Albert Einstein's Big Idea Research Paper

"Einstein's Big Idea" provided a broad overview of the scientists that have contributed to Einstein’s discovery of the infamous equation: E = mc^2. The video detailed the personal and scientific lives of many of these scientists.

The derivation of E=mc^2 began long before Einstein - it began in the 19th century, when scientists didn't even know what energy was. They thought of the world as a series of individual forces, rather than an overarching energy that might unite them together. Michael Faraday, despite being the son of a blacksmith, eventually became the laboratory assistant of Sir Humphry Davy, a prominent scientist of the day. At the time, scientists were preoccupied with the idea of electricity, as the lightbulb had recently been

It was in the midst of the Great Revolution that Einstein grew up--in this time of Enlightenment, where scientific thought began to predominate. Einstein was fascinated by science, particularly by the compass. He was taught that all forms of energy had already been discovered, but eventually, Einstein would prove this principle wrong. At the time, energy and mass were separated by scientists. However, due to his obsession with light, Einstein was able to unite these two seemingly disparate concepts. In 1905, he published his theory of special relativity - thus the one constant in the world was not time, but light. Moreover, he made a connection between energy, mass, and light such that as time passes and you approach the speed of light, energy becomes mass. From this, he derived his infamous equation: energy = mc^2. He had united mass and energy, which scientists had long thought of as completely different things that couldn’t possibly be talked about in comparable terms. However, after Einstein’s divorce, his downfall

Fledgling physicist Lise Meitner was interested in radioactivity, and aided by chemist Otto Hahn, she was able to pursue radioactivity, despite being a woman. She discovered that the atom was an example of E = mc^2, and that the unstable nature of the nucleus was simply its mass turning into energy. However, because she was a Jew, she lost everything in the Holocaust. Hahn still carried through with their experiment. When he added neutrons to the uranium nucleus, it did not increase in size; instead, radium began to appear. This led to the discovery that a nucleus doesn't simply increase in size when you add more neutrons; instead, the nucleus splits in two. An atom can be split. A large amount of energy is released, and this discovery was consistent with Einstein's