This is Steve Ember AQnd this is Sarah Long with the VOA Special

English Program Explorations.

Today we tell about a scientist who changed the way we understand te
Universe, Albert Einstein.
In the year 1905, Albert Einstein published some important paper in a
Germany Scientific Magazine.
They included one of the most important scientific documents in history. It
was filled with mathematics.
It explained what came to be called his Special Theory of Relativity. Ten
years later he expanded in to a General Theory of Relativity. Albert
Einstein Theories of relativity are about the basic ideas we use to
describe natural happenings.
They are about time, space, mass, movement, and gravity.
Albert Einstein was born in Ulm Germany, in 1879.His father owned a
factory that made electrical devices. His mother enjoyed music and
books. His parents were wish but they did not observe many of the
religions rules. Albert was quiet child who spend much of his time alone.
He was slow to talk and had difficulty learning to read. When Albert was
five years old, his father gave him a compass. The child was filled with
wonder when he discovered that the compass needle always pointed in
the same direction to the North.
He asked his father and his uncle what caused the needle to move. Their
answer about magnetism and gravity were difficult for the boy to
understand.
Yet he spent a lot of time thinking about them.
He said later that he felt something hidden had to be behind things.
Albert did not like school.
The German schools of that time were not pleasant students could not
ask questions.

Albert said he felt as if he were in prison.

One story says Albert told his uncle Jacob how much he hated school,
especially mathematics.
His uncle told him to solve mathematical problems by pretending to be a
policeman. You are looking for someone, he said but you do not know
who, calm him X Find him by using the mathematical tools of algebra and
geometry Albert learned to love mathematics.
He was studying the complex mathematics of calculus when all his
friends were still studying simple mathematics. Instead of playing with
friends he thought about such as: what would happen if people could
travel at the speed of light: Albert decide that the wanted to teach
mathematics and physics. He attended the Federal Polytechnic Institute
in Zurich, Switzerland.
He graduated with honors, but could not get a teaching job. So he began
working for the Swiss government as on inspector of patents for new
inventions. The job was not demanding he had a lot of time think about
some of his scientific theories.
From the time he was a boy, Albert Einstein had performed what he called
thought experiments test his ideas. He used his mind as a laboratory. By
1905, he had formed his ideas into theories that he published. In one
paper he said that light travels both in waves and in particles, called
photons.
This idea is an important part of what is called the quantum theory.
Another paper was about the motion of small particles suspended in a
liquid or gas.
It confirmed the atomic theory of matter.
The most important of Albert Einsteins theories published that year
became known as his special Theory of Relativity.
He said the speed of light is always the same almost 300,000/km a
second.

Where the light is coming from or who is measuring it does not change
the speed.
However, he said, time can change, and mass can change and length
can change.
They depend on where a person is in relation to an object or an event.
Imagine two space vehicles with a scientist travelling in each one. One
spaceship is red, one is blue except for color, both spaceships are exactly
alike. They pass one another far out, in space. Neither scientist feels that
his ship in moving. To each, it seems that the other ship is moving not his.
As they pass at high speed, the scientist in each ship measures how long
it takes a beam of light to travel from the floor to the top of his spaceship,
hit a mirror and return to the floor.
Each spaceship has a window that lets each scientist see the experiment
of the other. They begin their experiments at exactly the same moment.
The scientist in the blue ship sees his beam of light go straight up and
come straight down. But he sees that the light beam in the red ship does
not do this. The red ship is moving so fast that the beam does not appear
to go straight up.
It forms a path up and down that looks like an upside down v.
The scientist in the red ship would see exactly the same thing as he
watched the experiment by the other scientist.
He could say that the time passed more slowly in the other ship.
Each scientist would be correct because the passing of time is linked to
the position of the observer.
Each scientist also would see that the other spaceship was shorter than
his own. The higher the speeds the spaceships were travelling, the
shorter the other ship would appear. And although the other ship would
seem shorter, its mass would increase.

It would seem t get heavier. The ideas were difficult to accept. Yet other
scientist did experiments to prove that Einstein theory was correct.
Ten years after his paper on the special theory of relativity, Albert Einstein
finished work on another theory. It described what he called his General
Theory of Relativity.
It expanded his special theory to include the motion of objects that are
gaining speed. This theory offered new ideas about gravity and the close
relationship between matter and energy. It built on the ideas about mass
he had expressed in 1905.
Einstein said that an object loses mass when it gives off light, which is a
kind of energy.
He believed that the matter and energy were different forms of the same
thing.
That was the basic of his famous mathematical statement E equals m-c
squared (energy equals mass times the speed of light squared). This
statement or formula explained that a great amount of energy could come
from a small piece of matter.
It explained how the sun could give off heat and light for millions of years.
This formula also led to the discovery of atomic energy.
In his general theory of Relativity, Einstein said that gravity, like time, is
not always the same. Gravity changes as observes speed up or slow
down. He also said that gravity from very large objects, such as stars,
could turn the path of light waves that the passed nearby.
This seemed unbelievable. 1919, British scientist confirmed his theory
when the sun was completely blocked during a solar eclipse.
Albert Einstein immediately became famous around the world.
In 1921, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics. It was given to him, not for
his theories or relativity, but for his discovery of the law of the
photoelectric effect.

This scientific law explained how why some metals give off an electron
after light falls on their surfaces.
The Discovery led to the development of modern electronics, including
ratio and television.
Albert Einstein taught in Switzerland and Germany. He left Germany
when Adolph Hitler came to power in 1933. He moved to the United
States to continue his research. He worked at the Institute for Advanced
Study in Princeton, New Jersey.
Einstein became a Citizen of the United States in 1940. Einstein was a
famous man, but you would not have known that by looking at him.
His white hair was long and wild. He wore old clothes. He showed an
inner joy when he was playing his violin or talking about his work.
Students and friends said he had a way of explaining difficult ideas using
images that were easy to understand Albert Einstein opposed wars.
Yet he wrote to President Franklin Roosevelt in 1939 to advise him that
the United States should develop an atomic bomb before Germany did.
Einstein spent the last twenty-five years of his life working on that he
called a unified field theory.
He hoped to find a common mathematical statement that could tie
together all the different parts of physics. He did not succeed. Albert
Einstein died in 1955.
He was seventy-six years old.