EINSTEIN Albert

Biography

The scientific discoveries of Albert Einstein - Theory of general relativity, the famous E=mc2 formula, quantum physics, cosmology, ... radically changed the knowledge of physics. Already as of 1905, his first publications became the reference. 
1921 : Nobel Prize in Physics
1931 : Jules Janssen Prize

Albert Einstein was also a convinced pacifist : 
- In 1913, he signed a peace petition with three other German scientists (preceding World War I).
- In 1946, he co-founded the Emergency Committee of Nuclear scientists agianst nuclear arms.
- In 1948, he co-signed aletter criticising the Deir Yassin massacre in which 100-200 palestinian civils were killed by Israeli extremists.
- During the Cold War, with Bertrand Russell and Joseph Rotblat, he opposed the ams race, calling upon the men of science to greater responsibilities, upon governments to jointly renounce arms proliferation and usage, and upon peoples to search for other means to achieve peace.
- During the 1950-1955 period, he openly criticised Maccarthysm, in the midst of the Cold War, and sought to facilitate the immigration of many new persons to the US.
- In 1955, a few days before his death, in London, he made public the Russell-Einstein Manifesto of 11 scientists, including himself, which opposed nuclear arms and exhorted the leaders of the world to elaborate peace solutions for solving international conflicts.

Concerning the atomic bomb, Albert Einstein had been encouraged in 1939 by other scientists to alert in writing the President of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt, of the potential risk that Germany develops an atomic bomb and to take the necessary measures, in particular, to protect the sources of uranium supply. This letter led Roosevelt to develop the A bomb in the US (Manhattan Project). When Einstein realised that Roosevelt intended using against Japan, he wrote him a second letter in 1945 begging him not to do so. The US however proceeded to explose the bomb against Hiroshima, then Nagasaki.