Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein was one of the most influential and renowned physicists of the 20th century. He was born in Ulm, Germany, on March 14, 1879, to a Jewish family. He showed an early interest in mathematics and physics, but had difficulty with the rigid schooling system. He moved to Switzerland in 1895 and enrolled in the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich, where he met his first wife, Mileva Marić, a fellow physics student. He graduated in 1900 with a diploma in physics, but had trouble finding an academic position. He worked as a patent clerk in Bern from 1902 to 1909, while pursuing his own research in his spare time. In 1905, he published four groundbreaking papers on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity, and mass-energy equivalence, which earned him the reputation of a scientific genius. He received his PhD from the University of Zurich in 1905, and became a lecturer at the University of Bern in 1908. He moved to Prague in 1911 as a full professor, and then returned to Zurich in 1912 as a professor of theoretical physics. In 1914, he accepted a prestigious position at the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin, where he worked until 1933. He also became a German citizen in 1914, but renounced it in 1933 when Adolf Hitler came to power. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921 for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect, and his contributions to theoretical physics. He developed the general theory of relativity, a more comprehensive theory of gravity, between 1907 and 1915, which was confirmed by the observation of the bending of light by the Sun during a solar eclipse in 1919. He also made significant contributions to quantum mechanics, cosmology, statistical mechanics, and the unified field theory. He was a pacifist and a humanitarian, who advocated for social justice, civil rights, and nuclear disarmament. He was a supporter of the Zionist movement, and was offered the presidency of Israel in 1952, which he politely declined. He moved to the United States in 1933, where he joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He became an American citizen in 1940, and remained at Princeton until his death. He was involved in the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb, but later regretted his role and warned of the dangers of nuclear weapons. He died of an abdominal aortic aneurysm on April 18, 1955, at the age of 76, in Princeton Hospital. He left behind a legacy of scientific discoveries and insights that have shaped our understanding of the universe and inspired generations of scientists and thinkers.