Talk:Albert Einstein

Former featured articleAlbert Einstein is a former featured article. Please see the links under Article milestones below for its original nomination page (for older articles, check the nomination archive) and why it was removed.
Good articleAlbert Einstein has been listed as one of the Natural sciences good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.
Main Page trophyThis article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page as Today's featured article on February 12, 2005.
On this day... Article milestones
DateProcessResult
January 13, 2005Featured article candidatePromoted
November 16, 2006Featured article reviewDemoted
October 5, 2007Good article nomineeListed
June 14, 2009Featured article candidateNot promoted
July 18, 2009Peer reviewReviewed
May 8, 2023Good article reassessmentKept
On this day... Facts from this article were featured on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "On this day..." column on December 2, 2004, June 30, 2005, June 30, 2006, April 18, 2017, March 14, 2024, March 14, 2025, and April 18, 2025.
Current status: Former featured article, current good article

GA Reassessment

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The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.


Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · WatchWatch article reassessment page • GAN review not found
Result: Kept, with thanks to XOR'easter for their hard work. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 18:11, 8 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It looks like there's some uncited text and other problems including

  • If one end of a wormhole was positively charged, the other end would be negatively charged. These properties led Einstein to believe that pairs of particles and antiparticles could be described in this way.
  • Later, after the death of his second wife Elsa, Einstein was briefly in a relationship with Margarita Konenkova. Konenkova was a Russian spy who was married to the Russian sculptor Sergei Konenkov (who created the bronze bust of Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton).[67][68][failed verification]*the Einstein-Cartan theory section
  • The equations of motion section
  • The Adiabatic principle and action-angle variables section
  • In "Über die Entwicklung unserer Anschauungen über das Wesen und die Konstitution der Strahlung" ("The Development of our Views on the Composition and Essence of Radiation"), on the quantization of light, and in an earlier 1909 paper, Einstein showed that Max Planck's energy quanta must have well-defined momenta and act in some respects as independent, point-like particles. This paper introduced the photon concept (although the name photon was introduced later by Gilbert N. Lewis in 1926) and inspired the notion of wave–particle duality in quantum mechanics. Einstein saw this wave–particle duality in radiation as concrete evidence for his conviction that physics needed a new, unified foundation.
  • The matter waves section
  • Although he was lauded for this work, his efforts were ultimately unsuccessful. Notably, Einstein's unification project did not accommodate the strong and weak nuclear forces, neither of which was well understood until many years after his death. Although mainstream physics long ignored Einstein's approaches to unification, Einstein's work has motivated modern quests for a theory of everything, in particular string theory, where geometrical fields emerge in a unified quantum-mechanical setting.
  • The other investigations section
  • Einstein suggested to Erwin Schrödinger that he might be able to reproduce the statistics of a Bose–Einstein gas by considering a box. Then to each possible quantum motion of a particle in a box associate an independent harmonic oscillator. Quantizing these oscillators, each level will have an integer occupation number, which will be the number of particles in it.
  • Many popular quotations are often misattributed to him.[example needed]

and possibly more. Though some of these could have been general referenced and I missed it. Onegreatjoke (talk) 18:01, 17 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Seems rather odd to open this without editing the article yourself or raising any issues on the article talkpage first. --JBL (talk) 18:45, 17 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

information This review was put on hold for two months to relieve pressure on topic editors at GAR. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 22:57, 17 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

On a first reading, none of the uncited statements look atrocious. Various standard textbooks/histories/biographies should cover them, I think. XOR'easter (talk) 18:56, 20 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Working through these as I find the time. XOR'easter (talk) 21:04, 23 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
All the {{citation needed}} tags are addressed now. XOR'easter (talk) 20:20, 5 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
XOR'easter, thanks for your efforts. A couple of things still need to be directly cited: the quotes in the sentence beginning "As he stated in the paper" in the physical cosmology section, the Einstein–Cartan theory and Wave–particle duality sections. Also, do you think MOS:OVERSECTION is a problem at all? ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 16:46, 8 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The citation for the "As he stated in the paper..." is immediately preceding that passage. I don't see the need to repeat footnotes there.
There are more divisions into short subsections than I would have included, but I'm not sure that's a problem per se. XOR'easter (talk) 17:41, 8 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.


Leaving Germany

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The article currently says:

He and his wife Elsa returned to Europe in March, and during 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 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. ...
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 was able to leave Germany.

(Emphasis added.)

This implies that after Einstein turned in his passport at the German consulate on March 28, 1933, he must have nonetheless re-entered Germany, since an organization founded the following month (the Academic Assistance Council) aided him in leaving Germany. However, Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson, which is a source used in this section, says the opposite. "The news of the raid on his Caputh cottage determined Einstein's relationship to his German homeland. He never would go back there. As soon as his ship docked in Antwerp on March 28, 1933, he had a car drive him to the German consulate in Brussels, where he turned in his passport ...."

Einstein would not have needed help in leaving Germany if he wasn't in Germany. -- Metropolitan90 (talk) 04:13, 8 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Citizenship blabla in the lede

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This man uncovered the mechanisms of the universe and we are talking about his every administrative move with his citizenship documents. Who cares????? Shoshin000 (talk) 08:20, 16 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Probably the Germans, who did not appreciate Einstein switching nationalities and helping the Americans achieve scientific advances, including the atom bomb. Einstein is not well-known only because of his scientific breakthroughs but how he used them. Yue🌙 04:44, 17 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Is this an article about Albert Einstein, the man, or Albert Einstein, the legal person? Shoshin000 (talk) 21:35, 25 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Einstein's move to Switzerland was a conscription-evading effort. — Preceding unsigned comment added by K8gh32pr (talkcontribs) 09:57, 21 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The mechanisms were discovered earlier by Fitzgerald, Lamour, Poincare and others. — Preceding unsigned comment added by K8gh32pr (talkcontribs) 10:04, 21 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Splitting proposal

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Semi-protected edit request on 25 August 2025

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Change the currently broken link to his PhD thesis to its new location at https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/bitstream/20.500.11850/139872/1/eth-30378-01.pdf Lukasc-ch (talk) 20:45, 25 August 2025 (UTC)  Done[reply]

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Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein: Albert Einstein[a] (14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist best known for developing the theory of relativity. Einstein also made important contributions to quantum theory. His mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc2, which arises from special relativity, has been called "the world's most famous equation". He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for "his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect".

Photograph credit: Oren Jack Turner; restored by Jaakobou and Yann Forget


Notes

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  1. ^ /ˈnstn/; German: [ˈalbɛʁt ˈaɪnʃtaɪn]
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