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171-427: Many searches were conducted for Vulcan over the following decades, but despite several claimed observations, its existence could not be confirmed. The need for the planet as an explanation for Mercury's orbital peculiarities was later rendered unnecessary when Einstein 's 1915 theory of general relativity showed that Mercury's departure from an orbit predicted by Newtonian physics was explained by effects arising from

342-600: A Hanukkah celebration. Einstein next traveled to California, where he met Caltech president and Nobel laureate Robert A. Millikan . His friendship with Millikan was "awkward", as Millikan "had a penchant for patriotic militarism", where Einstein was a pronounced pacifist . During an address to Caltech's students, Einstein noted that science was often inclined to do more harm than good. This aversion to war also led Einstein to befriend author Upton Sinclair and film star Charlie Chaplin , both noted for their pacifism. Carl Laemmle , head of Universal Studios , gave Einstein

513-575: A unified field theory by generalizing his geometric theory of gravitation to include electromagnetism . As a result, he became increasingly isolated from the mainstream modern physics . His intellectual achievements and originality made Einstein broadly synonymous with genius . In 1999, he was named Time 's Person of the Century . Albert Einstein was born in Ulm , in the Kingdom of Württemberg in

684-682: A "citizen of the world" who should be offered a temporary shelter in the UK. Both bills failed, however, and Einstein then accepted an earlier offer from the Institute for Advanced Study , in Princeton, New Jersey , US, to become a resident scholar. Neptune Neptune is the eighth and farthest known planet from the Sun . It is the fourth-largest planet in the Solar System by diameter,

855-461: A Vulcan-type planet close to the Sun. Watson, observing from Separation Point, Wyoming , placed the planet about 2.5 degrees southwest of the Sun and estimated its magnitude at 4.5. Swift, observing the eclipse from a location near Denver, Colorado , saw what he took to be an intra-mercurial planet about 3 degrees southwest of the Sun. He estimated its brightness to be the same as that of Theta Cancri ,

1026-521: A bill to parliament to extend British citizenship to Einstein, during which period Einstein made a number of public appearances describing the crisis brewing in Europe. In one of his speeches he denounced Germany's treatment of Jews, while at the same time he introduced a bill promoting Jewish citizenship in Palestine, as they were being denied citizenship elsewhere. In his speech he described Einstein as

1197-740: A contract to install electric lighting in Munich, but without success—they lacked the capital that would have been required to update their technology from direct current to the more efficient, alternating current alternative. The failure of their bid forced them to sell their Munich factory and search for new opportunities elsewhere. The Einstein family moved to Italy, first to Milan and a few months later to Pavia , where they settled in Palazzo Cornazzani . Einstein, then fifteen, stayed behind in Munich in order to finish his schooling. His father wanted him to study electrical engineering , but he

1368-447: A definite disk—unlike stars, which appear in telescopes as mere points of light—and that its phase indicated that it was on the far side of the Sun approaching superior conjunction . Both Watson and Swift had observed two objects they believed were not known stars, but after Swift corrected an error in his coordinates, none of the coordinates matched each other, nor known stars. The idea that four objects were observed during

1539-431: A depth of 7,000 km, the conditions may be such that methane decomposes into diamond crystals that rain downwards like hailstones. Scientists believe that this kind of diamond rain occurs on Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus. Very-high-pressure experiments at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory suggest that the top of the mantle may be an ocean of liquid carbon with floating solid 'diamonds'. The core of Neptune

1710-677: A diploma handed to him by King Alfonso XIII . (His Spanish trip also gave him a chance to meet a fellow Nobel laureate, the neuroanatomist Santiago Ramón y Cajal .) From 1922 until 1932, with the exception of a few months in 1923 and 1924, Einstein was a member of the Geneva-based International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations , a group set up by the League to encourage scientists, artists, scholars, teachers and other people engaged in

1881-457: A fifth-magnitude star which was also visible during totality, about six or seven minutes from the "planet". Theta Cancri and the planet were nearly in line with the Sun's centre. Watson and Swift had reputations as excellent observers. Watson had already discovered more than twenty asteroids , while Swift had several comets named after him. Both described the colour of their hypothetical intra-mercurial planet as "red". Watson reported that it had

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2052-620: A figure of 19 days and 22 hours. On 8 May 1865 another French astronomer, Aristide Coumbary , observed an unexpected transit from Istanbul , Turkey . Between 1866 and 1878, no reliable observations of the hypothetical planet were made. Then, during the total solar eclipse of July 29, 1878 , two experienced astronomers, Professor James Craig Watson , the director of the Ann Arbor Observatory in Michigan , and Lewis Swift , from Rochester, New York , both claimed to have seen

2223-580: A formative event from his youth, when he was sick in bed and his father brought him a compass . This sparked his lifelong fascination with electromagnetism . He realized that "Something deeply hidden had to be behind things." Albert attended St. Peter's Catholic elementary school in Munich from the age of five. When he was eight, he was transferred to the Luitpold Gymnasium , where he received advanced primary and then secondary school education. In 1894, Hermann and Jakob's company tendered for

2394-606: A frequency range of 50–12 kHz at magnetic latitudes 7–33˚. These plasma wave detections were possibly triggered by lightning over 20 minutes in the ammonia clouds of the magnetosphere. During Voyager 2 ’s closest approach to Neptune, the PWS instrument provided Neptune's first plasma wave detections at a sample rate of 28,800 samples per second. The measured plasma densities range from 10 – 10 cm . Neptunian lightning may occur in three cloud layers, with microphysical modelling suggesting that most of these occurrences happen in

2565-463: A gravel sorter and an electric typewriter. His employers were pleased enough with his work to make his position permanent in 1903, although they did not think that he should be promoted until he had "fully mastered machine technology". It is conceivable that his labors at the patent office had a bearing on his development of his special theory of relativity. He arrived at his revolutionary ideas about space, time and light through thought experiments about

2736-410: A hot, dense supercritical fluid . This fluid, which has a high electrical conductivity, is sometimes called a water–ammonia ocean. The mantle may consist of a layer of ionic water in which the water molecules break down into a soup of hydrogen and oxygen ions , and deeper down superionic water in which the oxygen crystallizes but the hydrogen ions float around freely within the oxygen lattice. At

2907-485: A letter and urged Berlin Observatory astronomer Galle to search with the observatory's refractor . Heinrich d'Arrest , a student at the observatory, suggested to Galle that they could compare a recently drawn chart of the sky in the region of Le Verrier's predicted location with the current sky to seek the displacement characteristic of a planet , as opposed to a fixed star. On the evening of 23 September 1846,

3078-401: A low temperature of 51.8 K (−221.3 °C). At a depth where the atmospheric pressure equals 1  bar (100  kPa ), the temperature is 72.00 K (−201.15 °C). Deeper inside the layers of gas, the temperature rises steadily. As with Uranus, the source of this heating is unknown, but the discrepancy is larger: Uranus only radiates 1.1 times as much energy as it receives from

3249-513: A man can be." In 1912, Einstein entered into a relationship with Elsa Löwenthal , who was both his first cousin on his mother's side and his second cousin on his father's. When Marić learned of his infidelity soon after moving to Berlin with him in April 1914, she returned to Zürich, taking Hans Albert and Eduard with her. Einstein and Marić were granted a divorce on 14 February 1919 on the grounds of having lived apart for five years. As part of

3420-448: A more thorough study of Mercury's motion. This was based on a series of meridian observations of the planet and 14 transits. This study's rigor meant that any differences between the motion predicted and what was observed would point to the influence of an unknown factor. Indeed, some discrepancies remained. During Mercury's orbit, its perihelion advances by a small amount, something called perihelion precession . The observed value exceeds

3591-861: A nearly circular orbit at a distance of 21 million kilometres (0.14 AU; 13,000,000 mi). The period of revolution was 19 days and 17 hours, and the orbit was inclined to the ecliptic by 12 degrees and 10 minutes (an incredible degree of precision). As seen from the Earth, Vulcan's greatest elongation from the Sun was 8 degrees. Numerous reports reached Le Verrier from other amateurs who claimed to have seen unexplained transits. Some of these reports referred to observations made many years earlier, and many were not dated, let alone accurately timed. Nevertheless, Le Verrier continued to tinker with Vulcan's orbital parameters as each newly reported sighting reached him. He frequently announced dates of future Vulcan transits. When these failed to materialize, he tinkered with

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3762-514: A new planet. In 1845–1846, Urbain Le Verrier , developed his own calculations independently from Adams, but aroused no enthusiasm among his compatriots. In June 1846, upon seeing Le Verrier's first published estimate of the planet's longitude and its similarity to Adams's estimate, Airy persuaded James Challis to search for the planet. Challis vainly scoured the sky throughout August and September. Challis had, in fact, observed Neptune

3933-446: A paper which laid the foundations for the concepts of both laser and maser , and contained a trove of information that would be beneficial to developments in physics later on. In the middle part of his career, Einstein made important contributions to statistical mechanics and quantum theory. Especially notable was his work on the quantum physics of radiation , in which light consists of particles, subsequently called photons . With

4104-410: A pendulum with which he took his patients' pulses, estimated the total duration of the transit (coming up with 1 hour, 17 minutes, and 9 seconds). Le Verrier was not happy about Lescarbault's crude equipment but was satisfied the physician had seen the transit of a previously unknown planet. On 2 January 1860 he announced the discovery of the new planet with the proposed name from mythology, "Vulcan", at

4275-487: A planet in transit. French physician and amateur astronomer Edmond Modeste Lescarbault began searching the Sun's disk in 1853, and more systematically after 1858, with a 3.75 inch (95 mm) refractor in an observatory he set up outside his surgery. In 1840, François Arago , the director of the Paris Observatory , suggested to mathematician Urbain Le Verrier that he work on the topic of Mercury 's orbit around

4446-664: A platform from which to promote traditional Catholic doctrine. Einstein's former physics professor Hendrik Lorentz and the Polish chemist Marie Curie were also members of the committee. In March and April 1925, Einstein and his wife visited South America, where they spent about a week in Brazil, a week in Uruguay and a month in Argentina. Their tour was suggested by Jorge Duclout (1856–1927) and Mauricio Nirenstein (1877–1935) with

4617-524: A professorial salary but with no teaching duties to burden him. Their invitation was all the more appealing to him because Berlin happened to be the home of his latest girlfriend, Elsa Löwenthal. He duly joined the Academy on 24 July 1913, and moved into an apartment in the Berlin district of Dahlem on 1 April 1914. He was installed in his Humboldt University position shortly thereafter. The outbreak of

4788-648: A result of Germany having driven the Jews out, they had lowered their "technical standards" and put the Allies ' technology ahead of theirs. Einstein later contacted leaders of other nations, including Turkey's Prime Minister, İsmet İnönü , to whom he wrote in September 1933, requesting placement of unemployed German-Jewish scientists. As a result of Einstein's letter, Jewish invitees to Turkey eventually totaled over "1,000 saved individuals". Locker-Lampson also submitted

4959-403: A short time after he had given the twelve year old Einstein a geometry textbook, the boy "had worked through the whole book. He thereupon devoted himself to higher mathematics ... Soon the flight of his mathematical genius was so high I could not follow." Einstein recorded that he had "mastered integral and differential calculus " while still just fourteen. His love of algebra and geometry

5130-447: A subsequent letter to physicist and friend Max Born , who had already emigrated from Germany to England, Einstein wrote, "... I must confess that the degree of their brutality and cowardice came as something of a surprise." After moving to the US, he described the book burnings as a "spontaneous emotional outburst" by those who "shun popular enlightenment", and "more than anything else in

5301-601: A tour of his studio and introduced him to Chaplin. They had an instant rapport, with Chaplin inviting Einstein and his wife, Elsa, to his home for dinner. Chaplin said Einstein's outward persona, calm and gentle, seemed to conceal a "highly emotional temperament", from which came his "extraordinary intellectual energy". Chaplin's film City Lights was to premiere a few days later in Hollywood, and Chaplin invited Einstein and Elsa to join him as his special guests. Walter Isaacson , Einstein's biographer, described this as "one of

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5472-478: A twenty year old Serbian , Mileva Marić . Over the next few years, the pair spent many hours discussing their shared interests and learning about topics in physics that the polytechnic school's lectures did not cover. In his letters to Marić, Einstein confessed that exploring science with her by his side was much more enjoyable than reading a textbook in solitude. Eventually the two students became not only friends but also lovers. Historians of physics are divided on

5643-511: A visitor is the joyous, positive attitude to life ... The American is friendly, self-confident, optimistic, and without envy." In 1922, Einstein's travels were to the old world rather than the new. He devoted six months to a tour of Asia that saw him speaking in Japan, Singapore and Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon ). After his first public lecture in Tokyo, he met Emperor Yoshihito and his wife at

5814-457: A year before the planet's subsequent discoverer, Johann Gottfried Galle , and on two occasions, 4 and 12 August 1845. However, his out-of-date star maps and poor observing techniques meant that he failed to recognize the observations as such until he carried out later analysis. Challis was full of remorse but blamed his neglect on his maps and the fact that he was distracted by his concurrent work on comet observations. Meanwhile, Le Verrier sent

5985-432: Is 10–100 times greater than at the poles. This is interpreted as evidence for upwelling at the equator and subsidence near the poles, as photochemistry cannot account for the distribution without meridional circulation. In 2007, it was discovered that the upper troposphere of Neptune's south pole was about 10 K warmer than the rest of its atmosphere, which averages about 73 K (−200 °C). The temperature differential

6156-422: Is 28.32°, which is similar to the tilts of Earth (23°) and Mars (25°). As a result, Neptune experiences seasonal changes similar to those on Earth. The long orbital period of Neptune means that the seasons last for forty Earth years. Its sidereal rotation period (day) is roughly 16.11 hours. Because its axial tilt is comparable to Earth's, the variation in the length of its day over the course of its long year

6327-495: Is 29.81 AU, and the aphelion distance is 30.33 AU. Neptune's orbital eccentricity is only 0.008678, making it the planet in the Solar System with the second most circular orbit after Venus . The orbit of Neptune is inclined 1.77° compared to that of Earth. On 11 July 2011, Neptune completed its first full barycentric orbit since its discovery in 1846; it did not appear at its exact discovery position in

6498-518: Is banded by clouds of varying compositions depending on altitude. The upper-level clouds lie at pressures below one bar, where the temperature is suitable for methane to condense. For pressures between one and five bars (100 and 500 kPa), clouds of ammonia and hydrogen sulfide are thought to form. Above a pressure of five bars, the clouds may consist of ammonia, ammonium sulfide , hydrogen sulfide and water. Deeper clouds of water ice should be found at pressures of about 50 bars (5.0 MPa), where

6669-513: Is commonly used. In Māori , the planet is called Tangaroa , named after the Māori god of the sea . In Nahuatl , the planet is called Tlāloccītlalli , named after the rain god Tlāloc . In Thai , Neptune is referred to by the Westernised name Dao Nepchun/Nepjun ( ดาวเนปจูน ) but is also called Dao Ket ( ดาวเกตุ , lit.   ' star of Ketu ' ), after Ketu ( केतु ),

6840-421: Is enough to let methane, which elsewhere is frozen in the troposphere, escape into the stratosphere near the pole. The relative "hot spot" is due to Neptune's axial tilt , which has exposed the south pole to the Sun for the last quarter of Neptune's year, or roughly 40 Earth years. As Neptune slowly moves towards the opposite side of the Sun, the south pole will be darkened and the north pole illuminated, causing

7011-426: Is faintly blue in the optical spectrum , only slightly more saturated than the blue of Uranus's atmosphere. Early renderings of the two planets greatly exaggerated Neptune's colour contrast "to better reveal the clouds, bands and winds", making it seem deep blue compared to Uranus's off-white. The two planets had been imaged with different systems, making it hard to directly compare the resulting composite images . This

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7182-449: Is favoured due to its ability to better explain the occupancy of the populations of small objects observed in the trans-Neptunian region. The current most widely accepted explanation of the details of this hypothesis is known as the Nice model , which is a dynamical evolution scenario that explores the potential effect of a migrating Neptune and the other giant planets on the structure of

7353-519: Is harder to explain Uranus's lack of internal heat while preserving the apparent similarity between the two planets. The average distance between Neptune and the Sun is 4.5 billion km (about 30.1  astronomical units (AU), the mean distance from the Earth to the Sun), and it completes an orbit on average every 164.79 years, subject to a variability of around ±0.1 years. The perihelion distance

7524-409: Is likely composed of iron, nickel and silicates , with an interior model giving a mass about 1.2x that of Earth. The pressure at the centre is 7  Mbar (700 GPa), about twice as high as that at the centre of Earth, and the temperature may be 5,400 K (5,100 °C; 9,300 °F). At high altitudes, Neptune's atmosphere is 80% hydrogen and 19% helium . A trace amount of methane

7695-518: Is named after the Roman god of the sea and has the astronomical symbol [REDACTED] , representing Neptune's trident . Neptune is not visible to the unaided eye and is the only planet in the Solar System that was found from mathematical predictions derived from indirect observations rather than being initially observed by direct empirical observation , when unexpected changes in the orbit of Uranus led Alexis Bouvard to hypothesise that its orbit

7866-558: Is nearly four times that of Earth . Neptune, like Uranus , is an ice giant , a subclass of giant planet , because they are smaller and have higher concentrations of volatiles than Jupiter and Saturn. In the search for exoplanets , Neptune has been used as a metonym : discovered bodies of similar mass are often referred to as "Neptunes", just as scientists refer to various extrasolar bodies as "Jupiters". Neptune's internal structure resembles that of Uranus . Its atmosphere forms about 5 to 10% of its mass and extends perhaps 10 to 20% of

8037-426: Is not any more extreme. Because Neptune is not a solid body, its atmosphere undergoes differential rotation . The wide equatorial zone rotates with a period of about 18 hours, which is slower than the 16.1-hour rotation of the planet's magnetic field. By contrast, the reverse is true for the polar regions where the rotation period is 12 hours. This differential rotation is the most pronounced of any planet in

8208-407: Is present. Prominent absorption bands of methane exist at wavelengths above 600 nm, in the red and infrared portion of the spectrum. As with Uranus, this absorption of red light by atmospheric methane is part of what gives Neptune its faint blue hue, which is more pronounced for Neptune's due to concentrated haze in Uranus's atmosphere. Neptune's atmosphere is subdivided into two main regions:

8379-415: Is primarily composed of ices and rock; both planets are normally considered "ice giants" to distinguish them. Along with Rayleigh scattering , traces of methane in the outermost regions make Neptune appear faintly blue. In contrast to the strongly seasonal atmosphere of Uranus, which can be featureless for long periods of time, Neptune's atmosphere has active and consistently visible weather patterns. At

8550-471: Is that the ice giants were not formed by core accretion but from instabilities within the original protoplanetary disc and later had their atmospheres blasted away by radiation from a nearby massive OB star . An alternative concept is that they formed closer to the Sun, where the matter density was higher, and then subsequently migrated to their current orbits after the removal of the gaseous protoplanetary disc. This hypothesis of migration after formation

8721-690: Is thought to be a " skin effect " and not due to any deeper atmospheric processes. At 70°S latitude, a high-speed jet travels at a speed of 300 m/s. Due to seasonal changes, the cloud bands in the southern hemisphere of Neptune have been observed to increase in size and albedo . This trend was first seen in 1980. The long orbital period of Neptune results in seasons lasting 40 Earth years. Neptune differs from Uranus in its typical level of meteorological activity. Voyager 2 observed weather phenomena on Neptune during its 1989 flyby, but no comparable phenomena on Uranus during its 1986 flyby. The abundance of methane, ethane and acetylene at Neptune's equator

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8892-485: The ETH Zurich , to take up a chair in theoretical physics. His teaching activities there centred on thermodynamics and analytical mechanics, and his research interests included the molecular theory of heat, continuum mechanics and the development of a relativistic theory of gravitation. In his work on the latter topic, he was assisted by his friend, Marcel Grossmann, whose knowledge of the kind of mathematics required

9063-645: The First World War in July 1914 marked the beginning of Einstein's gradual estrangement from the nation of his birth. When the " Manifesto of the Ninety-Three " was published in October 1914—a document signed by a host of prominent German thinkers that justified Germany's belligerence—Einstein was one of the few German intellectuals to distance himself from it and sign the alternative, eirenic " Manifesto to

9234-737: The German Empire , Einstein moved to Switzerland in 1895, and at the age of seventeen he enrolled in the mathematics and physics teaching diploma program at the Swiss federal polytechnic school . In 1903, he secured a permanent position at the Swiss Patent Office . In 1905, he submitted a successful PhD dissertation to the University of Zurich . In 1914, he moved to Berlin to join the Prussian Academy of Sciences and

9405-722: The Humboldt University of Berlin , becoming director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in 1917. In 1933, while Einstein was visiting the United States, Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. Horrified by the Nazi persecution of his fellow Jews, Einstein decided to remain in the US. On the eve of World War II , he endorsed a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt alerting him to

9576-627: The Imperial Palace , with thousands of spectators thronging the streets in the hope of catching a glimpse of him. (In a letter to his sons, he wrote that Japanese people seemed to him to be generally modest, intelligent and considerate, and to have a true appreciation of art. But his picture of them in his diary was less flattering: "[the] intellectual needs of this nation seem to be weaker than their artistic ones – natural disposition?" His journal also contains views of China and India which were uncomplimentary. Of Chinese people, he wrote that "even

9747-523: The Lick Observatory , after comprehensive photographic observations at three solar eclipse expeditions in 1901, 1905, and 1908, stated: "In our opinion, the work of the three Crocker Expeditions,...brings the observational side of the intermercurial planet problem—famous for half a century—definitely to a close." In 1915 Einstein 's theory of relativity , an approach to understanding gravity entirely differently from classical mechanics , removed

9918-482: The Sun . The goal of this study was to construct a model based on Sir Isaac Newton 's laws of motion and gravitation . By 1843, Le Verrier published his provisional theory regarding Mercury's motion, with a detailed presentation published in 1845, which would be tested during a transit of Mercury across the face of the Sun in 1848. Predictions from Le Verrier's theory failed to match the observations. Despite this, Le Verrier continued his work and, in 1859, published

10089-588: The dipole moment in strength. By contrast, Earth, Jupiter and Saturn have only relatively small quadrupole moments, and their fields are less tilted from the polar axis. The large quadrupole moment of Neptune may be the result of an offset from the planet's centre and geometrical constraints of the field's dynamo generator. Measurements by Voyager 2 in extreme-ultraviolet and radio frequencies revealed that Neptune has faint and weak but complex and unique aurorae ; however, these observations were limited in time and did not contain infrared. Subsequent astronomers using

10260-609: The orbit of Uranus . Subsequent observations revealed substantial deviations from the tables, leading Bouvard to hypothesize that an unknown body was perturbing the orbit through gravitational interaction. In 1843, John Couch Adams began work on the orbit of Uranus using the data he had. He requested extra data from Sir George Airy , the Astronomer Royal , who supplied it in February 1844. Adams continued to work in 1845–1846 and produced several different estimates of

10431-568: The tropopause layer. The persistence of companion clouds shows that some former dark spots may continue to exist as cyclones even though they are no longer visible as a dark feature. Dark spots may dissipate when they migrate too close to the equator or possibly through some other, unknown mechanism. In 1989, Voyager 2 's Planetary Radio Astronomy (PRA) experiment observed around 60 lightning flashes, or Neptunian electrostatic discharges emitting energies over 7 × 10   J . A plasma wave system (PWS) detected 16 electromagnetic wave events with

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10602-485: The British High Commissioner, welcomed him with a degree of ceremony normally only accorded to a visiting head of state, including a cannon salute. One reception held in his honor was stormed by people determined to hear him speak: he told them that he was happy that Jews were beginning to be recognized as a force in the world. Einstein's decision to tour the eastern hemisphere in 1922 meant that he

10773-653: The British capital to meet several people prominent in British scientific, political or intellectual life, and to deliver a lecture at King's College . In July 1921, he published an essay, "My First Impression of the U.S.A.", in which he sought to sketch the American character, much as had Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America (1835). He wrote of his transatlantic hosts in highly approving terms: "What strikes

10944-627: The Europeans " instead. However, this expression of his doubts about German policy did not prevent him from being elected to a two-year term as president of the German Physical Society in 1916. When the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics opened its doors the following year—its foundation delayed because of the war—Einstein was appointed its first director, just as Planck and Nernst had promised. Einstein

11115-464: The French Bureau des Longitudes . In October, he sought to name the planet Le Verrier , after himself, and he had loyal support in this from the observatory director, François Arago . This suggestion met with stiff resistance outside France. French almanacs quickly reintroduced the name Herschel for Uranus, after that planet's discoverer Sir  William Herschel , and Leverrier for

11286-582: The French and the British over who deserved credit for the discovery. Eventually, an international consensus emerged that Le Verrier and Adams deserved joint credit. Since 1966, Dennis Rawlins has questioned the credibility of Adams's claim to co-discovery, and the issue was re-evaluated by historians with the return in 1998 of the "Neptune papers" (historical documents) to the Royal Observatory, Greenwich . Shortly after its discovery, Neptune

11457-486: The German Empire, on 14 March 1879. His parents, secular Ashkenazi Jews , were Hermann Einstein , a salesman and engineer, and Pauline Koch . In 1880, the family moved to Munich 's borough of Ludwigsvorstadt-Isarvorstadt , where Einstein's father and his uncle Jakob founded Elektrotechnische Fabrik J. Einstein & Cie, a company that manufactured electrical equipment based on direct current . He often related

11628-641: The German consulate and surrendered his passport, formally renouncing his German citizenship. The Nazis later sold his boat and converted his cottage into a Hitler Youth camp. In April 1933, Einstein discovered that the new German government had passed laws barring Jews from holding any official positions , including teaching at universities. Historian Gerald Holton describes how, with "virtually no audible protest being raised by their colleagues", thousands of Jewish scientists were suddenly forced to give up their university positions and their names were removed from

11799-496: The Hubble Space Telescope have not glimpsed the aurorae, in contrast to the more well-defined aurorae of Uranus. Neptune's bow shock , where the magnetosphere begins to slow the solar wind , occurs at a distance of 34.9 times the radius of the planet. The magnetopause , where the pressure of the magnetosphere counterbalances the solar wind, lies at a distance of 23–26.5 times the radius of Neptune. The tail of

11970-464: The Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose , he laid the groundwork for Bose-Einstein statistics . For much of the last phase of his academic life, Einstein worked on two endeavors that proved ultimately unsuccessful. First, he advocated against quantum theory's introduction of fundamental randomness into science's picture of the world, objecting that "God does not play dice". Second, he attempted to devise

12141-725: The Investigation of the State of the Ether in a Magnetic Field". Einstein excelled at physics and mathematics from an early age, and soon acquired the mathematical expertise normally only found in a child several years his senior. He began teaching himself algebra, calculus and Euclidean geometry when he was twelve; he made such rapid progress that he discovered an original proof of the Pythagorean theorem before his thirteenth birthday. A family tutor, Max Talmud , said that only

12312-504: The Kuiper belt. Neptune's orbit has a profound impact on the region directly beyond it, known as the Kuiper belt . The Kuiper belt is a ring of small icy worlds, similar to the asteroid belt but far larger, extending from Neptune's orbit at 30 AU out to about 55 AU from the Sun. Much in the same way that Jupiter's gravity dominates the asteroid belt , Neptune's gravity dominates

12483-410: The Kuiper belt. Over the age of the Solar System, certain regions of the Kuiper belt became destabilised by Neptune's gravity, creating gaps in its structure. The region between 40 and 42 AU is an example. There do exist orbits within these empty regions where objects can survive for the age of the Solar System. These resonances occur when Neptune's orbital period is a precise fraction of that of

12654-778: The Nobel award, the Royal Society 's Copley Medal , was not hung around Einstein's neck until 1925. He was elected an International Member of the American Philosophical Society in 1930. Einstein resigned from the Prussian Academy in March 1933. His accomplishments in Berlin had included the completion of the general theory of relativity, proving the Einstein–de Haas effect , contributing to

12825-561: The Nobel citation displayed a degree of doubt even about the work on photoelectricity that it acknowledged: it did not assent to Einstein's notion of the particulate nature of light, which only won over the entire scientific community when S. N. Bose derived the Planck spectrum in 1924. That same year, Einstein was elected an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . Britain's closest equivalent of

12996-847: The Parish of Roughton, Norfolk . To protect Einstein, Locker-Lampson had two bodyguards watch over him; a photo of them carrying shotguns and guarding Einstein was published in the Daily Herald on 24 July 1933. Locker-Lampson took Einstein to meet Winston Churchill at his home, and later, Austen Chamberlain and former Prime Minister Lloyd George . Einstein asked them to help bring Jewish scientists out of Germany. British historian Martin Gilbert notes that Churchill responded immediately, and sent his friend, physicist Frederick Lindemann , to Germany to seek out Jewish scientists and place them in British universities. Churchill later observed that as

13167-446: The Solar System, and it results in strong latitudinal wind shear. The formation of the ice giants, Neptune and Uranus, has been difficult to model precisely. Current models suggest that the matter density in the outer regions of the Solar System was too low to account for the formation of such large bodies from the traditionally accepted method of core accretion , and various hypotheses have been advanced to explain their formation. One

13338-525: The Sun that took place on 29 May 1919 provided an opportunity to put his theory of gravitational lensing to the test, and observations performed by Sir Arthur Eddington yielded results that were consistent with his calculations. Eddington's work was reported at length in newspapers around the world. On 7 November 1919, for example, the leading British newspaper, The Times , printed a banner headline that read: "Revolution in Science ;– New Theory of

13509-413: The Sun, Neptune's outer atmosphere is one of the coldest places in the Solar System, with temperatures at its cloud tops approaching 55  K (−218  °C ; −361  °F ). Temperatures at the planet's centre are approximately 5,400 K (5,100 °C; 9,300 °F). Neptune has a faint and fragmented ring system (labelled "arcs"), discovered in 1984 and confirmed by Voyager 2 . Some of

13680-549: The Sun, making Neptune the ninth planet from the Sun during this period. The increasingly accurate estimations of Pluto's mass from ten times that of Earth's to far less than that of the Moon and the discovery of the Kuiper belt in 1992 led many astronomers to debate whether Pluto should be considered a planet or as part of the Kuiper belt. In 2006, the International Astronomical Union defined

13851-525: The Sun. The fact that Le Verrier had predicted the existence of the planet Neptune in 1846 using the same techniques lent veracity to his claim. On 22 December 1859, Le Verrier received a letter from Lescarbault, saying that he had seen a transit of the hypothetical planet on March 26 of that year. Le Verrier took the train to the village of Orgères-en-Beauce , some 70 kilometres (43 mi) southwest of Paris , to Lescarbault's homemade observatory. Le Verrier arrived unannounced and proceeded to interrogate

14022-464: The Sun; whereas Neptune radiates about 2.61 times as much energy as it receives from the Sun. Neptune is over 50% farther from the Sun than Uranus and receives only ~40% of Uranus's amount of sunlight; however, its internal energy is still enough for the fastest planetary winds in the Solar System. Depending on the thermal properties of its interior, the heat left over from Neptune's formation may be sufficient to explain its current heat flow, though it

14193-550: The Swiss authorities deemed him medically unfit for military service. He found that Swiss schools too appeared to have no use for him, failing to offer him a teaching position despite the almost two years that he spent applying for one. Eventually it was with the help of Marcel Grossmann 's father that he secured a post in Bern at the Swiss Patent Office , as an assistant examiner – level III . Patent applications that landed on Einstein's desk for his evaluation included ideas for

14364-656: The United States in 1933. In 1935, she was diagnosed with heart and kidney problems. She died in December 1936. A volume of Einstein's letters released by Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2006 added further names to the catalog of women with whom he was romantically involved. They included Margarete Lebach (a married Austrian), Estella Katzenellenbogen (the rich owner of a florist business), Toni Mendel (a wealthy Jewish widow) and Ethel Michanowski (a Berlin socialite), with whom he spent time and from whom he accepted gifts while married to Löwenthal. After being widowed, Einstein

14535-541: The United States, drawn back to the US by the offer of a two month research fellowship at the California Institute of Technology . Caltech supported him in his wish that he should not be exposed to quite as much attention from the media as he had experienced when visiting the US in 1921, and he therefore declined all the invitations to receive prizes or make speeches that his admirers poured down upon him. But he remained willing to allow his fans at least some of

14706-535: The Universe ;– Newtonian Ideas Overthrown". With Eddington's eclipse observations widely reported not just in academic journals but by the popular press as well, Einstein became "perhaps the world's first celebrity scientist", a genius who had shattered a paradigm that had been basic to physicists' understanding of the universe since the seventeenth century. Einstein began his new life as an intellectual icon in America, where he arrived on 2 April 1921. He

14877-769: The University of Zurich, much admired by Alfred Kleiner, led to Zürich's luring him away from Bern with a newly created associate professorship. Promotion to a full professorship followed in April 1911, when he accepted a chair at the German Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague, a move which required him to become an Austrian citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire . His time in Prague saw him producing eleven research papers. In July 1912, he returned to his alma mater ,

15048-820: The age of sixteen, Einstein sat the entrance examination for the federal polytechnic school (later the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, ETH) in Zürich, Switzerland. He failed to reach the required standard in the general part of the test, but performed with distinction in physics and mathematics. On the advice of the polytechnic's principal, he completed his secondary education at the Argovian cantonal school (a gymnasium ) in Aarau , Switzerland, graduating in 1896. While lodging in Aarau with

15219-513: The care of his mother or in temporary confinement in an asylum. After her death, he was committed permanently to Burghölzli , the Psychiatric University Hospital in Zürich. Einstein graduated from the federal polytechnic school in 1900, duly certified as competent to teach mathematics and physics. His successful acquisition of Swiss citizenship in February 1901 was not followed by the usual sequel of conscription ;

15390-558: The children are spiritless and look obtuse... It would be a pity if these Chinese supplant all other races. For the likes of us the mere thought is unspeakably dreary". ) He was greeted with even greater enthusiasm on the last leg of his tour, in which he spent twelve days in Mandatory Palestine , newly entrusted to British rule by the League of Nations in the aftermath of the First World War. Sir Herbert Samuel ,

15561-415: The classical mechanics prediction by the small amount of 43 arcseconds per century. Le Verrier postulated that the excess precession could be explained by the presence of some unidentified object or objects inside the orbit of Mercury. He calculated that it was either another Mercury size planet or, since it was unlikely that astronomers were failing to see such a large object, an unknown asteroid belt near

15732-431: The cloud deck. These altitudes are in the layer where weather occurs, the troposphere. Weather does not occur in the higher stratosphere or thermosphere. In August 2023, the high-altitude clouds of Neptune vanished, prompting a study spanning thirty years of observations by the Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based telescopes. The study found that Neptune's high-altitude cloud activity is bound to Solar cycles , and not to

15903-496: The curriculum, allotting him a top grade of 6 for history, physics, algebra, geometry, and descriptive geometry. At seventeen, he enrolled in the four-year mathematics and physics teaching diploma program at the federal polytechnic school. Marie Winteler, a year older than him, took up a teaching post in Olsberg , Switzerland. The five other polytechnic school freshmen following the same course as Einstein included just one woman,

16074-496: The curvature of spacetime caused by the Sun's mass. Celestial bodies interior to the orbit of Mercury had been hypothesized, searched for, and even claimed as having been observed, for centuries. Claims of actually seeing objects passing in front of the Sun included those made by the German astronomer Christoph Scheiner in 1611 (which turned out to be the discovery of sunspots ), British lawyer, writer and amateur astronomer Capel Lofft 's observations of 'an opaque body traversing

16245-502: The curvature of spacetime was bending starlight around the Sun. Astronomers generally quickly accepted that a large planet inside the orbit of Mercury could not exist, given the corrected equation of gravity. Today, the International Astronomical Union has reserved the name "Vulcan" for the hypothetical planet, even though it has been ruled out, and also for the Vulcanoids , a hypothetical population of asteroids that may exist inside

16416-411: The day Galle received the letter, he discovered Neptune just northeast of Iota Aquarii , 1° from the " five degrees east of Delta Capricorn " position Le Verrier had predicted it to be, about 12° from Adams's prediction, and on the border of Aquarius and Capricornus according to the modern IAU constellation boundaries. In the wake of the discovery, there was a nationalistic rivalry between

16587-673: The descending lunar node , who plays a role in Hindu astrology . In Malay , the name Waruna , after the Hindu god of seas , is attested as far back as the 1970s, but was eventually superseded by the Latinate equivalents Neptun (in Malaysian ) or Neptunus (in Indonesian ). The usual adjectival form is Neptunian . The nonce form Poseidean ( / p ə ˈ s aɪ d i ən / ), from Poseidon , has also been used, though

16758-405: The divorce settlement, Einstein agreed that if he were to win a Nobel Prize, he would give the money that he received to Marić; he won the prize two years later. Einstein married Löwenthal in 1919. In 1923, he began a relationship with a secretary named Betty Neumann, the niece of his close friend Hans Mühsam. Löwenthal nevertheless remained loyal to him, accompanying him when he emigrated to

16929-512: The earliest known telescopic observations ever, Galileo's drawings on 28 Dec. 1612 and 27 Jan. 1613 ( New Style ) contain plotted points that match what is now known to have been the positions of Neptune on those dates. Both times, Galileo seems to have mistaken Neptune for a fixed star when it appeared close—in conjunction —to Jupiter in the night sky . Hence, he is not credited with Neptune's discovery. At his first observation in Dec. 1612, Neptune

17100-402: The easterly direction to 325 m/s westward. At the cloud tops, the prevailing winds range in speed from 400 m/s along the equator to 250 m/s at the poles. Most of the winds on Neptune move in a direction opposite the planet's rotation. The general pattern of winds showed prograde rotation at high latitudes vs. retrograde rotation at lower latitudes. The difference in flow direction

17271-653: The eclipse generated controversy in scientific journals and mockery from Watson's rival C. H. F. Peters . Peters noted that the margin of error in the pencil and cardboard recording device Watson had used was large enough to plausibly include a bright known star. A skeptic of the Vulcan hypothesis, Peters dismissed all the observations as mistaking known stars as planets. Astronomers continued searching for Vulcan during total solar eclipses in 1883, 1887, 1889, 1900, 1901, 1905, and 1908. Finally, in 1908, William Wallace Campbell , Director, and Charles Dillon Perrine , Astronomer, of

17442-474: The fall of 1915, his reimagining of the mathematics of gravitation in terms of Riemannian geometry was complete, and he applied his new theory not just to the behavior of the Sun as a gravitational lens but also to another astronomical phenomenon, the precession of the perihelion of Mercury (a slow drift in the point in Mercury's elliptical orbit at which it approaches the Sun most closely). A total eclipse of

17613-557: The family of Jost Winteler , he fell in love with Winteler's daughter, Marie. (His sister, Maja , later married Winteler's son Paul. ) In January 1896, with his father's approval, Einstein renounced his citizenship of the German Kingdom of Württemberg in order to avoid conscription into military service . The Matura (graduation for the successful completion of higher secondary schooling), awarded to him in September 1896, acknowledged him to have performed well across most of

17784-476: The field exists. In 1911, he used the principle to estimate the amount by which a ray of light from a distant star would be bent by the gravitational pull of the Sun as it passed close to the Sun's photosphere (that is, the Sun's apparent surface). He reworked his calculation in 1913, having now found a way to model gravitation with the Riemann curvature tensor of a non-Euclidean four-dimensional spacetime . By

17955-445: The first ground-based observation of a dark spot on Neptune was announced. Neptune's dark spots are thought to occur in the troposphere at lower altitudes than the brighter cloud features, so they appear as holes in the upper cloud decks. As they are stable features that can persist for several months, they are thought to be vortex structures. Often associated with dark spots are brighter, persistent methane clouds that form around

18126-400: The larger spot was recorded as 3 arcseconds across, and the smaller 1.25 arcseconds. Proposals that there could be planets orbiting inside Mercury's orbit were put forward by British scientist Thomas Dick in 1838 and by French physicist, mathematician, and astronomer Jacques Babinet in 1846 who suggested there may be "incandescent clouds of a planetary kind, circling the Sun" and proposed

18297-481: The life of the mind to work more closely with their counterparts in other countries. He was appointed as a German delegate rather than as a representative of Switzerland because of the machinations of two Catholic activists, Oskar Halecki and Giuseppe Motta . By persuading Secretary General Eric Drummond to deny Einstein the place on the committee reserved for a Swiss thinker, they created an opening for Gonzague de Reynold , who used his League of Nations position as

18468-453: The lower troposphere , where temperature decreases with altitude, and the stratosphere , where temperature increases with altitude. The boundary between the two, the tropopause , lies at a pressure of 0.1 bars (10 kPa). The stratosphere then gives way to the thermosphere at a pressure lower than 10 to 10  bars (1 to 10 Pa). The thermosphere gradually transitions to the exosphere . Models suggest that Neptune's troposphere

18639-405: The magnetic equator of Neptune is about 14  microteslas (0.14  G ). The dipole magnetic moment of Neptune is about 2.2 × 10  T·m (14 μT· R N , where R N is the radius of Neptune). Neptune's magnetic field has a complex geometry that includes relatively large contributions from non-dipolar components, including a strong quadrupole moment that may exceed

18810-401: The magnetic fields of the two planets, scientists now think the extreme orientation may be characteristic of flows in the planets' interiors. This field may be generated by convective fluid motions in a thin spherical shell of electrically conducting liquids (probably a combination of ammonia, methane and water), resulting in a dynamo action. The dipole component of the magnetic field at

18981-403: The magnetosphere extends out to at least 72 times the radius of Neptune, and likely much farther. Neptune's weather is characterized by extremely dynamic storm systems, with winds reaching speeds of almost 600 m/s (2,200 km/h; 1,300 mph)—exceeding supersonic flow. More typically, by tracking the motion of persistent clouds, wind speeds have been shown to vary from 20 m/s in

19152-411: The man. Lescarbault described in detail how, on 26 March 1859, he observed a small black dot on the face of the Sun . After some time had passed, he realized that it was moving. He thought it looked similar to the transit of Mercury which he had observed in 1845. He estimated the distance it had already traveled, made some measurements of its position and direction of motion and, using an old clock and

19323-663: The meeting of the Académie des Sciences in Paris. Lescarbault, for his part, was awarded the Légion d'honneur and invited to appear before numerous learned societies. Not everyone accepted the veracity of Lescarbault's "discovery", however. An eminent French astronomer, Emmanuel Liais , who was working for the Brazilian government in Rio de Janeiro in 1859, claimed to have been studying

19494-674: The methane release to shift to the north pole. In 1989, the Great Dark Spot , an anticyclonic storm system spanning 13,000 km × 6,600 km (8,100 mi × 4,100 mi), was discovered by NASA 's Voyager 2 spacecraft. The storm resembled the Great Red Spot of Jupiter. Some five years later, on 2 November 1994, the Hubble Space Telescope did not see the Great Dark Spot on

19665-475: The morning of 20 March 1862, between 08:00 and 09:00 Greenwich Time , another amateur astronomer, a Mr. Lummis of Manchester, England, saw a transit. His colleague, whom he alerted, also saw the event. Based on these two men's reports, two French astronomers, Benjamin Valz and Rodolphe Radau , independently calculated the object's supposed orbital period, with Valz deriving a figure of 17 days and 13 hours and Radau

19836-453: The most memorable scenes in the new era of celebrity". Chaplin visited Einstein at his home on a later trip to Berlin and recalled his "modest little flat" and the piano at which he had begun writing his theory. Chaplin speculated that it was "possibly used as kindling wood by the Nazis". In February 1933, while on a visit to the United States, Einstein knew he could not return to Germany with

20007-506: The name "Vulcan" (after the god Vulcan from Roman mythology ) for a planet close to the Sun. As a planet near the Sun would be lost in its glare, several observers mounted systematic searches to try to catch it during " transit ", i.e. when it passes in front of the Sun's disc. German amateur astronomer Heinrich Schwabe searched unsuccessfully on every clear day from 1826 to 1843 and Yale scientist Edward Claudius Herrick conducted observations twice daily starting in 1847, hoping to catch

20178-420: The need for Le Verrier's hypothetical planet. It showed that the peculiarities in Mercury's orbit were the results of the curvature of spacetime caused by the mass of the Sun. This added a predicted 0.1 arc-second advance of Mercury's perihelion each orbital revolution, or 43 arc-seconds per century, exactly the observed amount (without any recourse to the existence of a hypothetical Vulcan). The new theory modified

20349-561: The new planet. Struve came out in favour of the name Neptune on 29 December 1846, to the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences , after the colour of the planet as viewed through a telescope. Soon, Neptune became the internationally accepted name. In Roman mythology , Neptune was the god of the sea, identified with the Greek Poseidon . The demand for a mythological name seemed to be in keeping with

20520-452: The nomenclature of the other planets, all of which were named for deities in Greek and Roman mythology. Most languages today use some variant of the name "Neptune" for the planet. In Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Korean, the planet's name was translated as "sea king star" ( 海王星 ). In Mongolian , Neptune is called Dalain van ( Далайн ван ), reflecting its namesake god's role as

20691-404: The object, such as 1:2, or 3:4. If, say, an object orbits the Sun once for every two Neptune orbits, it will only complete half an orbit by the time Neptune returns to its original position. The most heavily populated resonance in the Kuiper belt, with over 200 known objects, is the 2:3 resonance. Objects in this resonance complete 2 orbits for every 3 of Neptune, and are known as plutinos because

20862-1161: The orbit of the planet Mercury. Thus far, however, earth- and space-based telescopes and the NASA Parker Solar Probe have detected no such asteroids. While three Atira asteroids have perihelion points within the orbit of Mercury, their aphelia are outside Mercury's orbit. Therefore, they cannot be defined as Vulcanoids, which would require wholly intra-Mercurian circular orbital trajectories, which none of them possess. Solar System   → Local Interstellar Cloud   → Local Bubble   → Gould Belt   → Orion Arm   → Milky Way   → Milky Way subgroup   → Local Group → Local Sheet → Virgo Supercluster → Laniakea Supercluster   → Local Hole   → Observable universe   → Universe Each arrow ( → ) may be read as "within" or "part of". Albert Einstein Albert Einstein ( / ˈ aɪ n s t aɪ n / , EYEN -styne ; German: [ˈalbɛʁt ˈʔaɪnʃtaɪn] ; 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955)

21033-545: The parameters some more. Shortly after 08:00 on 29 January 1860, F.A.R. Russell and three other people in London saw an alleged transit of an intra-Mercurial planet. An American observer, Richard Covington, many years later claimed to have seen a well-defined black spot progress across the Sun's disk around 1860 when he was stationed in Washington Territory . No observations of Vulcan were made in 1861. Then, on

21204-424: The phenomena of capillarity"), in which he proposed a model of intermolecular attraction that he afterwards disavowed as worthless, was published in the journal Annalen der Physik in 1901. His 24-page doctoral dissertation also addressed a topic in molecular physics. Titled "Eine neue Bestimmung der Moleküldimensionen" ("A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions") and dedicated to his friend Marcel Grossman, it

21375-429: The planet's seasons. Neptune's spectra suggest that its lower stratosphere is hazy due to condensation of products of ultraviolet photolysis of methane, such as ethane and ethyne . The stratosphere is home to trace amounts of carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide . The stratosphere of Neptune is warmer than that of Uranus due to the elevated concentration of hydrocarbons. For reasons that remain obscure,

21546-576: The planet's thermosphere is at an anomalously high temperature of about 750 K (477 °C; 890 °F). The planet is too far from the Sun for this heat to be generated by ultraviolet radiation. One candidate for a heating mechanism is atmospheric interaction with ions in the planet's magnetic field . Other candidates are gravity waves from the interior that dissipate in the atmosphere. The thermosphere contains traces of carbon dioxide and water, which may have been deposited from external sources such as meteorites and dust. Neptune's atmosphere

21717-532: The planet. Instead, a new storm similar to the Great Dark Spot was found in Neptune's northern hemisphere. The Scooter is another storm, a white cloud group farther south than the Great Dark Spot. This nickname first arose during the months leading up to the Voyager 2 encounter in 1989, when they were observed moving at speeds faster than the Great Dark Spot (and images acquired later would subsequently reveal

21888-454: The potential German nuclear weapons program and recommended that the US begin similar research , though he generally viewed the idea of nuclear weapons with great dismay. In 1905, he published four groundbreaking papers , sometimes described as his annus mirabilis (miracle year). These papers outlined a theory of the photoelectric effect, explained Brownian motion , introduced his special theory of relativity, and demonstrated that if

22059-507: The predicted orbits of all planets, but the magnitude of the differences from Newtonian theory diminishes rapidly as one gets farther from the Sun. Also, Mercury's fairly eccentric orbit makes it much easier to detect the perihelion shift than is the case for the nearly circular orbits of Venus and Earth . Einstein's theory was empirically verified in the Eddington experiment during the solar eclipse of May 29, 1919 when photographs showed

22230-476: The presence of clouds moving even faster than those that had initially been detected by Voyager 2 ). The Small Dark Spot is a southern cyclonic storm, the second-most-intense storm observed during the 1989 encounter. It was initially completely dark, but as Voyager 2 approached the planet, a bright core developed, which can be seen in most of the highest-resolution images. In 2018, a newer main dark spot and smaller dark spot were identified and studied. In 2023,

22401-455: The president of Columbia University , who described Einstein as "the ruling monarch of the mind". Harry Emerson Fosdick , pastor at New York's Riverside Church , gave Einstein a tour of the church and showed him a full-size statue that the church made of Einstein, standing at the entrance. Also during his stay in New York, he joined a crowd of 15,000 people at Madison Square Garden during

22572-409: The quantum theory of radiation, and the development of Bose–Einstein statistics . In 1907, Einstein reached a milestone on his long journey from his special theory of relativity to a new idea of gravitation with the formulation of his equivalence principle , which asserts that an observer in an infinitesimally small box falling freely in a gravitational field would be unable to find any evidence that

22743-427: The question of the extent to which Marić contributed to the insights of Einstein's annus mirabilis publications. There is at least some evidence that he was influenced by her scientific ideas, but there are scholars who doubt whether her impact on his thought was of any great significance at all. Correspondence between Einstein and Marić, discovered and published in 1987, revealed that in early 1902, while Marić

22914-560: The rise to power of the Nazis under Germany's new chancellor, Adolf Hitler . While at American universities in early 1933, he undertook his third two-month visiting professorship at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. In February and March 1933, the Gestapo repeatedly raided his family's apartment in Berlin. He and his wife Elsa returned to Europe in March, and during

23085-491: The rolls of institutions where they were employed. A month later, Einstein's works were among those targeted by the German Student Union in the Nazi book burnings , with Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels proclaiming, "Jewish intellectualism is dead." One German magazine included him in a list of enemies of the German regime with the phrase, "not yet hanged", offering a $ 5,000 bounty on his head. In

23256-638: The ruler of the sea. In modern Greek , the planet is called Poseidon ( Ποσειδώνας , Poseidonas ), the Greek counterpart of Neptune. In Hebrew , Rahab ( רהב ), from a Biblical sea monster mentioned in the Book of Psalms , was selected in a vote managed by the Academy of the Hebrew Language in 2009 as the official name for the planet, even though the existing Latin term Neptun ( נפטון )

23427-448: The sky because Earth was in a different location in its 365.26-day orbit. Because of the motion of the Sun in relation to the barycentre of the Solar System, on 11 July, Neptune was not at its exact discovery position in relation to the Sun—if the more common heliocentric coordinate system is used, the discovery longitude was reached on 12 July 2011. The axial tilt of Neptune

23598-402: The special theory is correct, mass and energy are equivalent to each other. In 1915, he proposed a general theory of relativity that extended his system of mechanics to incorporate gravitation . A cosmological paper that he published the following year laid out the implications of general relativity for the modeling of the structure and evolution of the universe as a whole. In 1917, he wrote

23769-435: The sun's disc' on 6 January 1818, and Bavarian physician and astronomer Franz von Paula Gruithuisen 's 26 June 1819 report of seeing "two small spots...on the Sun, round, black and unequal in size". German astronomer J. W. Pastorff  [ de ] reported many observations also claiming to have seen two spots, with the first observation on 23 October 1822 and subsequent observations in 1823, 1834, 1836, and 1837; in 1834

23940-640: The support of several Argentine scholars, including Julio Rey Pastor , Jakob Laub , and Leopoldo Lugones . and was financed primarily by the Council of the University of Buenos Aires and the Asociación Hebraica Argentina (Argentine Hebraic Association) with a smaller contribution from the Argentine-Germanic Cultural Institution. In December 1930, Einstein began another significant sojourn in

24111-400: The surface of the Sun with a telescope twice as powerful as Lescarbault's at the very moment that Lescarbault said he observed his mysterious transit. Liais, therefore, was "in a condition to deny, in the most positive manner, the passage of a planet over the sun at the time indicated". Based on Lescarbault's "transit", Le Verrier computed Vulcan's orbit: it supposedly revolved about the Sun in

24282-406: The temperature reaches 273 K (0 °C; 32 °F). Underneath, clouds of ammonia and hydrogen sulfide may be found. High-altitude clouds on Neptune have been observed casting shadows on the opaque cloud deck below. There are high-altitude cloud bands that wrap around the planet at constant latitudes. These circumferential bands have widths of 50–150 km and lie about 50–110 km above

24453-453: The third-most-massive planet, and the densest giant planet . It is 17 times the mass of Earth . Compared to its fellow ice giant Uranus , Neptune is slightly more massive, but denser and smaller. Being composed primarily of gases and liquids, it has no well-defined solid surface, and orbits the Sun once every 164.8  years at an orbital distance of 30.1 astronomical units (4.5 billion kilometres; 2.8 billion miles). It

24624-492: The time of the Voyager ;2 flyby in 1989, the planet's southern hemisphere had a Great Dark Spot comparable to the Great Red Spot on Jupiter. In 2018, a newer main dark spot and smaller dark spot were identified and studied. These weather patterns are driven by the strongest sustained winds of any planet in the Solar System, as high as 2,100 km/h (580 m/s; 1,300 mph). Because of its great distance from

24795-558: The time with him that they requested. After arriving in New York City, Einstein was taken to various places and events, including Chinatown , a lunch with the editors of The New York Times , and a performance of Carmen at the Metropolitan Opera , where he was cheered by the audience on his arrival. During the days following, he was given the keys to the city by Mayor Jimmy Walker and met Nicholas Murray Butler ,

24966-920: The transmission of signals and the synchronization of clocks, matters which also figured in some of the inventions submitted to him for assessment. In 1902, Einstein and some friends whom he had met in Bern formed a group that held regular meetings to discuss science and philosophy. Their choice of a name for their club, the Olympia Academy , was an ironic comment upon its far from Olympian status. Sometimes they were joined by Marić, who limited her participation in their proceedings to careful listening. The thinkers whose works they reflected upon included Henri Poincaré , Ernst Mach and David Hume , all of whom significantly influenced Einstein's own subsequent ideas and beliefs. Einstein's first paper, "Folgerungen aus den Capillaritätserscheinungen" ("Conclusions drawn from

25137-589: The trip, they learned that the German Reichstag had passed the Enabling Act on 23 March, transforming Hitler's government into a de facto legal dictatorship, and that they would not be able to proceed to Berlin. Later on, they heard that their cottage had been raided by the Nazis and Einstein's personal sailboat confiscated. Upon landing in Antwerp , Belgium on 28 March, Einstein immediately went to

25308-442: The usual adjectival form of Poseidon is Poseidonian ( / ˌ p ɒ s aɪ ˈ d oʊ n i ən / ). From its discovery in 1846 until the discovery of Pluto in 1930, Neptune was the farthest known planet. When Pluto was discovered, it was considered a planet, and Neptune thus became the second-farthest known planet, except for a 20-year period between 1979 and 1999 when Pluto's elliptical orbit brought it closer than Neptune to

25479-476: The water clouds of the troposphere or the shallow ammonia clouds of the magnetosphere. Neptune is predicted to have 1/19 the lightning flash rate of Jupiter and to display most of its lightning activity at high latitudes. However, lightning on Neptune seems to resemble lightning on Earth rather than Jovian lightning. Neptune's more varied weather when compared to Uranus is due in part to its higher internal heating . The upper regions of Neptune's troposphere reach

25650-399: The way towards the core. Pressure in the atmosphere reaches about 10  GPa , or about 10 atmospheres. Increasing concentrations of methane , ammonia and water are found in the lower regions of the atmosphere. The mantle is equivalent to 10 to 15 Earth masses and is rich in water, ammonia and methane. As is customary in planetary science, this mixture is called icy even though it is

25821-492: The word "planet" for the first time, reclassifying Pluto as a " dwarf planet " and making Neptune once again the outermost-known planet in the Solar System. Neptune's mass of 1.0243 × 10  kg is intermediate between Earth and the larger gas giants : it is 17 times that of Earth but just 1/19th that of Jupiter . Its gravity at 1 bar is 11.15 m/s , 1.14 times the surface gravity of Earth, and surpassed only by Jupiter. Neptune's equatorial radius of 24,764 km

25992-481: The world, fear the influence of men of intellectual independence". Einstein was now without a permanent home, unsure where he would live and work, and equally worried about the fate of countless other scientists still in Germany. Aided by the Academic Assistance Council , founded in April 1933 by British Liberal politician William Beveridge to help academics escape Nazi persecution, Einstein

26163-420: The year being celebrated as an annus mirabilis for physics akin to 1666 (the year in which Isaac Newton experienced his greatest epiphanies). The publications deeply impressed Einstein's contemporaries. Einstein's sabbatical as a civil servant approached its end in 1908, when he secured a junior teaching position at the University of Bern . In 1909, a lecture on relativistic electrodynamics that he gave at

26334-489: Was a German-born theoretical physicist who is widely held as one of the most influential scientists . 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 . Born in

26505-622: Was a fractious pupil who found the Gymnasium's regimen and teaching methods far from congenial. He later wrote that the school's policy of strict rote learning was harmful to creativity. At the end of December 1894, a letter from a doctor persuaded the Luitpold's authorities to release him from its care, and he joined his family in Pavia. While in Italy as a teenager, he wrote an essay entitled "On

26676-528: Was able to leave Germany. He rented a house in De Haan, Belgium, where he lived for a few months. In late July 1933, he visited England for about six weeks at the invitation of the British Member of Parliament Commander Oliver Locker-Lampson , who had become friends with him in the preceding years. Locker-Lampson invited him to stay near his Cromer home in a secluded wooden cabin on Roughton Heath in

26847-517: Was almost stationary in the sky because it had just turned retrograde that day. This apparent backward motion is created when Earth's orbit takes it past an outer planet. Because Neptune was only beginning its yearly retrograde cycle, the motion of the planet was far too slight to be detected with Galileo's small telescope. In 2009, a study suggested that Galileo was at least aware that the "star" he had observed had moved relative to fixed stars. In 1821, Alexis Bouvard published astronomical tables of

27018-406: Was born in Bern , Switzerland. Their son Eduard was born in Zürich in July 1910. In letters that Einstein wrote to Marie Winteler in the months before Eduard's arrival, he described his love for his wife as "misguided" and mourned the "missed life" that he imagined he would have enjoyed if he had married Winteler instead: "I think of you in heartfelt love every spare minute and am so unhappy as only

27189-469: Was briefly in a relationship with Margarita Konenkova, thought by some to be a Russian spy; her husband, the Russian sculptor Sergei Konenkov , created the bronze bust of Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Following an episode of acute mental illness at about the age of twenty, Einstein's son Eduard was diagnosed with schizophrenia . He spent the remainder of his life either in

27360-401: Was completed on 30 April 1905 and approved by Professor Alfred Kleiner of the University of Zurich three months later. (Einstein was formally awarded his PhD on 15 January 1906.) Four other pieces of work that Einstein completed in 1905— his famous papers on the photoelectric effect , Brownian motion , his special theory of relativity and the equivalence of mass and energy —have led to

27531-468: Was discovered shortly thereafter, though none of the planet's remaining moons were located telescopically until the 20th century. The planet's distance from Earth gives it a small apparent size , and its distance from the Sun renders it very dim, making it challenging to study with Earth-based telescopes. Only the advent of the Hubble Space Telescope and of large ground-based telescopes with adaptive optics allowed for detailed observations. Neptune

27702-558: Was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1920, and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1921 . In 1922, he was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect". At this point some physicists still regarded the general theory of relativity skeptically, and

27873-438: Was greater than his own. In the spring of 1913, two German visitors, Max Planck and Walther Nernst , called upon Einstein in Zürich in the hope of persuading him to relocate to Berlin. They offered him membership of the Prussian Academy of Sciences , the directorship of the planned Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics and a chair at the Humboldt University of Berlin that would allow him to pursue his research supported by

28044-410: Was referred to simply as "the planet exterior to Uranus" or as "Le Verrier's planet". The first suggestion for a name came from Galle, who proposed the name Janus . In England, Challis put forward the name Oceanus . Claiming the right to name his discovery, Le Verrier quickly proposed the name Neptune for this new planet, though falsely stating that this had been officially approved by

28215-483: Was revisited with the colour normalised over time, most comprehensively in late 2023. Neptune's magnetosphere consists of a magnetic field that is strongly tilted relative to its rotational axis at 47° and offset of at least 0.55 radius (~13,500 km) from the planet's physical centre—resembling Uranus's magnetosphere. Before the arrival of Voyager 2 to Neptune, it was hypothesised that Uranus's sideways rotation caused its tilted magnetosphere. In comparing

28386-496: Was so great that at twelve, he was already confident that nature could be understood as a "mathematical structure". At thirteen, when his range of enthusiasms had broadened to include music and philosophy, Talmud introduced Einstein to Kant 's Critique of Pure Reason . Kant became his favorite philosopher; according to Talmud, "At the time he was still a child, only thirteen years old, yet Kant's works, incomprehensible to ordinary mortals, seemed to be clear to him." In 1895, at

28557-413: Was subject to gravitational perturbation by an unknown planet. After Bouvard's death, the position of Neptune was predicted from his observations, independently, by John Couch Adams and Urbain Le Verrier . Neptune was subsequently directly observed with a telescope on 23 September 1846 by Johann Gottfried Galle within a degree of the position predicted by Le Verrier. Its largest moon, Triton ,

28728-483: Was unable to go to Stockholm in the December of that year to participate in the Nobel prize ceremony. His place at the traditional Nobel banquet was taken by a German diplomat, who gave a speech praising him not only as a physicist but also as a campaigner for peace. A two-week visit to Spain that he undertook in 1923 saw him collecting another award, a membership of the Spanish Academy of Sciences signified by

28899-449: Was visited by Voyager 2 , which flew by the planet on 25 August 1989; Voyager 2 remains the only spacecraft to have visited it. Like the gas giants ( Jupiter and Saturn ), Neptune's atmosphere is composed primarily of hydrogen and helium , along with traces of hydrocarbons and possibly nitrogen , but contains a higher proportion of ices such as water, ammonia and methane . Similar to Uranus, its interior

29070-510: Was visiting her parents in Novi Sad , she gave birth to a daughter, Lieserl . When Marić returned to Switzerland it was without the child, whose fate is uncertain. A letter of Einstein's that he wrote in September 1903 suggests that the girl was either given up for adoption or died of scarlet fever in infancy. Einstein and Marić married in January 1903. In May 1904, their son Hans Albert

29241-617: Was welcomed to New York City by Mayor John Francis Hylan , and then spent three weeks giving lectures and attending receptions. He spoke several times at Columbia University and Princeton , and in Washington, he visited the White House with representatives of the National Academy of Sciences . He returned to Europe via London, where he was the guest of the philosopher and statesman Viscount Haldane . He used his time in

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