Albert later in life related the story that at age five, his father showed him a pocket compass. Young Einstein realized that something in "empty" space affected the needle. He said the experience was one of the most revelatory of his life.
About a year later, Albert's education began. Besides the violin lessons his mother insisted on, he also received religious education at home. Two years later, he began school at the Luitpold Gymnasium and after that, his religious training was also taught there.
Although he was clever and built models and mechanical devices for fun, he was also considered a slow learner. It's possible he was dyslexic, or it could have been just shyness. He was good mathematics, in particular the calculus, and did not fail these subjects as has been often reported.
In 1894, the Einsteins moved to Italy, but Albert stayed in Munich. The following year, he failed an exam, which determined whether he could study for a diploma in electrical engineering at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich. In 1896, he renounced his German citizenship, not becoming a citizen of any other country until 1901. Also in 1896 he entered the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich to be trained as a teacher in physics and mathematics, receiving his degree in 1900.
After trying unsuccessfully to obtain employment at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule and other universities, he finally took a temporary job as a mathematics teacher at the Technical High School in Winterthur. This was followed by another temporary position teaching in a private school in Schaffhausen. Finally, the father of a friend helped him find a position as a technical expert third class at the patent office in Bern. He held this job from 1902 to 1909, receiving a promotion to technical expert second class in 1906.
Albert and Mileva Maric, a mathematician, had a daughter Lieserl, born in January, 1902. (What eventually happened to Lieserl is not know. It's possible she died in infancy or was put up for adoption.) The couple wasn't married until 1903. On May 14, 1904, the couple's first son, Hans Albert Einstein was born. (Hans eventually became a professor of hydraulic engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He had very little interaction with his father.)
It was during these years when his prolific writing of theoretical physics publications began. He also earned a doctorate from the University of Zurich in 1905 for a thesis On a new determination of molecular dimensions.
The first of Albert Einstein's three 1905 papers looked at a phenomenon discovered by Max Planck. Planck's discovery indicated that electromagnetic energy seemed to be emitted from radiating objects in discrete quantities. This energy was directly proportional to the frequency of the radiation. Previously, Maxwell's equations and the laws of thermodynamics assumed that electromagnetic energy consisted of waves which could contain any small amount of energy. Einstein's paper used Planck's quantum hypothesis for the description of the electromagnetic radiation of light.
Einstein's second 1905 paper laid the groundwork for what would eventually become Einstein's best known legacy, the special theory of relativity. Using a reinterpretation of the classical principle of relativity, which said that the laws of physics had to have the same form in any frame of reference, Einstein proposed that the speed of light remained constant in all frames of reference, as required by Maxwell's theory. Later that year, as an extension of his theory of relativity, Einstein showed how mass and energy were equivalent. While not the first to propose all the components of special theory of relativity, he was the first to unite important parts of classical mechanics and Maxwell's electrodynamics.
His final paper of that important year dealt with statistical mechanics.
In 1908 he was appointed Privatdozent in Berne and in 1909 he became Professor Extraordinary at Zurich. Albert and Mileva had a second son, Eduard, born on July 28, 1910. (Eduard was later institutionalized for schizophrenia and died in an asylum.)
This was followed in 1911 by Professor of Theoretical Physics at Karl-Ferdinand University in Prague. That same year, he was able to make preliminary predictions about how a ray of light from a distant star, passing near the Sun, would appear to be bent slightly, in the direction of the Sun, leading to the first experimental evidence in favor of his theory.
The following year, he moved Prague to Zurich the following year to accept a chair at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zurich. It also began a new phase in his gravitational research, with the help of mathematician friend Marcel Grossmann. He called his new work the general relativity theory, which he was able to publish in 1915.
In 1914 he became a German citizen and was appointed Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Physical Institute and Professor in the University of Berlin. The Einsteins divorced on February 14, 1919. Albert then married his cousin Elsa Loewenthal on June 2 of that year.
The Nobel Prize he received in 1921 was not for his relativity theories, but for 1905 work on the photoelectric effect. Other honors he received during these years include the Coley Medal of the Royal Society in 1925 and the gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1926.
He remained in Berlin until 1933 when he renounced his citizenship for political reasons and emigrated to the United States, where he became Professor of Theoretical Physics at Princeton. He became a United States citizen in 1940, but retained his Swiss citizenship. In 1944, as a contribution to the war effort, he hand wrote a copy of his 1905 paper on special relativity, which he put up for auction. This raised six million dollars and the manuscript now resides in the Library of Congress.
Albert Einstein retired from his post at Princeton in 1945. In 1952. after the death of the first president of Israel, the Israeli government offered the post of second president to Einstein, which he refused. On March 30, 1953, he released a revised unified field theory.
Einstein died on April 18, 1955 in Princeton, New Jersey. He was cremated at Trenton, New Jersey at 4 pm that same day and his ashes were scattered at an undisclosed place.
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