Did you know --- that Einstein... other than being best known for his E=mc2, he was a violin player too?
In one of my assignments, I had to write about the life story of a famous physicist. Initially I had picked Louis De Broglie, but after reading pages and pages, his life was too boring, or perhaps not very well-documented. Other than he had a brother who was working with X-rays helped him to think about the duality of particles and waves, there's nothing else much exciting enough to get me fill up 2 pages of words.
Why not pick someone who is more famously known? Perhaps Einstein?
And wow... I could not stop reading. There are so much about him that I am not sure if I am missing out any important stuff. I think his life... would make an interesting essay.
With some of my thoughts and interpretation, here it goes.
Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955)
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“Everybody
is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will
live its whole life believing that it is stupid1.” Famously quoted
by Einstein, this was known to suggest each unique individual excels
differently. True enough, the legendary physicist too had his fair share of struggles
– he was a late developer in speech deliveries; he failed his entrance
examinations at age of sixteen and his violin skills were debatably amateurish.2
From Jesse Schell’s The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses – p. 98
Besides physics, his greatest
passions were music and violin. Einstein picked up the violin since young, much
to the influence by his pianist mother. But he did not relish it. His love for
music was only ignited by Mozart’s sonatas much later, and in his lifetime he often
socialised by performing chamber music to some private audience3. If
only he could bestow similar faithfulness to his wife as he did to his violin ‘Lina’
4 – his love life was however much promiscuous.
With his mediocre looks and his
dishevelled hairstyle, it was surprisingly incredible that he was well-embraced
by ladies. From having an illegitimate daughter, he married, re-married, cheated
on his second wife with his secretary, and had recorded 6 other women he loved5,6.
He was nonetheless blessed to be born a German. If he were born a Chinese, historically
he would have already been tied to a pig cage and thrown into the Yellow River for
adultery in that period of time.
Like the women in his love affairs, his
theory of relativity was likewise as alluring. In 1905, that was one of the
most significant years in the field of physics. He brought apparently unrelated
elements together and laid the foundations that energy (E) was directly
proportional to mass (m), with speed of light (c) as a constant7. He
became best known for his E=mc2, although he was not awarded the
Nobel Prize of this.
Fast
forward to World War II, he facilitated the development of the atomic bomb. He
endorsed a letter to the then President Franklin Roosevelt of United States,
urging the development of Uranium bombs. With Adolf Hitler’s territorial
ambitions a massive threat, they agreed that they could not let the Germans
lead the construction of the atomic bomb. However afterwards he was excluded
from bomb project as the research team could not trust him to keep the secret.
In
the makings of the atomic bomb, we could relate how E=mc2
was utilized in the Uranium chain reaction. The researchers knew the mass of
Uranium before fission, and the mass of the elements that will result after splitting
of the nucleus, with the latter being slightly less massive. The missing mass
would be converted to the total energy of the explosion:
(E) Energy of explosion = (m) Missing mass x (c 2) speed
of light 2
That
is a huge amount of energy for this little change in mass. The United States
finally bombed Japan, 3 months after the surrender of Germany in 1945, killing
80,000 casualties, injuring more people with burns, radiation sickness, and
other damages.
As
a lifelong pacifist, Einstein regretted his role in signing the letter that
recommended atomic bombs be made. Throughout his years, he published more than
300 papers, with over 150 political and humanitarian topics. He eventually died
of heart failure, alone on his deathbed.
References:
[1] Matthew Kelly. Living Every Day with Passion and Purpose
, The Rhythm of Life, 2004, p. 80.
[2] Eric Koch. Einstein the Violinist — Did He Really Play
So Badly? Sketches. 2012, retrieved
from http://erickoch.ca/
[3] Arthur L. Miller. A Genius Finds Inspiration in the
Music of Another. The New York Times.
2006, retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com
[4] Josh Jones. The Musical Mind of Albert Einstein:
Great Physicist, Amateur Violinist and Devotee of Mozart. Open Culture. 2013, retrieved from http://www.openculture.com
[5] Deborah Arthurs. Was Einstein the world’s worst
husband? Wife ordered to keep room tidy, serve three meals a day – but expect
NO affection… and she must stop talking when he demands it. Dailymail. 2012, retrieved from
http://www.dailymail.co.uk
[6] NBC News. New letters shed light on Einstein’s love
life. NBC News. 2006, retrieved from http://www.nbcews.com
[7] Albert Einstein. Does the inertia of a body depend upon
its energy-content? Annals of Physics.
1905, 18:639
