Albert Einstein

Life and legacy

Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany, in 1879 and raised in Munich, where his father ran an electrochemical business. As a child, he was fascinated by a compass and by geometry, but chafed at the rigid Prussian school system. After his family moved to Italy, Einstein renounced his German citizenship to avoid military service and enrolled at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Zürich, graduating in 1900. Unable to find an academic position, he took a job as a patent clerk in Bern - a role that gave him time to think.

In 1905, his "miracle year," the twenty-six-year-old patent clerk published four papers that transformed physics. One explained the photoelectric effect using the idea of light quanta (photons), for which he would later receive the Nobel Prize. Another provided definitive evidence for the existence of atoms through Brownian motion. The third introduced special relativity, showing that the laws of physics are the same for all observers moving at constant speed relative to each other and that the speed of light is constant. The fourth derived the mass-energy equivalence formula E=mc², revealing that mass and energy are interchangeable.

Einstein spent the next decade developing general relativity, his masterwork, which reimagined gravity not as a force but as the curvature of spacetime caused by mass and energy. Published in 1915, general relativity predicted phenomena that were confirmed by observation: the bending of starlight by the sun (verified during the 1919 solar eclipse by Arthur Eddington's expedition), gravitational redshift, and - a century later - gravitational waves. The 1919 confirmation made Einstein a worldwide celebrity overnight.

As a secular Jewish intellectual in Weimar Germany, Einstein watched the rise of Nazism with alarm. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Einstein was visiting the United States and never returned. He settled at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he spent the rest of his life pursuing a unified field theory. In 1939, he signed a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt warning that Germany might develop atomic weapons, which helped initiate the Manhattan Project - though Einstein himself did not work on the bomb and later expressed deep regret about the nuclear arms race.

Einstein became an outspoken advocate for civil rights, pacifism, and Zionism (though he favored cooperation with Arabs in Palestine). He was offered the presidency of Israel in 1952 but declined. He died in Princeton on April 18, 1955, at age seventy-six. His contributions to physics - from quantum theory to cosmology - remain the foundation of modern science, and his name has become synonymous with genius itself.

Key accomplishments

• Published the special theory of relativity and the mass-energy equivalence formula E=mc² in 1905
• Developed the general theory of relativity (1915), redefining gravity as the curvature of spacetime
• Won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921 for his explanation of the photoelectric effect
• Provided theoretical foundations for quantum mechanics, cosmology, and nuclear physics
• Co-signed the Einstein-Szilard letter to President Roosevelt, catalyzing American nuclear research

Quotes

Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

Interview by George Sylvester Viereck, The Saturday Evening Post, October 26, 1929

God does not play dice with the universe.

Paraphrase from letter to Max Born, December 4, 1926; original German: "Jedenfalls bin ich überzeugt, daß der nicht würfelt"

Related figures