Albert Einstein

From Ulm to Zürich

Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany, in 1879 and spent much of his childhood in Munich. He enjoyed music and played the violin, but his strongest interests became mathematics and physics. As a teenager, he continued his education in Switzerland. He later studied at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Zürich, which is now called ETH Zürich, and trained to teach physics and mathematics.

After graduating, Einstein had difficulty finding an academic job. In 1902 he began working at the Swiss patent office in Bern. The job involved studying other people's inventions, while he used his free time to work on his own questions about light, atoms, space, and time.

A Remarkable Year

In 1905, Einstein published four papers that changed physics. One explained the photoelectric effect: under the right conditions, light can transfer energy in packets and knock electrons out of a material. Another used the random motion of tiny particles in a liquid as evidence that atoms and molecules are real.

His paper on special relativity showed that measurements of time and distance depend on how observers are moving, while the speed of light remains constant. A short follow-up paper introduced the relationship later written as E = mc², connecting mass and energy. These were different discoveries, not one single "theory of everything."

Gravity and the Nobel Prize

Einstein kept developing his ideas. In 1915 he completed the general theory of relativity, which describes gravity as the bending of space and time around matter. Observations of a solar eclipse in 1919 supported a prediction of the theory and helped make him internationally famous.

Einstein received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics. The prize especially recognized his explanation of the photoelectric effect, not relativity. That work helped establish quantum physics and later contributed to technologies that detect or use light.

A New Home and a Lasting Legacy

When Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in 1933, Einstein did not return to Germany. He settled in Princeton, New Jersey, and worked at the Institute for Advanced Study. He became a United States citizen in 1940 while also keeping his Swiss citizenship.

Einstein died in 1955. Scientists still test the predictions of relativity, and his 1905 papers remain central to modern physics. His story is valuable because it shows how several carefully argued ideas—not a single sudden guess—can reshape what people know about nature.