Albert Einstein: A Genius, Relatively Speaking краткий пересказ текста, ПОМОГИТЕ!
Albert einstein
(1879-1955) was one of
the greatest scientists of
the 20th century, an era dominated
by science. His theories about how
the world works transformed our
understanding of the universe. Even as
a young child, Einstein was thinking
about the world in a way that was
different from other children. A toy
compass given to Einstein by his
father inspired the future scientist.
The five-year-old wondered what
made the needle always point north.
A creative mind and a love for
mathematics and physics inspired
the German-born Einstein to
become a scientist. However, it
was not as a celebrated scientist
that Einstein proposed his first
groundbreaking theories.
In 1905, when he was 26 years old,
Einstein worked as a clerk at the
Patent Office in Bern, Switzerland.
In his spare time, he wrote and then submitted a series of five scientific
papers to a leading German physics
journal. This alone was remarkable,
as scientists usually submit a couple
of papers a year, working on them
full time.
In addition, three of these
papers were revolutionary, providing
the foundation for modern physics.
Transforming physics.
Einstein’s first paper used mathematics
to explain the motion of particles
in a liquid or gas, such as dust
particles moving in air.
In another
paper,
Einstein explained how light
can be transformed into electricity.
He won the 1921
Nobel Prize in
Physics for this explanation.
In his third paper, he described
the complicated Special Theory of Relativity. This theory explains how
measurements change when you travel
very fast — almost as fast as light
travels.
To mark the 100th anniversary
of these achievements, 2005 was
designated by the United
Nations
as the
International Year of Physics,
also known as the
Einstein year.
Great minds think alike In later years, Einstein developed his
General Theory of
Relativity, which
explains how gravity works for very
massive objects like black holes. The
equations also indicated that the
universe should be either expanding
or collapsing. However,
Einstein
observed that stars do not appear
to move away from or toward each
other, and he rejected that prediction.
He added a factor to his theory to
make the universe motionless.
A few years later, astronomer
Edwin
Hubble, for whom the Hubble Space Telescope is named, became famous
for showing that galaxies existed
Continued from page …
outside our Milky Way Galaxy. He also
showed that the farther away a galaxy
is from
Earth, the faster it appeared
to be moving away. Hubble was the
first to explain that this observation
meant the universe was expanding.
When
Einstein learned of Hubble’s
work, he realized his theory had
correctly predicted the universe’s
expansion. He considered his disbelief
of his own theory the greatest blunder
of his life. Scientists now have proven Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity,
and use it, along with new telescope
technology, to help them discover
more about the expanding universe.
Legacy of a genius If the universe is expanding today,
then it must have been smaller in
the past.
In fact, the universe must
have a beginning.
If scientists can
figure out how fast the universe is
expanding, they can work backward
to find out how long the universe
has been expanding. This calculation
yields the age of the universe and
answers several of the basic questions
we have concerning where we
came from and how we got here. Before the Hubble Space Telescope was
launched, estimates for the universe’s
age ranged between 10 and 20 billion
years old. One of the three primary
scientific goals of the Hubble mission
is to determine the expansion rate,
and thus the age, of the universe.
In
1999, astronomers used the Hubble
Space
Telescope to narrow down the
age of universe to between 10 and 14
billion years old. Further studies with
Hubble and other telescopes yielded
an age of about 13.7 billion years old.These results, and many of the
groundbreaking discoveries of the
last century, still rely upon Einstein’s
work. His ideas have provided a
solid and stable framework upon
which much of our knowledge
of the universe is built.