Author Description

Albert Einstein was a German Jewish physicist. He is considered the best-known and most popular scientist of the 20th century. In 1905, when he was an unknown young physicist, employed in the Patent Office of Berne, he published his theory of special relativity. In it he incorporated, in a simple theoretical framework based on simple physical postulates, concepts and phenomena previously studied by Henri Poincaré and Hendrik Lorentz. As a logical consequence of this theory, he deduced the most famous equation of physics: mass-energy equivalence, E = mc2. That year he published other works that would lay some of the foundations of statistical physics and quantum mechanics In 1915, he introduced the theory of general relativity, in which he completely reformulated the concept of gravity. One of the consequences was the emergence of the scientific study of the origin and evolution of the universe by the branch of physics called cosmology. In 1919, when British observations of a solar eclipse confirmed their predictions about the curvature of light, Einstein's theory of general relativity was idolized by the press. Einstein became a popular icon of world-famous science, a privilege available to very few scientists.