Early life and career

In 1880, the year after Einstein's birth, his family moved from Ulm to Munich, where Hermann Einstein, his father, and Jakob Einstein, his uncle, set up a small electrical plant and engineering works. In Munich Einstein attended rigidly disciplined schools. Under the harsh and pedantic regimentation of 19th-century German education, which he found intimidating andboring, he showed little scholastic ability. At the behest of his mother, Einstein also studied music; though throughout life he played exclusively for relaxation, he became an accomplishedviolinist. It was then only Uncle Jakob who stimulated in Einstein a fascination for mathematicsand Uncle Cäsar Koch who stimulated a consuming curiosity about science.

By the age of 12 Einstein had decided to devote himself to solving the riddle of the "huge world." Three years later, with poor grades in history, geography, and languages, he left school with no diploma and went to Milan to rejoin his family, who had recently moved there from Germany because of his father's business setbacks. Albert Einstein resumed his education in Switzerland, culminating in four years of physics and mathematics at the renowned Federal Polytechnic Academy in Zürich.

After his graduation in the spring of 1900, he became a Swiss citizen, worked for two months as a mathematics teacher, and then was employed as examiner at the Swiss patent office in Bern. With his newfound security, Einstein married his university sweetheart, Mileva Marić, in 1903.

Early in 1905 Einstein published in the prestigious German physics monthly Annalen der Physik a thesis, "A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions," that won him a Ph.D. from the University of Zürich. Four more important papers appeared in Annalen that year and forever changed man's view of the universe.

The first of these, "Über die von der molekularkinetischen Theorie der Wärme geforderte Bewegung von in ruhenden Flüssigkeiten suspendierten Teilchen" ("On the Motion-Required by the Molecular Kinetic Theory of Heat-of Small Particles Suspended in a Stationary Liquid"), provided a theoretical explanation of Brownian motion. In "Über einen die Erzeugung und Verwandlung des Lichtes betreffenden heuristischen Gesichtspunkt" ("On a Heuristic ViewpointConcerning the Production and Transformation of Light"), Einstein postulated that light is composed of individual quanta (later called photons) that, in addition to wavelike behaviour, demonstrate certain properties unique to particles. In a single stroke he thus revolutionized the theory of light and provided an explanation for, among other phenomena, the emission of electrons from some solids when struck by light, called the photoelectric effect.

Einstein's special theory of relativity, first printed in "Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper" ("On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies"), had its beginnings in an essay Einstein wrote at age 16. The precise influence of work by other physicists on Einstein's special theory is still controversial. The theory held that if, for all frames of reference, the speed of light is constant and if all natural laws are the same, then both time and motion are found to be relative to the observer.

In the mathematical progression of the theory, Einstein published his fourth paper, "Ist die Trägheit eines Körpers von seinem Energieinhalt abhängig?" ("Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?"). This mathematical footnote to the special theory of relativity established the equivalence of mass and energy, according to which the energy E of a quantity of matter, with mass m, is equal to the product of the mass and the square of the velocity of light, c. This relationship is commonly expressed in the form E = mc 2.

Public understanding of this new theory and acclaim for its creator were still many years off, butEinstein had won a place among Europe's most eminent physicists, who increasingly sought his counsel, as he did theirs. While Einstein continued to develop his theory, attempting now toencompass with it the phenomenon of gravitation, he left the patent office and returned to teaching-first in Switzerland, briefly at the German University in Prague, where he was awarded a full professorship, and then, in the winter of 1912, back at the Polytechnic in Zürich. He was later remembered from this time as a very happy man, content in his marriage and delighted with his two young sons, Hans Albert and Edward.

In April