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Einstein: New Jersey
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After Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, Einstein was accused by the ring-wing Nazi regime of creating a "Jewish physics". Nazi physicists (notably including the Nobel laureate Johannes Stark) attempted to discredit his theories. Einstein fled to the United States. In 1935, Einstein was given permanent residency in the United States. He accepted a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He became an American citizen in 1940 (though maintaining possession of his Swiss citizenship).
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Einstein was a mythic figure—the world’s most famous scientist. Moffat was living with his British father and Danish mother in Copenhagen. Einstein was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Yet both men were outsiders. In his later years, Einstein had become increasingly isolated from the physics community, refusing to embrace the strange but powerful theory of quantum mechanics—with its particles that are ... waves and that exist in no specific place until they’re observed. Nature, he argued, couldn’t be so perverse.
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Einstein's influence on twentieth-century philosophy of science is comparable to his influence on twentieth-century physics. What made that possible? One explanation looks to the institutional and disciplinary history of theoretical physics and the philosophy of science. Each was, in its own domain, a new mode of thought in the latter nineteenth century, and each finally began to secure for itself a solid institutional basis in the early twentieth century. In a curious way, the two movements helped one another. Philosophers of science helped to legitimate theoretical physics by locating the significant cognitive content of science in its theories.
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Einstein sent the Annalen der Physik a paper on electromagnetism and motion. Since the time of Galileo and Newton, physicists had known that laboratory measurements of mechanical processes could never show any difference between an apparatus at rest and an apparatus moving at constant speed in a straight line. Objects behave the same way on a uniformly moving ship as on a ship at the dock; this is called the Principle of Relativity. But according to the electromagnetic theory, developed by Maxwell and refined by Lorentz, light should not obey this principle. Their electromagnetic theory predicted that measurements on the velocity of light would show the effects of motion. Yet no such effect had been detected in any of the ingenious and delicate experiments that physicists had devised: the velocity of light did not vary.
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In November 1915, Einstein presented a series of lectures before the Prussian Academy of Sciences in which he described his theory of general relativity. The final lecture climaxed with his introduction of an equation that replaced Newton's law of gravity. This theory considered all observers to be equivalent, not only those moving at a uniform speed. In general relativity, gravity is no longer a force (as it was in Newton's law of gravity) but is a consequence of the curvature of space-time. The theory provided the foundation for the study of cosmology and gave scientists the tools for understanding many features of the universe that were not discovered until well after Einstein's death. General relativity becomes a method of perceiving all of physics.
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At the start of his scientific work, Einstein realized the inadequacies of Newtonian mechanics and his special theory of relativity stemmed from an attempt to reconcile the laws of mechanics with the laws of the electromagnetic field. He dealt with classical problems of statistical mechanics and problems in which they were merged with quantum theory: this led to an explanation of the Brownian movement of molecules. He investigated the thermal properties of light with a low radiation density and his observations laid the foundation of the photon theory of light.
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