CHILD HOOD

Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany on March 14, 1879. His
father, Hermann, managed a featherbed business in Ulm, which was
situated on the River Danube in southern Germany. Around a year after
Albert was born, his father's featherbed business failed and the family
moved to Munich, Germany where Hermann went to work for an
electrical supply company. Einstein spent his childhood and his early
education in the city of Munich.
Einstein's mother, Pauline, came from a fairly wealthy family and was
known to have a sharp wit and be outgoing. His father tended to be more
quiet and gentle. They were both intelligent and educated.

When Einstein turned two, his parents had a daughter named Maria.
Maria went by the nickname "Maja." Like most siblings, they had their
differences growing up, but Maja would grow to be one of Albert's
closest and best friends throughout his life.

When Albert was around the age of five or six, he fell ill. To try and
make him feel better, his father bought him a compass to play with.
Einstein became fascinated with the compass. How did it work? What
was the mysterious force that caused the compass to point north?
Einstein claimed as an adult that he could remember how he felt
examining the compass. He said it made a profound and lasting
impression on him even as a child and sparked his curiosity to want to
explain the unknown.

EDUCATION
After three years attending the local Catholic school, eight-year-old
Albert changed schools to the Liutpold Gymnasium where he would
spend the next seven years. Einstein felt that the teaching style at
Liutpold was too regimented and constraining. He did not enjoy the
military discipline of the teachers and often rebelled against their
authority. He compared his teachers to drill sergeants.

Einstein was seventeen when he enrolled in Zurich Polytechnic, a

technical college in Switzerland. It was at Zurich Polytechnic where
Einstein made many of his lifelong friendships. Einstein felt that some
of the teaching in the school was out of date. He often skipped class,
not to goof around, but to read up on the latest theories in modern
physics. Despite his apparent lack of effort, Einstein scored well enough
on the final examinations to earn his diploma in 1900.

ADULT LIFE
Despite having a day job at the patent office, Einstein spent much of his time developing
his own scientific theories. By 1905, he was ready to present his theories to the world. He
published four scientific papers that year, each covering a different subject, in a physics
journal called the Annalen der Physik. These papers were groundbreaking and set the
foundation for modern physics. This burst of scientific discovery is often called the "Miracle
Year" by historians.

As Einstein's fame as a theoretical physicist grew, so did his opportunities in the

academic arena. A year after becoming a lecturer at the University of Bern, he was
appointed to the position of associate professor of physics at the University of Zurich.
He then became a full professor at the University of Prague in 1911 and, a year later,
returned to Zurich as a full professor. His academic life reached its peak when he
became a professor at the University of Berlin and a member of the Prussian Academy of
Sciences. At the University of Berlin, Einstein earned the salary of a professor without
any teaching duties. This allowed him to focus on research and developing new theories
full time. He also served as the Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics.
Einstein would remain at the University of Berlin until the early 1930s.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS
Albert Einstein predicted the equivalence of mass (m) and energy (E) through his famous
mass–energy equivalence formula E=mc2, where c is the speed of light in vacuum. This
was of paramount importance because it showed that a particle possesses an energy
called the “rest energy”, distinct from its classical kinetic and potential energies. It
implied that gravity had the ability to bend light and could be used to calculate the
amount of energy released or consumed during nuclear reactions.
In 1921, Albert Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics “for his services to
theoretical physics and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric
effect”. In 1925, he was awarded the Copley Medal by the Royal Society, which is
perhaps the oldest surviving scientific award in the world. Einstein received numerous
other awards and honors including Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in
1926, Matteucci Medal in 1921, Max Planck Medal in 1929 and Franklin Medal in 1935. In
1999, Time magazine named Albert Einstein as the Person of the Century.

HOW THE WORLD WAS INFLUENCED

One of Einstein's earliest achievements, at the age of 26, was his theory of special
relativity — so-called because it deals with relative motion in the special case where
gravitational forces are neglected. This may sound innocuous, but it was one of the
greatest scientific revolutions in history, completely changing the way physicists
think about space and time. In effect, Einstein merged these into a single space-
time continuum. One reason we think of space and time as being completely separate
is because we measure them in different units, such as miles and seconds,
respectively. But Einstein showed how they are actually interchangeable, linked to
each other through the speed of light — approximately 186,000 miles per second
(300,000 kilometers per second).

he most enduring change brought by Einstein's work was to shake our

sense of certainty. When Einstein entered science at the start of the 20th
century, there was a strong sense of its stability. In antiquity, Euclid had
described perfectly how space really is. In the 17th century, Newton had
discovered the dynamics that govern time and matter. It is only from the
perspective of this certainty that we can now understand the project of the
influential eighteenth century philosopher Immanuel Kant. He felt compelled
to devise an explanation of why all our experience must conform to the
geometry of Euclid and the mechanics of Newton. The project now seems
misplaced. Einstein showed us that both theories can fail when we enter the
realms of the cosmically large, the very heavy, the atomically small and the
very fast.