A child in Ulm and Munich
Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879, in Ulm, in the year-old German Empire, and raised in Munich, where his father Hermann and uncle Jakob ran a modest electrical-equipment firm. He was a quiet, inward child who spoke late enough to unsettle his parents, and who disliked the rigid, militaristic discipline of German schooling. But the legend of Einstein the failing student is false. Privately he was voracious. At twelve he worked through a book of Euclidean geometry he later called his “holy little geometry book”; by his mid-teens he had taught himself calculus. A family friend, the medical student Max Talmud, brought him popular science and the philosophy of Kant. And he never forgot the moment, around the age of five, when his father showed him a compass: the needle’s unwavering pull convinced him that “something deeply hidden had to be behind things.” When the family business failed and his parents moved to Italy, the teenage Einstein left his Munich school without a diploma and renounced his German citizenship, stateless, and uncertain of his future.
The wandering student
He finished school in Switzerland and, in 1896, entered the Zurich Polytechnic to train as a physics and mathematics teacher. He was a gifted but wilful student who skipped lectures, antagonised professors, and leaned on the meticulous notes of his friend Marcel Grossmann. Graduating in 1900, he could not find an academic post, partly, he believed, because of quiet antisemitism and his reputation for insolence. For two years he scraped by on tutoring. Then Grossmann’s father helped him secure a position as a technical expert, third class, at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. It proved a gift. The work, assessing patents, often for electrical devices, was undemanding enough to leave his mind free and disciplined enough to sharpen it. In his off-hours, with a circle of friends he half-jokingly called the “Olympia Academy,” he read physics and philosophy and argued late into the night. He married Mileva Marić, a fellow physics student, in 1903. From that patent-office desk, with no university post and no laboratory, he was about to remake physics.
The miracle year
In 1905, his annus mirabilis, Einstein published four papers, any one of which would have secured his reputation. The first explained the photoelectric effect by proposing that light itself arrives in discrete packets, or quanta; it helped found quantum theory and would later earn him the Nobel Prize. The second showed that the random jittering of tiny particles suspended in fluid, Brownian motion, was direct evidence that atoms and molecules are real, settling a question physicists had argued for a century. The third introduced the special theory of relativity, discarding the assumed fixed stage of absolute space and time: the speed of light is constant for every observer, and time and length themselves stretch and contract with motion. The fourth, a three-page afterthought, drew out a consequence so strange that Einstein himself was unsure of it, that mass and energy are the same thing, related by what became the most famous equation ever written, E=mc². He was twenty-six years old, and still an unknown clerk.
Bending space and time
Special relativity made Einstein known among physicists; what followed made him immortal. For a decade he wrestled with a deeper puzzle, how to reconcile relativity with gravity. The breakthrough came from what he called “the happiest thought of my life”: the realisation that a person in free fall feels no gravity at all. From that seed he built, by 1915, the general theory of relativity, which recast gravity not as a force but as the curving of spacetime itself by mass and energy. It was a wholly new picture of the universe, and, crucially, it made testable predictions. In 1919 a British expedition led by Arthur Eddington photographed a solar eclipse and measured starlight bending around the sun by exactly the amount Einstein had calculated. The confirmation ran on front pages around the world. Almost overnight, a former patent clerk became the most famous scientist alive, the human face of a revolution in how reality itself was understood.
The world’s first scientific celebrity
Einstein wore his fame as few scientists ever have. He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics, officially for the photoelectric effect, the committee being wary of relativity, and used the platform relentlessly. He spoke for pacifism, for civil rights, for refugees, and for internationalism. A secular but proud Jew, he became an outspoken supporter of the Zionist movement, toured the United States in 1921 to raise funds for the future Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and would later bequeath his papers to it. He answered letters from ordinary schoolchildren and from heads of state alike. His unruly hair, his violin, his gentle wit, and his readiness to say plainly that he did not understand something made him beloved in a way no scientist had ever been. He turned the figure of the scientist into someone the public could trust, and made the life of the mind look like an adventure open to anyone curious enough to attempt it.
Exile and conscience
In January 1933, while Einstein was visiting the United States, Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. Einstein never set foot in his homeland again. The Nazi regime seized his property, burned his books, and a German magazine listed him among enemies of the state with the caption “not yet hanged.” He renounced his German citizenship a second time and settled at the newly founded Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he remained for the rest of his life. He worked tirelessly to help Jewish scientists and other refugees escape Europe, signing affidavits and raising money. In 1939, fearing that Nazi Germany might build an atomic bomb, he signed a letter, drafted largely by the physicist Leó Szilárd, urging President Roosevelt to begin American nuclear research. He later called it the one great mistake of his life, and spent his remaining years campaigning against the very weapons it had helped bring into being.
What his physics gave the world
It is tempting to file Einstein’s physics under abstraction, but it runs straight through ordinary life. The GPS in every phone relies on satellites whose clocks must be corrected for both special and general relativity; without those corrections, navigation would drift off by miles within a day. His account of the photoelectric effect underlies the solar cell, the digital camera sensor, and the laser, and therefore fibre-optic communication, barcode scanners, and modern eye surgery. The equivalence of mass and energy underpins nuclear medicine, which diagnoses and treats millions, as well as nuclear power. His proof of atoms helped found modern chemistry and materials science. Beyond any single device, Einstein changed what people believed the universe to be, bendable, relative, and knowable, and he changed the standing of science itself, showing that the disciplined imagination of a single mind could reshape the world. Few individuals have handed humanity more practical tools, or a larger picture of its own home.
A mind, and a man
Behind the icon was a person of contradictions. Einstein could be warm, funny, and disarmingly humble, and also remote from those closest to him; his first marriage, to Mileva Marić, herself a trained physicist, ended painfully, and his relationships with his sons were strained by distance and by the mental illness of his younger son, Eduard. He found refuge in music, playing the violin throughout his life and saying that he often thought in sounds and images before words. He loved sailing small boats, was frequently becalmed because he refused to fit a motor, and kept up an enormous correspondence on everything from quantum theory to the worries of individual schoolchildren who wrote to him. He distrusted nationalism, organised religion, and unexamined authority in equal measure, and he insisted that the moral worth of a life lay not in its achievements but in its service to others. The rumpled, sweet-natured sage of the Princeton years was, by the end, as much a moral symbol as a scientific one.
The last years, and the legend
Einstein spent his final three decades at Princeton pursuing a unified field theory that would knit gravity and electromagnetism into one framework. He never found it, and the quantum mechanics he had helped create moved in directions he distrusted “God does not play dice,” he famously objected. But he never stopped working, and he never stopped speaking out: against McCarthyism, against nuclear weapons, and for international cooperation that might prevent another war. He declined an offer to become the first president of the State of Israel in 1952, saying he lacked the aptitude for human affairs. He died in Princeton on April 18, 1955, at seventy-six, a sheet of unfinished equations beside his bed. His name has become a synonym for genius itself, but his deeper legacy is the example of a free, sceptical, and humane mind, certain that the universe could be understood, and that understanding it was among the most beautiful things a person could do.
Sources & further reading
Albert Einstein, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.