Einstein Born: Physics Gains Its Greatest Mind

Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany, on March 14, 1879, to a family that worried about his development. He did not speak fluently until age nine. His teachers considered him slow. His school in Munich recommended he leave because his attitude was disruptive. Nothing about his early life suggested he would become the most famous scientist in human history. Einstein's academic career began unremarkably. He graduated from the Zurich Polytechnic in 1900 but could not secure a teaching position at any university, partly because his professors found him insubordinate. He took a job as a patent clerk in Bern, Switzerland, evaluating patent applications for electromagnetic devices. The position left his evenings free for physics. In 1905, working alone without access to an academic laboratory or research colleagues, Einstein published four papers that transformed physics. The first explained the photoelectric effect using quantum theory, work that would earn him the 1921 Nobel Prize. The second provided mathematical proof that atoms exist by analyzing Brownian motion. The third introduced special relativity, demolishing the Newtonian concept of absolute space and time. The fourth derived the mass-energy equivalence formula E=mc2, establishing that matter and energy are interchangeable. The general theory of relativity followed in 1915, describing gravity not as a force but as a curvature of spacetime caused by mass and energy. Arthur Eddington's 1919 solar eclipse observations confirmed Einstein's prediction that light bends around massive objects, turning Einstein into an international celebrity overnight. Einstein fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and settled at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He signed the letter to President Roosevelt in 1939 warning that Germany might develop an atomic bomb, helping to initiate the Manhattan Project, though he played no direct role in weapons development. He spent his final decades searching for a unified field theory that eluded him, and died in Princeton on April 18, 1955, at age seventy-six.