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The Essential Einstein

The Essential Einstein

His Greatest Works

Summary

Albert Einstein changed the way physicists view the universe – and transformed the way we all see the world. Just over one hundred years ago, his Theory of Relativity stunned scientists, but today it is integral to modern thought as the most important scientific discovery of the twentieth century.

In this unique single volume, Stephen Hawking has assembled the highlights of Einstein’s groundbreaking scientific work. Collected here are Einstein’s own illuminating writings on the Theory of Relativity, which present a world of paradoxes in which space is bent and time is curved. Yet Einstein was known not only for his landmark ideas in physics. Here too are his reflections on politics and religion, and his musings on the ultimate significance of his scientific findings.

About the author

Albert Einstein

Regarded as the founder of modern physics, Albert Einstein was born in 1879, in Ulm, Kingdom of Württemberg, German Empire. He completed his Ph.D. from the University of Zürich in 1905 and published four papers in the scientific journal named Annalen der Physik. These papers on photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity and mass-energy equivalence (E = mc2) were significant contributors to the foundation of modern physics. In the next few years, Einstein came to be recognized as a major scientist.
He developed the general theory of relativity between 1907 and 1915. It was published in 1915. In 1916, Einstein published Relativity: The Special and the General Theory in German. Its first English translation was published in 1920. In 1921, Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to Theoretical Physics and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect." He published numerous scientific and non-scientific works.
Einstein died on 18 April 1955, aged seventy-six, in Princeton, New Jersey.
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