Nobel Prize in Physics 2020 to be announced today: Remembering 1921 winner Albert Einstein

As the Committee is set to announce the winner of Nobel Prize in Physics on October 6, 2020, it recalled one of the world’s “greatest minds”, Albert Einstein. Remembering his ground-breaking discoveries and research that continue to give direction to the physics even till this date, Einstein was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics, a year later in 1922 for his theoretical physics and discovery of the law of photoelectric effect. 

Remarkably, during the election process in 1921, the Nobel Committee for Physics had decided that none of that year’s nominations successfully met the criteria outlined in the will of Alfred Nobel. Therefore, the prize was reserved until next year to be awarded to Albert Einstein. Born in Germany in 1879, Einstein’s contribution to Physics started early on his life. Beginning his study on the light as early as in 1905, he went on to explain that the light consists of “quanta-packets” that have a fixed amount of energies corresponding to their frequencies. 

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Einstein’s personal life

Albert Einstein grew up in Munich, Germany where his father owned an electrical engineering company. Following his studies at ETH University, he worked at the patent office in Bern and utilised the time to develop several pioneering works in physics. Einstein was later employed at universities in Bern, Zurich and Prague and from 1914 he was at Berlin. He later shifted to the United States, where he worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He had married twice and had three children with his first wife. 

Nobel Prize Committee has said, “Einstein always appeared to have a clear view of the problems of physics and the determination to solve them. He had a strategy of his own and was able to visualize the main stages on the way to his goal. He regarded his major achievements as mere stepping-stones for the next advance.”

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Second woman to receive Nobel Prize in Physics

Apart from the legendary Albert Einstein, Nobel Prize Committee also remembered the second woman ever to receive the prize in Physics in 1963, Maria Goeppert-Mayer for her work ion the nuclear shell structure of the atoms. Sharing an interesting fact about the iconic woman, the Committee revealed that she did most of the research work without being paid but it fetched her the Nobel Prize in Physics when she was 57 years old.  She was one of the only three women to get the honour. Marie Curie was the first woman to be awarded in 1903 and then in 1905. Donna Strickland got the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2018.

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