Albert Eistein

The German-American physicist Albert Einstein, b. Ulm, Germany, Mar. 14, 1879, d. Princeton, N.J., Apr. 18, 1955, contributed more than any other scientist to the 20th-century vision of physical reality. In the wake of World War I, Einstein's theories--especially his theory of relativity--seemed to many people to point to a pure quality of human thought, one far removed from the war and its aftermath. Seldom has a scientist received such public attention for having cultivated the fruit of pure learning.

EARLY LIFE
Einstein's parents, who were nonobservant Jews, moved from Ulm to Munich when Einstein was an infant. The family business was the manufacture of electrical apparatus; when the business failed (1894), the family moved to Milan, Italy. At this time Einstein decided officially to relinquish his German citizenship. Within a year, still without having completed secondary school, Einstein failed an examination that would have allowed him to pursue a course of study leading to a diploma as an electrical engineer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (the Zurich Polytechnic). He spent the next year in nearby Aarau at the cantonal secondary school, where he enjoyed excellent teachers and first-rate facilities in physics. Einstein returned in 1896 to the Zurich Polytechnic, where he graduated (1900) as a secondary school teacher of mathematics and physics.

After a lean two years he obtained a post at the Swiss patent office in Bern. The patent-office work required Einstein's careful attention, but while employed (1902-09) there, he completed an astonishing range of publications in theoretical physics. For the most part these texts were written in his spare time and without the benefit of close contact with either the scientific literature or theoretician colleagues. Einstein submitted one of his scientific papers to the University of Zurich to obtain a Ph.D. degree in 1905. In 1908 he sent a second paper to the University of Bern and became...