Albert Einstein

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From being born in Germany and having to escape the rule of Hitler, Albert Einstein came to be a person whose name is synonymous with the word "Genius".  Einstein was born in the city of Ulm in Germany in the year 1879.  Einstein received his early education in the city of Munich in Germany and eventually, due to his extremely high test scores in physics and math, gained admission to Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich. Einstein would later graduate and immigrate to the United States where he would receive the Nobel Prize. Albert Einstein is a hero because he has revolutionized the study of physics and has discovered a plethora of facts about the universe.  His theories of how the universe functions still surpass all the knowledge our modern scientists have acquired even over half a century after his death.

As a young child, Albert Einstein attended school in Munich, Germany.  The school's strict and rigorous ways of teaching didn't correspond with Einstein's learning style.  He was said to have a speech impairment, however, he was always curious as a child and always loved learning.  Due to work, his father moved his family to Italy and left Einstein in Munich to finish his schooling.  Einstein's strengths were math and physics which he used to his advantage to get accepted into Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich after he graduated high school.  In Switzerland, he would later graduate college and marry his wife Marie, who together, had 3 kids. Shortly after graduating, Einstein received work at a Swiss patent office where he would be exposed to many inventions and ideas which were crucial to his findings on his four major papers which he wrote during his time at work.  His time at the patent office was mostly spent expanding his studies at Swiss polytechnic and working to publish his four major papers: The Brownian motion, The Photoelectric Effect, Special Relativity, and Mass-Energy Equivalence.  In the year 1905("Miracle Year") when his papers were published in the largest physics journal of all time, the world was immediately dumbfounded by his discoveries.  It was a few years later when Einstein received the Nobel Prize for his Theory of Relativity and became known as one of the most influential physicists in the world.  Due to Hitler's sudden rise of power in Germany, Einstein was ordered to be killed by the Nazis.  In the year 1933, he fled to New Jersey and continued his work at Princeton University where he never bothered to go back to his homeland.

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The first reason Albert Einstein is a hero is because he is a revolutionary.  With his many theories and discoveries, Einstein helped pave the way for future physicists and mathematicians to further explore the universe we live in.  In the year 1905, Einstein first published the "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 which fell short in Isaac Newton's theory, and for a more expansive, nuanced explanation of how gravitational forces worked."  The Theory of Relativity was the result of Einstein's decades of hard work.  Using Isaac Newton's laws of gravity, he came to the conclusion that "spacetime is a differentiable manifold whose curvature is related to energy density, and that particles move on geodesics of this manifold, while different observers correspond to different coordinate choices".  This theory helps us to better understand and predict movements of planets, which opens a large door in the science of astronomy and allows us to gain much needed information on planets like mars.  Second to his theory of special relativity stands the theory of mass-energy equivalence, or more commonly know, E=MC2.   This theory was first introduced in the "Miracle Year" In 1905 when "Albert Einstein announced that mass and energy are not separate quantities as physicists had thought. Instead, they could be converted from one to the other according to the famous equation: energy equals mass times the speed of light squared."  This explains the relationship between energy and mass and how they are equivalent.  This equation is used to calculate the distance between an object that emits light and an object that receives the light which on a greater scale, is used to calculate distances and other information about planets and astronomical objects.

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The second reason Albert Einstein was a hero is because he influenced President Roosevelt's decisions while he was in office.  In the year 1939, Hitler was at his highest point of power and many countries were in danger of a nuclear war. According to Einstein's theory splitting a nucleus of an atom would result in a large nuclear explosion and would cause great devastation; his theory was proven correct when he collaborated with other physicists to bombard the nucleus of an atom with neutrons.  "Since assuming power in 1933, Adolf Hitler had withdrawn Germany from the League of Nations, rearmed at breakneck speed, and occupied the Rhineland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. That Hitler would attempt to build an atomic bomb became clear when, after occupying Czechoslovakia in 1939, he stopped selling uranium from its mines."  This quote explains how dangerous Hitler became and how Einstein's quick thinking saved many lives. He knew engineers in Germany had discovered nuclear weaponry and through high ranked scientific figures, Einstein wrote letters to president Roosevelt and warned him of Germany's weaponry and convinced him to build nuclear bombs.  After president Roosevelt received the letters, he responded quickly by forming a committee to study the task at hand which eventually led to a project which "became known as the Manhattan Project. The Project succeeded: by July 1945 U.S. physicists had built three bombs, one out of uranium and two from the element plutonium, synthesized for the first time as part of the project. One plutonium bomb was successfully tested in the New Mexico desert. The other two bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, prompting Japan to surrender and end World War II."  This quote explains the significance of Einstein's well-thought decisions which eventually helped our country in war years later.  This was the peak of the Nuclear age for America which is one of the reasons we are one of the most powerful countries in the world to this day.

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In conclusion, Albert Einstein is a hero because he paved the way for modern physics, and all sciences for that matter.  By elaborating on previous laws such as those of Isaac Newton, Einstein managed to expand them and even explain how they work.  Without these core fundamentals of physics that he derived, we wouldn't have our everyday technology such as cell phones, space electronics, or even lasers.  Some of Einstein's major accomplishments Include his many original theories, and the advice he gave to president Roosevelt on nuclear weapons and technology.  His brilliance and compassion for others saved many lives over the decades and have made our lives much easier with the ability to have technology such as telephones.  Einstein was always quirky and energetic as a child, curious about the world around him; his child-like spirit stuck with him until the day he passed away.  He always knew that it does not matter how smart you are, but how willing you are to achieve your goals and that attitude inspired people to chase after their goals.  Einstein has taught us that along with a hard work ethic, imagination is the key to success and achieving your dreams.  Remember, "Everyone 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 stupid."-Albert Einstein.