Albert Einstein was born in 1879 in Germany, the first
child of a bourgeois Jewish couple. The young Albert displayed
an early interest in science, but he was unhappy with the principles
of obedience and conformity that governed his Catholic elementary school.
At the age of ten, he began attending the Luitpold Gymnasium,
though most of his education consisted of the study and reading
he undertook on his own under the guidance of his Uncle Jakob and
the young medical student and family friend Max Talmud. Talmud
recommended popular science and philosophy books that put an abrupt
end to the boy's short-lived but intense religious fervor, perhaps
to the relief of his nonobservant parents.
When his parents moved to Italy in 1893, Einstein dropped
out of school and renounced both his German citizenship and his
Jewish faith. He applied to study at the Zurich Polytechnic, an advanced
Swiss technical institute. However, he failed the entrance examinations
and was not accepted until spending a year of preparation at a
Swiss secondary school. Between 1896 and 1900, he participated
in a teachers' training program at the Zurich Polytechnic, where
he met his lifelong friends Marcel Grossman and Michele Angelo
Besso, as well as his first wife, Mileva Maric. Following the
completion of his program in 1900, Einstein went on to work as
a teacher and tutor in a series of posts in Germany and Switzerland.
He finally settled in Bern, Switzerland, in 1902, where he received
a job as a technical expert in a patent office. In Bern, Einstein
married Mileva and the couple raised two sons together.
The year 1905 has been termed Einstein's annus
mirabilis, or miracle year, because it was in this year
that the scientist published three of his most important papers
and completed most of the work for his doctoral degree, which he
received in 1906. Einstein's papers dealt with quantum theory,
Brownian motion, and special relativity. In subsequent years,
he expanded his theory of special relativity to account for accelerating
frames of reference, so that he could then theorize that the laws
of physics (including both mechanics and electrodynamics) are the
same for all observers in all frames of reference. This theory,
known as general relativity, was fully formulated by 1915. In
1919, scientists verified general relativity through measurements
taken during a solar eclipse, and Einstein was catapulted into
a position of international prominence. However, while his relativity
theory won him popular fame, it was his contributions to quantum
theory that won Einstein a Nobel Prize in 1922.
For most of Einstein's life, he worked as a university
professor. He began at the University of Bern in 1909, but also
taught at Prague and Zurich before ultimately settling at the University
of Berlin and the Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1915. Although
Mileva and their sons initially lived in Berlin with Albert, the
couple separated shortly thereafter and in 1919 obtained an official
divorce. Einstein remarried that same year, to his cousin Elsa
Lowenthal, and lived with her until her death in 1936.
During the 1920s and 1930s, Einstein became increasingly
active in politics and international affairs. He was a strong
supporter of Zionism and traveled on a lecturing tour to the United
States in 1922 to raise money on behalf of a new Hebrew University
in Jerusalem. Einstein's Zionism was primarily cultural rather
than nationalistic; he wanted to preserve the values of social justice
and intellectual aspiration that he associated with the Jewish
people. In addition to his Zionism, Einstein was also a militant
pacifist during and following World War
I. He was critical of nationalism and committed to
the idea of a single world government without any need for armed
forces. Throughout the 1920s, he participated in numerous peace
campaigns and wrote articles on international peace and disarmament.
However, when Hitler's
National Socialist party came to power in Germany in 1933, Einstein
began to rethink his rigid pacifist stance. When the Nazis began
targeting him in their anti-Semitic propaganda, Einstein resigned
from the Prussian Academy of Sciences and accepted a full-time
position at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University.
Einstein departed further from his pacifism during World War
II, when he actively participated in the war effort,
working for the US Navy and writing a letter to President Roosevelt
in 1939, in which he urged him to accelerate the nation's nuclear
weaponry development. However, Einstein never advocated the dropping
of the atomic bombs on Japan and worked until his death in 1955
in a campaign for international peace and nuclear disarmament.
Einstein's greatest contributions to physics were his
synthesis of mechanics and electrodynamics through his relativity
theory, and his challenge to Newtonian physics through
his quantum theory. However, the impact of his ideas was not limited
to science: Einstein's achievements influenced philosophy, art,
literature, and countless other disciplines. As an individual
passionate in his convictions and outspoken in his politics, Einstein
transformed the image of the scientist in the twentieth century.
It comes as no surprise, therefore, that TIME Magazine
selected Albert Einstein as "Person of the Century," hailing him
as "genius, political refugee, humanitarian, locksmith of the mysteries
of the atom and the universe."
