Afro-asian writers with biography of albert einstein

German-born physicist (1879–1955)

"Einstein" redirects here. For other uses, see Einstein (disambiguation) and Albert Einstein (disambiguation).

Albert Einstein (, EYEN-styne;German:[ˈalbɛʁtˈʔaɪnʃtaɪn]; 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist who is best known for developing the theory of relativity. Einstein also made important contributions to quantum mechanics. His mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc, which arises from special relativity, has been called "the world's most famous equation". He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for .

Born in the German Empire, Einstein moved to Switzerland in 1895, forsaking his German citizenship (as a subject of the Kingdom of Württemberg) the following year. In 1897, at the age of seventeen, he enrolled in the mathematics and physics teaching diploma program at the Swiss federal polytechnic school in Zurich, graduating in 1900. He acquired Swiss citizenship a year later, which he kept for the rest of his life, and afterwards secured a permanent position at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. In 1905, h

Albert Einstein is back in the news, but not because someone has disproved or confirmed one of his theories. The publication of Einstein's travel diaries last week reveal that he wrote some racist things about the Chinese back in the early 1920s. The media have jumped on Einstein's observations to undermine his reputation as a progressive, suggesting that the world-renowned physicist was a hypocrite. “Einstein's travel diaries reveal physicist's racism,” BBC News headlined its story. USA Today's version was: “Einstein was a racist? His 1920s travel diaries contain shocking slurs against Chinese people.” Wrote Fox News: “Einstein's diaries contain shocking details of his racism.”

Princeton University Press (in coordination with the Einstein Papers Project at the California Institute of Technology) just published The Travel Diaries of Albert Einstein: The Far East, Palestine, and Spain, 1922–1923, translated into English for the first time. In his journal, written while he was in his early 40s and still living in Europe, Einstein jotted down his observations during his wanderings through China, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Spain, and Palestine about science, art, politics, and philosophy.

The media has focused on several racist comments, including Einstein calling the Chinese an “industrious, filthy, obtuse people” and "often more like automatons than people.” He wrote that China is a “peculiar herd-like nation" and that “It would be a pity if these Chinese supplant all other races. For the likes of us the mere thought is unspeakably dreary.” In contrast, he wrote that the Japanese were "pure souls" who are "unostentatious, decent, altogether very appealing."

Einstein was already world-famous for his theory of relativity. He won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1922. Indeed, Einstein was the world's first celebrity scientist. He appeared on the cover of TIME magazine four times (1929, 1946, 1979, and 1999, when TIME selected E

Albert Einstein, the German-born Nobel prize-winning physicist, became an outspoken civil rights advocate after immigrating to the United States in the 1930s to escape the Nazis. But newly published travel diaries from the 1920s, when Einstein and his wife Elsa embarked on a months-long voyage to the Far East and Middle East, reveal a younger man who himself harbored xenophobic and even racist views.

In passages from The Travel Diaries of Albert Einstein, edited by Ze’ev Rosenkrantz, Einstein muses on the character and nature of the people he meets in Singapore, Hong Kong, China, Japan and Palestine, sometimes in insulting and stereotypical terms.

The Chinese, Einstein wrote, were “industrious” but also “filthy.” He described them as a “peculiar, herd-like nation often more like automatons than people.” Even though he only spent a few days in China, Einstein felt confident enough to cast judgment on the entire country and its inhabitants, at least in his private journal.

“It would be a pity if these Chinese supplant all other races,” Einstein wrote. “For the likes of us the mere thought is unspeakably dreary.”

While visiting Ceylon, modern-day Sri Lanka, Einstein was moved to pity for the crowds of beggars lining the streets of the capital city Colombo, but also described the mostly Indian panhandlers in dehumanizing terms. “They live in great filth and considerable stench down on the ground, do little, and need little,” he wrote.

Later in life, Einstein compared of his experience as a Jew in Germany—where anti-Semitism dogged him long before the rise of Hitler and the Nazis—to the plight of blacks in America. As early as 1931, Einstein spoke out against the racially motivated “Scotsboro Boys” trial and contributed as essay on racism to a magazine published by W.E.B. Du Bois, co-founder of the NAACP. In a famous 1946 commencement address at Lincoln University, a historically black college in Pennsylvania, Einstein said that segregation was “not a disea