Albert Einstein

Before Albert Einstein changed physics, he was a curious child staring at a compass. Born in Ulm on 14 March 1879, a subject of the Kingdom of Württemberg in the German Empire, he grew up in a secular Ashkenazi Jewish family. His father, Hermann Einstein, was a salesman and engineer, and his mother was Pauline Koch. When Einstein was five and ill in bed, his father brought him the compass that sparked a lifelong fascination with electromagnetism. He later felt that “something deeply hidden had to be behind things.”

School did not always suit him. His family moved to Munich, where his father and uncle founded a company that made electrical equipment, but Einstein disliked the strict rote learning of the Gymnasium and later wrote that such schooling was harmful to creativity. At the same time, his gifts were obvious. He excelled at mathematics and physics, taught himself algebra, calculus, and Euclidean geometry, and before turning thirteen discovered an original proof of the Pythagorean theorem. By fourteen, he had mastered integral and differential calculus, and he came to believe that nature could be understood as a mathematical structure.

Einstein moved to Switzerland in 1895, gave up his earlier citizenship the next year, and in 1896 entered the mathematics and physics teaching diploma program at the Swiss federal polytechnic school in Zurich. He graduated in 1900, became a Swiss citizen in 1901, and found a permanent position at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. In 1905 he submitted a successful PhD dissertation to the University of Zurich, and that same year became his annus mirabilis, his “miracle year.” He published four papers that outlined the photoelectric effect, explained Brownian motion, introduced special relativity, and showed that mass and energy are equivalent.

From those papers came the equation E = mc², called the world’s most famous equation. Einstein’s work soon widened. In 1915 he proposed the general theory of relativity, extending his mechanics to include gravitation. A paper the next year explored what general relativity meant for the structure and evolution of the universe as a whole and introduced the cosmological constant. In 1917 he wrote on spontaneous and stimulated emission, the latter becoming the core mechanism behind the laser and maser. He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for his services to theoretical physics, especially his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.

Einstein’s life also crossed the storms of the twentieth century. In 1914 he moved to Berlin to join the Prussian Academy of Sciences and the Humboldt University of Berlin, and in 1917 became director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics. In 1933, while he was visiting the United States, Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. Horrified by Nazi persecution of his fellow Jews, Einstein stayed in the United States and became an American citizen in 1940. On the eve of World War II, he endorsed a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt warning of a possible German nuclear weapons program and recommending similar research in the United States.

In later years, Einstein made important contributions to statistical mechanics and quantum theory, including work on the quantum physics of radiation and, with Satyendra Nath Bose, the groundwork for Bose–Einstein statistics. Yet he also resisted the idea that fundamental randomness belonged at the center of science, objecting that “God does not play dice,” and he spent much of his final academic life trying unsuccessfully to form a unified field theory. He died on 18 April 1955, but his words still travel easily because they sound like his science: direct, searching, and alert to hidden order. As one of his sayings puts it, “If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.”