Albert Einstein

Lore & Background

Einstein was born in Ulm as a subject to the Kingdom of Württemberg in the German Empire. His parents were secular Ashkenazi Jews. As a child, he was slow to learn to talk, but at age five a compass sparked his lifelong fascination with electromagnetism. He attended school in Munich and later moved to Italy with his family. In 1895, he sat the entrance examination for the federal polytechnic school in Zurich, failing the general part but excelling in physics and mathematics. He completed secondary education in Aarau, Switzerland, and renounced his German citizenship in 1896 to avoid military service. He enrolled in the mathematics and physics teaching diploma program at the polytechnic school, graduating in 1900, and acquired Swiss citizenship in 1901.

In 1905, his annus mirabilis, Einstein published four groundbreaking papers on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity, and mass–energy equivalence. In 1915, he proposed general relativity, extending his mechanics to include gravitation. A 1916 paper laid out implications for cosmology, introducing the cosmological constant. In 1917, he wrote a paper introducing spontaneous and stimulated emission, the latter being the core mechanism behind the laser. He moved to Berlin in 1914, becoming director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in 1917. In 1933, while visiting the United States, Adolf Hitler came to power; horrified by Nazi persecution of Jews, Einstein remained in the US and was granted American citizenship in 1940. On the eve of World War II, he endorsed a letter to President Roosevelt alerting him to potential German nuclear weapons research.

Reader's Guide

Einstein's significance lies in his revolutionary contributions to physics, particularly the theories of special and general relativity, which fundamentally changed understanding of space, time, and gravity. His explanation of the photoelectric effect provided key evidence for quantum theory and earned him the Nobel Prize. His mass–energy equivalence formula became foundational for nuclear physics. He also laid groundwork for Bose–Einstein statistics and contributed to quantum optics and electrodynamics. In his later career, he opposed quantum theory's randomness and sought a unified field theory, but these efforts proved unsuccessful. Despite increasing isolation from mainstream physics, his work remains central to modern science. Many things are named after him, including the element Einsteinium. In 1999, he was named Time's Person of the Century.

Did You Know?

• Einstein was slow to learn to talk as a child, leading his parents to worry he had a learning disability.
• He discovered an original proof of the Pythagorean theorem before his thirteenth birthday.
• He renounced his German citizenship in 1896 to avoid conscription into military service.
• He endorsed a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt alerting him to the potential German nuclear weapons program.

Notable Quotes (Wikiquote)

"Un homme heureux est trop content du présent pour trop se soucier de l'avenir." — Albert Einstein "A happy man is too satisfied with the present to dwell too much on the future." — Albert Einstein "From "Mes Projets d'Avenir", a French essay written at age 18 for a school exam (18 September 1896). The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein Vol. 1 (1987) Doc. 22." — Albert Einstein "Autoritätsdusel ist der größte Feind der Wahrheit." — Albert Einstein