Manhattan Project Pioneers: Albert Einstein

For decades, the name “Einstein” has been connected with genius and science. Albert Einstein (1879-1955) is best known for his work with relativity and quantum mechanics, but he was not involved in the Manhattan Project, except at the very beginning.

Einstein was born in Germany in 1879, moved to Switzerland in 1897, and to the United States in 1933. Although there is a familiar story that he had difficulty in school, he was a good student. Even as a child, Einstein excelled at math and physics. In his early teens he taught himself algebra, calculus, and Euclidean geometry. He received his PhD from the University of Zurich in 1905. In 1922 he received a Nobel Prize for Physics, for “his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.” That discovery was essential to the development of quantum theory. The year 1905 is known as Einstein’s “annus mirabilis,” his miracle year, because he published four groundbreaking papers for which he is still known: his theory of photoelectric effect, explanation of Brownian motion, introduction to his special theory of relativity, and his theory of mass and energy equivalency that is expressed as e=mc2, widely considered the most famous formula in the world. In 1933 Einstein moved to the United States to escape Nazi Germany. His house was seized, and his name was on a list of “not yet hanged.” Einstein was welcomed into the Institute for Advanced Study in New Jersey.

In 1939 his friend Leo Szilard and two other physicists, Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner, asked him to sign a letter to President Roosevelt alerting Roosevelt to the likelihood of a German atomic weapons program and urging the United States to begin a uranium research program. Einstein agreed to sign the letter even though he supported pacifism but opposed the Nazis getting ahead in the effort to build atomic weapons. Einstein became a naturalized American citizen in 1940, but the US Army Intelligence Office denied him a security clearance. He supported the Allies but not the use of atomic weapons. Einstein was not a part of the Manhattan Project, and he was never in Los Alamos during the project.