Albert Einstein

TASK 1. Fill in the text while listening ALBERT EINSTEINAlbert Einstein was a German-born physicist, although most people probably know him as the most intelligent person who ever lived. His name has become part of many languages when we want to say someone is a genius, as in the phrase, “She’s a real Einstein”. He must have been pretty brainy to discover the Theory of Relativity and the equation E=mc2.In 1999, ‘Time’ magazine named Einstein as the Person of the Century. No one could have guessed this would happen when he was at school. He was extremely interested in science but hated the system of learning by heart. He said it destroyed learning and creativity. He had already done many experiments, but failed the entrance exams to a technical college.He didn’t let this setback stop him. When he was 16, he performed his famous experiment of imagining traveling alongside a beam of light. He eventually graduated from university, in 1900, with a degree in physics. Twelve years later he was a university professor and in 1921, he won the Nobel Prize for Physics. He went on to publish over 300 scientific papers.Einstein is the only scientist to become a cult figure, a household name, and part of everyday culture. He once joked that when people stopped him in the street, he always replied: "Pardon me, sorry! Always I am mistaken for Professor Einstein.” Today, he is seen as the typical mad, absent-minded professor, who just happened to change our world. TASK 2. Fill in the blanks using the words given below. Light and other electromagnetic radiation such as radio waves, are obviously waves—or so everyone thought. Maxwell and Lorentz had firmly established the wave nature of electromagnetic radiation in electromagnetic theory. Numerous experiments on the interference, diffraction, and scattering of light had confirmed it. We can well appreciate the shock and disbelief when Einstein argued in 1905 that under certain circumstances light behaves not as continuous waves but as discontinuous, individual particles. These particles, or "light quanta," each carried a "quantum," or fixed amount of energy, much as automobiles produced by an assembly plant arrive only as individual, identical cars—never as fractions of a car. The total energy of the light beam (or the total output of an assembly plant) is the sum total of the individual energies of these discrete "light quanta (or automobiles), what are called today "photons." Theories of matter and electromagnetic radiation in which the total energy is treated as "quantized" are known as quantum theories. Although Einstein was not the first to break the energy of light into packets, he was the first to take this seriously and to realize the full implications of doing so.