein-website.de. Retrieved 23 July 2012.
^ "Left Handed Einstein". Being Left Handed.com. Retrieved 23 July 2012.
^ Schilpp (Ed.), P. A. (1979), Albert Einstein – Autobiographical Notes, Open Court Publishing Company, pp. 8–9
^ M. Talmey, The Relativity Theory Simplified and the Formative Period of its Inventor. Falcon Press, 1932, pp. 161–164.
^ Dudley Herschbach, "Einstein as a Student", Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA, pp. 4–5, web: HarvardChem-Einstein-PDF
^ Einstein as a Student, pp. 3–5.
^ A. Fölsing, Albert Einstein, 1997, pp. 30-31.
^ Albert Einstein Collected Papers, vol. 1 (1987), doc. 5.
^ Mehra, Jagdish (2001), "Albert Einstein's first paper", The Golden Age of Physics, World Scientific, ISBN 981-02-4985-3
^ A. Fölsing, Albert Einstein, 1997, pp. 36-37.
^ Highfield & Carter (1993, pp. 21,31,56–57)
^ A. Fölsing, Albert Einstein, 1997, p. 40.
^ Collected Papers, vol. 1, docs. 21-27.
^ Albert Einstein Collected Papers, vol. 1, 1987, doc. 67.
^ Troemel-Ploetz, D., "Mileva Einstein-Maric: The Woman Who Did Einstein's Mathematics", Women's Studies Int. Forum, vol. 13, no. 5, pp. 415–432, 1990.
^ Walker, Evan Harris (February 1989) (PDF), Did Einstein Espouse his Spouse's Ideas?, Physics Today, retrieved 2012-07-24.
^ Pais, A., Einstein Lived Here, Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. 1–29.
^ Holton, G., Einstein, History, and Other Passions, Harvard University Press, 1996, pp. 177–193.
^ Stachel, J., Einstein from B to Z, Birkhäuser, 2002, pp. 26–38; 39–55. philoscience.unibe.ch
^ Martinez, A. A., "Handling evidence in history: the case of Einstein's Wife." School Science Review, 86 (316), March 2005, pp. 49–56. PDF
^ This conclusion is from Einstein's correspondence with Maric. Lieserl is first mentioned in a letter from Einstein to Maric (who was staying with her family in or near Novi Sad at the time of Lieserl's birth) dated 4 February 1902 (Collected papers Vol. 1, document 134).
^ Albrecht Fölsing (1998). Albert Einstein: A Biography. Penguin Group. ISBN 0-14-023719-4; see section I, II,
^ Highfield & Carter 1993, p. 216
^ Now the Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property, retrieved 16 October 2006. See also their FAQ about Einstein and the Institute
^ Peter Galison, "Einstein's Clocks: The Question of Time" Critical Inquiry 26, no. 2 (Winter 2000): 355–389.
^ Peter Galison, "Einstein's Clocks: The Question of Time" Critical Inquiry 26, no. 2 (Winter 2000).
^ Galison, Peter (2003), Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps: Empires of Time, New York: W.W. Norton, ISBN 0-393-02001-0
^ (Einstein 1905b)
^ "Eine Neue Bestimmung der Moleküldimensionen". ETH Zürich. 1905. Retrieved 26 September 2011.
^ "Universität Zürich: Geschichte". Uzh.ch. 2 December 2010. Retrieved 3 April 2011.
^ Kant, Horst. "Albert Einstein and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin". in Renn, Jürgen. "Albert Einstein – Chief Engineer of the Universe: One Hundred Authors for Einstein." Ed. Renn, Jürgen. Wiley-VCH. 2005. pp. 166–169. ISBN 3-527-40574-7
^ Calaprice, Alice; Lipscombe, Trevor (2005), Albert Einstein: a biography, Greenwood Publishing Group, p. xix, ISBN 0-313-33080-8, Timeline, p. xix
^ Heilbron, 2000, p. 84.
^ Andrzej, Stasiak (2003), "Myths in science", EMBO Reports 4 (3): 236, doi:10.1038/sj.embor.embor779, retrieved 31 March 2007
^ Earman, John; Glymour, Clark (1980). "Relativity and Eclipses: The British Eclipse Expeditions of 1919 and Their Predecessors". Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press) 11 (1): 49–85. ISSN 0890-9997.
^ Minkel, J. R. (6 March 2008). "Did Researchers Cook Data from the First Test of General Relativity?". Scientific American (New York: Nature Publishing).
^ Harper, William (1998). "Isaac Newton on Empirical Success and Scientific Method". In Earman, John; Norton, John. The Cosmos of Science: Essays of Exploration. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh. p. 81. ISBN 978-0-8229-3930-6. "It is not at all obvious that…the Glymour-Earman criticisms are accurate reflections of the evidential implications of the data."
^ Kennefick, Daniel (March 2009). "Testing relativity from the 1919 eclipse— a question of bias". Physics Today (College Park, MD: American Institute of Physics): 37–42. ISSN 0031-9228.
^ Hoffman and Dukas (1972), pp. 145–148; Fölsing (1997), pp. 499–508.
^ a b c d e Isaacson, Walter. Einstein: His Life and Universe, Simon & Schuster (2007)
^ a b c d e f g h i Isaacson, Walter. Einstein: His Life and Universe, Simon & Schuster (2007) pp. 407–410
^ Fölsing (1997), p. 659.
^ Isaacson (2007), p. 404.
^ Hoffman, B. (1972), pp. 165–171
^ Fölsing, A. (1997), pp. 666–677.
^ Clark (1971), p. 619.
^ Fölsing (1997), pp. 649, 678.
^ Clark (1971), p.642.
^ Fölsing (1997), pp. 686-687.
^ "In Brief". Institute for Advanced Study. Archived from the original on 29 March 2010. Retrieved 4 March 2010.
^ Evans-Pritchard, Ambrose (29 August 2010). "Obama could kill fossil fuels overnight with a nuclear dash for thorium". The Daily Telegraph (London).
^ Gosling, F.G. The Manhattan Project: Making the Atomic Bomb, U.S. Department of Energy, History Division (January, 1999) p. vii
^ Diehl, Sarah J.; Moltz, James Clay. Nuclear Weapons and Nonproliferation: a Reference Handbook, ABC-CLIO (2008) p. 218
^ a b Stern, Fritz. Essay, "Einstein's Germany", E = Einstein: His Life, His Thought, and His Influence on Our Culture, Sterling Publishing (2006) pp. 97–118
^ Einstein: The Life and Times by Ronald Clark. page 752
^ Fred Jerome, Rodger Taylor (2006) Einstein on Race and Racism Rutgers University Press, 2006.
^ Calaprice, Alice (2005) The new quotable Einstein. pp.148–149 Princeton University Press, 2005. See also Odyssey in Climate Modeling, Global Warming, and Advising Five Presidents
^ a b "ISRAEL: Einstein Declines". Time magazine. 1 December 1952. Retrieved 31 March 2010.
^ "Einstein in Princeton / Scientist, Humanitarian, Cultural Icon". Historical Society of Princeton. Archived from the original on 27 April 2010. Retrieved 31 March 2010.
^ The Case of the Scientist with a Pulsating Mass, 14 June 2002, retrieved 11 June 2007
^ Albert Einstein Archives (April 1955), "Draft of projected Telecast Israel Independence Day, April 1955 (last statement ever written)", Einstein Archives Online, archived from the original on 13 March 2007, retrieved 14 March 2007
^ Cohen, J.R.; Graver, L.M. (November 1995), "The ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm of Albert Einstein", Surgery, Gynecology & Obstetrics 170 (5): 455–8, PMID 2183375.
^ The Long, Strange Journey of Einstein's Brain, National Public Radio, retrieved 3 October 2007
^ O'Connor, J.J.; Robertson, E.F. (1997), "Albert Einstein", The MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St. Andrews
^ "Dr. Albert Einstein Dies in Sleep at 76. World Mourns Loss of Great Scientist", New York Times, 19 April 1955, "Princeton, New Jersey, 18 April 1955. Dr. Albert Einstein, one of the great thinkers of the ages, died in his sleep here early today."
^ a b "Einstein archive at the Instituut-Lorentz". Instituut-Lorentz. 2005. Retrieved on 21 November 2005.
^ Das, Ashok (2003). Lectures on quantum mechanics. Hindustan Book Agency. p. 59. ISBN 81-85931-41-0.
^ Spielberg, Nathan; Anderson, Bryon D. (1995). Seven ideas that shook the universe (2nd ed.). John Wiley & Sons. p. 263. ISBN 0-471-30606-1.
^ Major, Fouad G. (2007). The quantum beat: principles and applications of atomic clocks (2nd ed.). Springer. p. 142. ISBN 0-387-69533-8.
^ Lindsay, Robert Bruce; Margenau, Henry (1981). Foundations of physics. Ox Bow Press. p. 330. ISBN 0-918024-17-X.
^ a b Hans-Josef Kuepper. "List of Scientific Publications of Albert Einstein". Einstein-website.de. Retrieved 3 April 2011.
^ (Einstein 1905d)
^ Stachel, John J. (December 2001), Einstein from "B" to "Z", Einstein Studies, Vol. 9, Center for Einstein Studies, Boston University: Springer-Verlag New York, LLC, pp. vi, 15, 90, 131, 215, ISBN 978-0-8176-4143-6
^ For a discussion of the reception of relativity theory around the world, and the different controversies it encountered, see the articles in Thomas F. Glick, ed., The Comparative Reception of Relativity (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1987), ISBN 90-277-2498-9.
^ Pais, Abraham (1982), Subtle is the Lord. The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein, Oxford University Press, pp. 382–386, ISBN 0-19-853907-X
^ Einstein, Albert (1905), "Über einen die Erzeugung und Verwandlung des Lichtes betreffenden heuristischen Gesichtspunkt", Annalen der Physik 17 (6): 132–148, Bibcode 1905AnP...322..132E, doi:10.1002/andp.19053220607, retrieved 27 June 2009
^ (Einstein 1905a).
^ Celebrating Einstein "Solid Cold". U.S. DOE., Office of Scientific and Technical Information, 2011.
^ Pais, Abraham (1982), Subtle is the Lord. The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein, Oxford University Press, p. 522, ISBN 0-19-853907-X
^ Levenson, Thomas. "Einstein's Big Idea". Public Broadcasting Service. 2005. Retrieved on 25 February 2006.
^ Albert Einstein, Nobel lecture in 1921
^ van Dongen, Jeroen (2010) Einstein's Unification Cambridge University Press, p.23.
^ (Einstein 1917a)
^ Video: The Elegant Universe: Part 1 | Watch NOVA Online | PBS Video. Video.pbs.org. Retrieved on 11 May 2012.
^ (Einstein 1917b)
^ (Einstein 1924)
^ Cornell and Wieman Share 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics, 9 October 2001, archived from the original on 10 June 2007, retrieved 11 June 2007
^ (Einstein 1950)
^ Moore, Walter (1989), Schrödinger: Life and Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-43767-9
^ Goettling, Gary. Einstein's refrigerator Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine. 1998. Retrieved on 21 November 2005. Leó Szilárd, a Hungarian physicist who later worked on the Manhattan Project, is credited with the discovery of the chain reaction
^ In September 2008 it was reported that Malcolm McCulloch of Oxford University was heading a three-year project to develop more robust appliances that could be used in locales lacking electricity, and that his team had completed a prototype Einstein refrigerator. He was quoted as saying that improving the design and changing the types of gases used might allow the design's efficiency to be quadrupled.Alok, Jha (21 September 2008), "Einstein fridge design can help global cooling", The Guardian (UK), archived from the original on 24 January 2011, retrieved 22 February 2011
^ Bohr N. "Discussions with Einstein on Epistemological Problems in Atomic Physics". The Value of Knowledge: A Miniature Library of Philosophy. Marxists Internet Archive. Archived from the original on 13 September 2010. Retrieved 30 August 2010. From Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist (1949), publ. Cambridge University Press, 1949. Niels Bohr's report of conversations with Einstein.
^ (Einstein 1969). A reprint of this book was published by Edition Erbrich in 1982, ISBN 3-88682-005-X
^ (Einstein 1935)
^ Einstein, Albert (May 1949). "Why Socialism?". Monthly Review (New York City) 1 (1). Retrieved 29 July 2012.
^ David E. Rowe and Robert Schulmann (08). David A., Walsh. ed. "What Were Einstein's Politics?". George Mason University's History News Network (George Mason University). Retrieved 29 July 2012.
^ Clark, Ronald W. (1971), Einstein: The Life and Times, Avon, ISBN 0-380-44123-3
^ Dukas, Helen (1981). Albert Einstein the Human Side. Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 43. Einstein Archives 59-494[dead link]
^ a b c d Botstein, Leon; Galison, Peter; Holton, Gerald James; Schweber, Silvan S. Einstein for the 21st century: His Legacy in Science, Art, and Modern Culture, Princeton Univ. Press (2008) pp. 161-164
^ Cariaga, Daniel, "Not Taking It with You: A Tale of Two Estates," Los Angeles Times, 22 December 1985. Retrieved April 2012.
^ Auction listing by RR Auction, auction closed 13 October 2010.
^ "Obituary". New York Times. 12 July 1986. Retrieved 3 April 2011.
^ "Letters Reveal Einstein Love Life", BBC News (BBC), 11 July 2006, retrieved 14 March 2007
^ Einstein, Corbis Rights Representation, archived from the original on 19 August 2008, retrieved 8 August 2008
^ The New Yorker April 1939 pg 69 Disguise
^ McTee, Cindy. "Einstein's Dream for orchestra". Cindymctee.com.
^ Golden, Frederic (3 January 2000), "Person of the Century: Albert Einstein", Time, archived from the original on 21 February 2006, retrieved 25 February 2006
Further reading

Brian, Denis (1996). Einstein: A Life. New York: John Wiley.
Clark, Ronald (1971). Einstein: The Life and Times. New York: Avon Books.
Fölsing, Albrecht (1997): Albert Einstein: A Biography. New York: Penguin Viking. (Translated and abridged from the German by Ewald Osers.) ISBN 978-0670855452
Highfield, Roger; Carter, Paul (1993). The Private Lives of Albert Einstein. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 978-0-571-16744-9.
Hoffmann, Banesh, with the collaboration of Helen Dukas (1972): Albert Einstein: Creator and Rebel. London: Hart-Davis, MacGibbon Ltd. ISBN 978-0670111817
Isaacson, Walter (2007): Einstein: His Life and Universe. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, New York. ISBN 978-0-7432-6473-0
Moring, Gary (2004): The complete idiot's guide to understanding Einstein ( 1st ed. 2000). Indianapolis IN: Alpha books (Macmillan USA). ISBN 0-02-863180-3
Pais, Abraham (1982): Subtle is the Lord: The science and the life of Albert Einstein. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0198539070. The definitive biography to date.
Pais, Abraham (1994): Einstein Lived Here. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-192-80672-6
Parker, Barry (2000): Einstein's Brainchild: Relativity Made Relatively Easy!. Prometheus Books. Illustrated by Lori Scoffield-Beer. A review of Einstein's career and accomplishments, written for the lay public. ISBN 978-1591025221
Schweber, Sylvan S. (2008): Einstein and Oppenheimer: The Meaning of Genius. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-02828-9.
Oppenheimer, J.R. (1971): "On Albert Einstein," p. 8–12 in Science and synthesis: an international colloquium organized by Unesco on the tenth anniversary of the death of Albert Einstein and Teilhard de Chardin, Springer-Verlag, 1971, 208 pp. (Lecture delivered at the UNESCO House in Paris on 13 December 1965.) Also published in The New York Review of Books, 17 March 1966, On Albert Einstein by Robert Oppenheimer
External links

Find more about Albert Einstein on Wikipedia's sister projects:
 Definitions and translations from Wiktionary
 Images and media from Commons
 Learning resources from Wikiversity
 News stories from Wikinews
 Quotations from Wikiquote
 Source texts from Wikisource
 Textbooks from Wikibooks
Ideas and Opinions, Einstein's letters and speeches, Full text, Crown Publishers (1954) 384 pages
Einstein's Scholar Google profile
Works by Albert Einstein (public domain in Canada)
The MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St Andrews, Scotland, April 1997, retrieved 14 June 2009
Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein, Monthly Review, May 1949
Einstein's Personal Correspondence: Religion, Politics, The Holocaust, and Philosophy Shapell Manuscript Foundation
FBI file on Albert Einstein
Nobelprize.org Biography:Albert Einstein
The Einstein You Never Knew — slideshow by Life magazine
Albert Einstein — videos
Science Odyssey People And Discoveries
MIT OpenCourseWare STS.042J/8.225J: Einstein, Oppenheimer, Feynman: Physics in the 20th century — free study course that explores the changing roles of physics and physicists during the 20th century
List of publications from Google Scholar.
Albert Einstein Archives Online (80,000+ Documents) (MSNBC - 19 March 2012)
[show] v t e
Albert Einstein
[show] v t e
Copley Medallists
[show] v t e
Nobel Laureates in Physics (1901–1925)
[show] v t e
Philosophy of science
Authority control: PND: 118529579 | LCCN: n79022889 | VIAF: 75121530 | WorldCat
View page ratings
Rate this page
What's this?
Trustworthy
Objective
Complete
Well-written
I am highly knowledgeable about this topic (optional)

Submit ratings
Categories: 1879 births1955 deaths20th-century Swiss peopleAcademics of Charles University in PragueAlbert EinsteinAmerican physicistsCosmologistsDeaths from abdominal aortic aneurysmEinstein familyETH Zurich alumniETH Zurich facultyGerman emigrants to SwitzerlandGerman Jews who emigrated to the United States to escape NazismGerman physicistsInstitute for Advanced Study facultyJewish agnosticsJewish physicistsLeiden University facultyNobel laureates in PhysicsPatent examinersPeople from UlmStateless personsSwiss emigrants to the United StatesSwiss physicistsTheoretical physicistsPhilosophers of sciencePacifists
Create accountLog inArticleTalkReadView sourceView history

Main page
Contents
Featured content
Current events
Random article
Donate to Wikipedia
Wikipedia Shop
Interaction
Help
About Wikipedia
Community portal
Recent changes
Contact Wikipedia
Toolbox
Print/export
Languages
Afrikaans
Alemannisch