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Hi guys! This is Yasmine Yeow Qian Yi. So today, I'm gonna be talking about Albert Einstein.
Albert Einstein not only is one of the history’s most important physicists, but his corky personality and fame made him a cultural icon as well.
Albert Einstein was a German-born physicist who developed the general theory of relativity. He was born on March 14, 1879, in the southern German.
As a child, Einstein became fascinated by music, mathematics and science. He started to learn violin when he was very young.
He dropped out of school in 1894 and moved to Switzerland, where he resumed his schooling and later gained admission to the Swiss Federal Polytechnic Institute in Zurich.
. In 1896, he renounced his German citizenship, and remained officially stateless before becoming a Swiss citizen in 1901.
After finding a position as a clerk at the Swiss patent office in Bern, Einstein married Maric in 1903. They had two children, Hans Albert (born 1904) and Eduard (born 1910).
While working at the patent office, Einstein did some of the most creative work of his life, producing no fewer than four groundbreaking articles alone.
In the first paper, he applied the quantum theory (developed by German physicist Max Planck) to light in order to explain the phenomenon known as the photoelectric effect,
by which a material will emit electrically charged particles when hit by light. The second article contained Einstein’s experimental proof of the existence of atoms,
which he got by analyzing the phenomenon of Brownian motion, in which tiny particles were suspended in water.
In the third and most famous article, titled “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” Einstein confronted the apparent contradiction between two principal theories of physics:
Isaac Newton’s concepts of absolute space and time and James Clerk Maxwell’s idea that the speed of light was a constant.
In November, 1915, Einstein completed the general theory of relativity, which he considered the culmination of his life research
He was convinced of the merits of general relativity because it allowed for a more accurate prediction of planetary orbits around the sun.
In 1921, Einstein won the Nobel Prize for Physics though he wasn't actually given the award until the following year due to a bureaucratic ruling.
Because his ideas on relativity were still considered questionable, he received the prize for his explanation of the photoelectric effect though Einstein still opted to speak about relativity during his acceptance speech.
In the development of his general theory, Einstein had held on to the belief that the universe was a fixed though his later theories directly contradicted this idea and asserted that the universe could be in a state of flux.
After learning of the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, Einstein became a major player in efforts to curtail usage of the a-bomb.
The following year he and Szilard founded the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists.
Around this time, Einstein also became a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, seeing the parallels
between the treatment of Jews in Germany and African Americans in the United States. After the war, Einstein continued to work on his unified field theory and key aspects of the theory of general relativity.
On 17 April 1955, Einstein experienced an abdominal aortic aneurysm and internal bleeding, but refused to undergo surgery.
He died the next day at Princeton Hospital in New Jersey. Just hours after his death, Einstein’s brain was removed without the permission of his family,
and it was taken to the University of Pennsylvania. It was dissected, cut into 240 pieces, and samples were put onto slides, ready to be examined under a microscope.
Over the past six decades, numerous studies have been published on Einstein’s brain,
and some scientists have even suggested that the unusual features of his brain may be linked to his high level of intelligence.
So this is the end of my speech. I hope you guys enjoy it, and have a nice day. Bye!