ampson. While there, he met with then-Member of Parliament Winston Churchill and former Prime Minister Lloyd George, and asked them to help bring Jewish scientists out of Germany. According to one historian, Churchill dispatched physicist Frederick Lindemann to Germany to seek out Jewish scientists and place them in British universities.
Einstein later contacted leaders of other nations, including Turkish Prime Minister Ismet Inönü to ask for help resettling of Jewish citizens fleeing the Nazis. In September 1933, he wrote to Inönü, requesting the placement of unemployed German-Jewish scientists. As a result of Einstein’s letter, Jewish invitees to Turkey eventually totaled over 1,000 individuals.
Though Locker-Lamspon urged Britain’s parliament to extend citizenship to Einstein, his efforts failed, and Einstein accepted an earlier offer from the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study in New Jersey to become a resident scholar. In October 1933, Einstein arrived in the U.S. and took up the position.
At the time, most American universities had minimal or no Jewish faculty or students due to quotas that limited the number of Jews that could enroll or teach. These would expire by 1940, but remained a barrier for American-Jewish scientists to participate fully in academic life and receive a university education.
In 1935, Einstein applied for permanent citizenship in the US, which he was granted in 1940. He would remain in the US and maintain his affiliation with the Institute for Advanced Study until his death in 1955. During this period, Einstein tried to develop a unified field theory and to refute the accepted interpretation of quantum physics, both unsuccessfully.
The Manhattan Project:
During World War II, Einstein played an important role in the creation of The Manhattan Projectthe – development of the atomic bomb. This project began after Einstein was approached by a group of scientists led by Hungarian physicist Leó Szilárd in 1939. After hearing their warnings of a Nazi nuclear weapons program, he co-wrote a letter to then-President Roosevelt, warning him about the extreme danger of such a weapon in Nazi hands.
Though a pacifist who had never considered the idea of using nuclear physics for the sake of developing a weapon, Einstein was concerned about the Nazis possessing such a weapon. As such, he and Szilárd, along with other refugees such as Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner, “regarded it as their responsibility to alert Americans to the possibility that German scientists might win the race to build an atomic bomb, and to warn that Hitler would be more than willing to resort to such a weapon.”
According to historians Sarah J. Diehl and James Clay Moltz, the letter was “arguably the key stimulus for the U.S. adoption of serious investigations into nuclear weapons on the eve of the U.S. entry into World War II”. In addition to the letter, Einstein used his connections with the Belgian Royal Family and the Belgian queen mother to get access with a personal envoy to the White House’s Oval Office, where he met with Roosevelt to discuss the danger personally.
As a result of Einstein’s letter and his meetings with Roosevelt, the U.S. initiated The Manhattan Project and mobilized all the necessary resources to research, build and test the atomic bomb. By 1945, this aspect of the arms race was won by the Allied Powers, as Germany had never succeeded in creating an atomic weapon of their own.
A thoroughgoing pacifist, Einstein would later come to deeply regret his involvement in the development of nuclear weapons. As he said to his friend, Linus Pauling, in 1954 (a year before his death): “I made one great mistake in my life—when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be made; but there was some justification—the danger that the Germans would make them.”
Theory of Relativity:
Though Einstein made many significant achievements over the years, and is widely known for his contribution to the establishment of The Manhattan Project, his most famous theory is that which is represented by the simple 