If he was still alive, there would be a big party, with lots of physicists' jokes no non-physicist would understand nor find funny: Albert Einstein has his 140th birthday today!
(Photo source: wikipedia.org/wikimedia.org, link: link to Einstein's picture "Wikimedia.org", license type: public domain)
Born on March 14 of 1879 in Ulm, Germany, he development one of the most tested and confirmed theory in the history of physics, the theory of relativity. Without considering the consequences of the effects of relativity, the Global Positioning System (GPS) would quickly drift into error, accumulating to 10 kilometers (6 miles) each day!
Lots of other effects have been predicted and confirmed by enumerous experiments, like light deflection, gravitational time dilation, graviational waves when neutron stars or black holes collide, just to name a few.
Also the innermost planet of our solar system, Mercury, is influenced by relativity, resulting in the perihelion advance of 42.98 arcseconds per century of its orbit around the sun. Sounds more complicated than it really is: The orbit of Mercury has the form of an ellipse which turns in itself around the sun by the mentioned amount of arcseconds. Originally it was believed by astrophysicists that another planet might be accountable for that effect, but Einstein showed this to be a result of relativistic effects of the sun's mass.
Albert Einstein received the Nobel Price 1921, interestingly for the discovery of the photoelectric effect which by the way also laid the basis for the quantum theory.
During his visit of the United States, Hitler came to power in Germany. Since Albert Einstein had a Jewish background, he decided not to return. He became US citizen in 1940.
Einstein died on 18 April 1955, having published more 300 scientific papers and 150 non-scientific works.
What a genius!
