Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879 in Ulm. He spent his childhood in Munich where his family owned a small machine shop. By the age of twelve, Einstein had taught himself Euclidean Geometry. His family moved to Milan, where he stayed for a year, and he used it as an excuse to drop out of school, which bored him. He finished secondary school in Aarau, Switzerland and entered the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. Einstein graduated in 1900, by studying the notes of a classmate since he did not attend his classes out of boredom, again. His teachers did not like him and would not recomend him for a position in the University. For two years, Einstein worked as a substitute… teacher and a tutor before getting a job, in 1902, as an examiner for a Swiss patent office in Bern. In 1905, he received his doctorate from the University of Zurich for a theoretical dissertation on the dimension of molecules. Einstein also published three theoretical papers of central importance to the development of 20th Century physics. The first was entitled "Brownian Motion," and the second "Photoelectric Effort," which was a revolutionary way of thinking and contradicted tradition. No one accepted the proposals of the first two papers. Then the third one was published in 1905 and called "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies." Einstein's words became what is known today as the special theory of relativity and said that the physical laws are the same in all inertial reference systems and that the speed of light in a vacuum is a universal constant. Virtually no one understood or supported Einstein's argument. Einstein left the patent office in 1907 and received his first academic appointment at the University of Zurich in 1909. In 1911, he moved to a German speaking university in Prague, but returned to Swiss National Polytechnic in Zurich in 1912. By 1914, Einstein was appointed director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics in Berlin. His chief patron in those early days was German physicist Max Planck and lent much credibility to Einstein's work. Einstein began working on generalizing and extending his theory of relativity, but the full general theory was not published until 1916. In 1919, he predicted that starlight would bend in the vicinity of a massive body, such as the sun. This theory was confirmed during a solar eclipse and cause Einstein to become world renowned after the phenomenon. Einstein received be Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921. With his new fame, Einstein attempted to further his own political and social views. He supported pacifism and Zionism and opposed Germany's involvement in World War I. His support of Zionism earned him attacks from both Anti-Semitic and right wing groups in Germany. Einstein left Germany for the United States when Hitler came into power, taking a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Once there, he renounced his stand on pacifism in the face of Nazi rising power. In 1939 he collaborated with other physicists in writing a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt informing him of the possibility that the Nazis may in fact be attempting to create an atomic bomb. The letter bore only Einstein's signature but lent credence to the letter and spurred the U.S. race to create the bomb first. Einstein became an American citizen in 1940. After the war, Einstein was active in international disarmament as well as world government. He was offered the position of President of Israel but turned the honor down. Albert Einstein died on April 18, 1955 in Princeton, New Jersey.Stephen William Hawking was born on January 8, 1942 in Oxford, England. As a student at Oxford University, Hawking studied Physics, and after three years was awarded a first class honors degree in Natural Science. After gaining a Ph.D. from Cambridge, Hawking became a Research Fellow, and later on a Professional Fellow at Gonville and Caius College. Widely regarded as one of the greatest theoretical physicists since Einstein, Hawking has held the post as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge since 1979. Most famous for his research on black holes, he has written the books A Brief History of Time and Black Holes and Baby Universes, a collection of essays published in 1993. He also authored the books On the Shoulders of Giants, A Briefer History of Time, The Universe in a Nutshell, and The Grand Design. Hawking is also the author of numerous articles for scientific papers, has 12 honorary degrees and is a Fellow of The Royal Society and a Member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Hawking was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease in his early 20s and is now confined to a wheelchair. He uses a computer device to help him speak. Hawking holds a professorship at the University of Oxford.
Timothy Ferris was born on August 29, 1944, in Miami, Florida. He graduated from Northwestern University with a B.A. in 1966 and did graduate work from 1966-1967. Ferris is the author of Coming of Age in the Milky Way, for which he was awarded the American Institute of Physics Prize and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; The Red Limit; The Whole Shebang: A State of the Universe(s) Report; Galaxies; The Mind's Sky; The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature, and other popular books on astronomy and physics. He has received the American Institute of Physics Prize, the American Association for the Advancement of Science Prize, the Klumpke-Roberts Prize, and a Guggenheim… Fellowship. Books by Ferris have been nominated for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. His PBS special, The Creation of the Universe, won an Emmy nomination in 1986. In addition to his books, Ferris is a former editor of Rolling Stone magazine and has authored more than 100 articles, essays, and reviews in such publications as Esquire, Nature, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, and Reader's Digest. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, writes a column for Scientific American, has served as an essayist for The MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour, and is a commentator for National Public Radio's All Things Considered. Ferris produced the Voyager phonograph record, an artifact of human civilization containing music, the sounds of Earth, and encoded photographs, that was launched aboard the Voyager spacecraft. He serves as a consultant to NASA on long-term space exploration policy. A polymath scholar, Ferris has taught in five disciplines at four universities including City University of New York and University of Southern California. Professor Ferris lives with his wife and family in San Francisco and teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, in the departments of journalism and astronomy, where he is an emeritus professor.
Alan Lightman was born in Memphis, Tenn. in 1948. As a boy, he had what seemed like incompatible interests--writing poetry and building rockets. He eventually put his literary interests aside to concentrate on science. After completing an A.B. at Princeton University in 1970, a Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology in 1974, and postdoctoral studies at Cornell University in 1976, Lightman moved directly into academia, teaching astronomy and physics at Harvard, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In the 1980s, however, Lightman found a way to combine his literary and scientific interests when he began to write essays about… science. He explored astronomy, cosmology, particle physics, space exploration, and the life of a scientist, writing about these topics in a way that makes them understandable to the average reader. Many of his essays can be found in the collections Time Travel and Papa Joe's Pipe and A Modern-Day Yankee in a Connecticut Court and Other Essays on Science. Alan Lightman is also the author of "Ancient Light: Our Changing View of the Universe", which won the Boston Globe's 1991 Critics' Choice award for non-fiction; and co-author of "Origins: The Lives and Worlds of Modern Cosmologists", which received an award from the Association of American Publishers in 1990. In the 1990's, Lightman branched out into fiction, although still with a focus on science, with the novels "Einstein's Dreams" and "Good Benito."