Reacquaintance with Albert Einstein

I knew Albert Einstein a long, long time ago, and at that time I only knew that he was a great scientist and that was it. Until I wrote this article I only knew some terms like relativity, quantum science, atomic bomb related, but treating a man so great, I think it's time to get to know him.

Einstein not only had the world's craziest haircut, he also had one of the smartest brains. As a young child, Einstein spoke so late in life that the maids in his home called him a silly child, but it was only after taking him to the doctor that they realized he just liked to speak in complete sentences as soon as he opened his mouth. As a young boy, Einstein began to explore the world of everyday life, and he himself said that two things influenced his early life: a compass he received at the age of 5, and a geometry book he received at the age of 12. He was fascinated by mysterious phenomena and mathematics.

Einstein had a different way of thinking than others, which made him have a poor relationship with his teachers. In fact, school was a "barracks" and teachers were "lieutenants", as he called them, and the "soldier" Einstein became a high school dropout because he failed a single subject. He also failed the exams at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, but at the age of 17 he took the exam again and passed with a high score. However, he was still very rebellious and was often at odds with his teachers, believing that the education system stifled innovation. He never followed the rules and often challenged his teachers, which caused them a lot of headaches. So by the age of 22, he was still unemployed, with no prospects and a pregnant girlfriend, but luckily he got a small job at the Swiss Patent Office, which he himself called his career as a cobbler for seven years, seven years of doing his favorite thing: thinking.

He saw that period as having a very positive impact, a period when he wrote a lot of important papers, and thought about it while he was doing his job as a patent examiner, so that his work at that time didn't have a negative impact on Einstein, but rather helped. Because if he had been in academia, he would have been subject to a lot of distractions.

Einstein's great idea:

Imagine you're chasing a bus**** car that's going 48 kilometers per hour, and you're only going 47 kilometers per hour. The bull**** car is going 1 kilometer per hour faster than you, and you can catch up with it with a little acceleration. But if you replace the public **** car's with a beam of light (about 300,000 kilometers per second or so), then no matter how much you accelerate, the difference in speed between you stays the same, and that difference is the speed of light. This statement may sound difficult to understand, but experiments in the early 20th century have proved this conclusion to be correct, the speed of light is indeed constant.

He deduced through an interesting thought experiment that it is not light that changes, but time itself. Because the speed of light is constant, the concepts of space and time must change, and after excluding the factor of distance, all that remains is time. This means that time itself is no longer absolute, but relative, and this is where Einstein made his major breakthrough. This a very counter-intuitive idea, but it turned out to be right.

The mass-energy equation E=MC^2 is actually energy = mass * speed of light squared, and since the speed of light squared is a very large number, even a very small object, such as a paper clip, is equivalent to a huge amount of energy, equivalent to 1.8 tons of trinitrotoluene explosive or an atomic bomb to be exact. It's a far-reaching equation that took years for people to master, and Einstein embodied in this equation that energy and mass are related. Imagine you're in a spaceship trying to catch up with the speed of light, and the rocket fuel is burning as hard as ever, but as you get closer to the speed of light, you realize that you're getting slower and slower, but you're not at the speed of light yet, and the rocket fuel is still burning and generating energy, and that energy has to go somewhere, and if you're not getting to the speed of light, then that means that you're becoming more difficult to propel, that is, you're becoming heavier and heavier, and so you're gaining mass, and that means you're gaining weight, and that's why you're gaining mass. So your mass is increasing, which means that the energy produced by the rocket is actually converted into your increased mass. So Einstein realized that mass itself is a form of energy. This is the essence of the mass-energy equation.

At the same time he tells us more than that, it tells us that small amounts of matter can be converted into huge amounts of energy. No matter what the substance is - applesauce, a rock, or a monkey's earwax - theoretically they are all atoms that can be converted into energy. The question is which energy to release which in turn requires considerable energy, and one way to do this is nuclear fission, where a large atomic nucleus, such as uranium, is split in two, and a portion of it is converted to energy, with the byproduct of horrible radiation. The other method is nuclear fusion, which causes two hydrogen nuclei to polymerize to form a helium nucleus and produce some energy, but first you need a hot environment of about 100 million degrees Celsius, which is why stars such as the sun can undergo nuclear fusion. If we can solve this one problem here on Earth, controlled nuclear fusion will give us an endless supply of clean energy. A fusion power station consumes about 1 kilogram of fuel per day, that's the equivalent of a big bag of sugar, while a coal-fired power station consumes hundreds of truckloads of coal per day, so now you see how much energy we could get from nuclear fusion. This idea is indeed overly optimistic, because at the moment the hydrogen bomb is the only type of energy-efficient fusion we have realized, and he is absolutely uncontrollable, but the science is still progressing.

Einstein knew that his first theory of relativity missed something: gravity, so he relabeled it special relativity and began to work on an entirely new version, which he made into general relativity. Legend has it that Einstein was sitting in his office when he saw a man repairing a roof, and he imagined the poor guy falling, a thought that gave him what he called "the happiest idea of his life. The man was actually in zero gravity when he fell, and if he was placed in a closed box that was also in free fall, he had no way of knowing that he was moving, a condition that lasted until the moment he hit the ground. Einstein realized that gravity was really just an illusion, although the effect it caused was as real as ever. Einstein spent ten years working out the details, and eventually he painted a whole new picture of time, space, and gravity, a new universe in which gravity slowed down time. He combined three-dimensional space and time and came up with the concept of spacetime. This is a difficult concept to understand because we live in a three-dimensional space and we cannot describe a four-dimensional space. Besides up and down, left, right, front and back, there is another direction, and I can't point to it, unfortunately, because I can only point to the direction in space, but that direction, if we can point to it, is the direction of time.

We can think of space-time as a rubber sheet, and if you think about gravity, it makes a dent in that rubber sheet, and if I put a planet in my space-time, it deforms space-time, and that's my gravity well. So we don't just think of it as a force, we think of it as a perturbation in spacetime. We say that gravity acts to make them move around larger objects, but if gravity doesn't exist then there must be some other sort of factor that allows objects to move in a straight line when in turn makes their paths curved, and indeed curved surfaces do that, so if you want to fly straight from Beijing to New York in the shortest distance you can choose to go in a straight line, but if you look at that straight line from space you'll realize that it's actually a curved line, because you would be flying around the surface of the Earth. Einstein realized that curvature is essentially the same as gravity, and so we have this curved four-dimensional space-time, which is really the equivalent of gravity. The further you get from the center of the earth the weaker the gravitational force becomes, and in terms of aging rate your head will outpace your feet by a hundred billionth of a second per day, and by your 80th birthday your cranium will have aged 300 nanoseconds older than your toes, which is a millionth of a blink of an eye.

General relativity truly breaks away from the inherent way of thinking; Einstein used thought experiments to imagine scenarios, but no one had thought about this before. Einstein's way of thinking about problems and integrating knowledge was unique.

Einstein was right when an astronomical experiment proved that gravity bends light, and this turned everything we used to know about space, time, and the universe on its head, making Einstein a world celebrity. The general theory of relativity caused a huge international sensation, which is very rare for scientific theories. I feel that the general theory of relativity touches the world as we can perceive it, it deepens our understanding and knowledge of the universe, and the Newtonian school of worldview is completely shattered. Ever since humans could think, we've been looking up at the stars and wondering what's out there where, and Einstein provided us with a wider window.

At this point the general theory of relativity came to an end, and a lot of things happened later on this foundation: for example, the inquiry about quantum physics, the theory of the Big Bang, the rejection of Israel's invitation to make him president, and later, Einstein encouraged U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt to order the development of the atomic bomb, an extraordinarily difficult decision because Einstein was a pacifist, and all his life he had been fighting for peace.

Einstein left this four-dimensional world in 1955, and his brain was stolen by an autopsy technician who was keen to find out whether there was a physiological link between the brain and genius, and who wanted to unravel the mysteries of Einstein's genius. Eventually it was discovered that Einstein's brain was the same size as an average person's, putting to rest the notion that the bigger the brain, the smarter the person. It was found that due to the underdevelopment of the lateral fissure, Einstein's parietal lobe was 15% wider than the average person's, and this area of the brain controlled mathematical operations and spatial cognition, which were definitely two of Einstein's best subjects. In addition to this Einstein's 76-year-old gray matter does not seem to show any signs of aging, so perhaps the key to Einstein's talent lies in his having a young mind, or a young brain.

I think in actuality it was the fact that he was always scraping the bottom of the barrel, had the focus and curiosity of a child, and that he had his own philosophy of life, which helped him develop his own ideas. Albert. Einstein was a great genius who brought us a new view of the universe. He was the greatest physicist who ever lived, he laid the foundations for science in the 21st century, he introduced new concepts and ideas that no one had ever considered before, and he changed our perception of the universe in a way that is widely significant.