The Greatest Individual

Albert Einstein was the greatest individual in history because of his huge contributions to science. Throughout his whole life he was considered the lazy student that did not attend classes or if he did, did not pay attention, and then proved the world wrong by becoming the most famous physicist in the 1900s and even was awarded Time magazine’s title of Man of the Century.

In his early life Einstein did not finish high school, but instead applied to Eidgenössische Polytechnische Schule, after not getting in, his parents sent him to a Swedish secondary school. After graduating at 17 he moved to Zurich, Germany to attend the Polytechnic in Zurich. He published his first paper on capillary action by his graduation, with help from classmate and long-time friend Michele Besso.

He then took work in a patent office, and enjoyed this because it allowed him to think. During this job he began to think about light and time in relation to all things. He discovered that the speed of light is always constant, no matter how fast a person or object is moving, the light will hit it at the same speed. He also discovered many things about gravity and space. For example, he theorized that there were four dimensions that all objects in the universe occupied, length, width, height, and time. The time dimension meant that as things moved in space they all moved in time, and even if something stopped moving in space it would still be moving in time. For example, he theorized that if there were a set of twins and one went into space and the other stayed on Earth, then when the one came back from space he would be substantially younger than the one on Earth. This is because the twin in space was traveling almost at the speed of light, thus causing time to go slower. This changed the world’s view of reality immensely. Einstein showed the world that nothing was absolute that two events could never actually occur at the same time if they were viewed at two different reference points. He proved this by saying that if a person was standing next to a railroad track and lightning hit the train at both the front and the end, than that person observing would say that the lightning striked at exactly the same time. However, if a person inside the train moving forward saw the same occurrence then they would say that the one in the front struck first because the light has less distance to travel to reach the person that the light of the bolt striking the back of the train. That’s not all though, he also discovered many new things about quanta, or molecular objects like atoms. Things that would later change the view of science forever. He theorized that the random movement of small objects was due to molecular action and he also found the equation E=mc² which described that small amounts of mass could be converted into huge amounts of energy, which jumpstarted the research on nuclear power. After all of this though, Einstein decided to tackle the theory of gravity. He theorized that gravity and acceleration were equivalent. For example, if an astronaut was traveling through space he would be floating in the spacecraft, but as the spacecraft accelerated, he would come down to the floor of the spacecraft and would be able to stand on it. The same principle is applied when saying that if a person was in an elevator when the cable snapped, the person and the elevator would fall at the same rate because gravity has the same pull on both objects. This made him the most influential man in science in the mid-1900s and that had many repercussions through the rest of the 20^th century and during the 21^st century, today.

Why is this important? Why do Einstein’s achievements make him the most influential man in history? Because if Einstein had never discovered these things then science today would be very different, in that we would still be trying to figure out the different qualities of space and time and we would not be as nearly as technologically advanced as we are now. Not only would we still think that time was still absolute but we would also have no idea about nuclear science because the fact that atoms could create large amounts of energy would never have been discovered. Einstein, the Nobel prize-winning, isolated, comical, studied his entire life in order to change everything people knew about science and should be named the greatest individual in history because of that.

 [I wanted to put these in but they won't work. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62yHCse9qDY&NR=1 and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7jJnOQJZzc]

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