Synopsis
Born in Ulm, Württemberg, Germany in 1879, Albert Einstein had a passion for inquiry that eventually led him to develop the special and general theories of relativity. In 1921, he won the Nobel Prize for physics for his explanation of the photoelectric effect and immigrated to the U.S. in the following decade after being targeted by the Nazis. Einstein is generally considered the most influential physicist of the 20th century, with his work also having a major impact on the development of atomic energy. With a focus on unified field theory during his later years, Einstein died on April 18, 1955, in Princeton, New Jersey.
Albert Einstein had a hand in each. But whereas one, quantum mechanics, was the work of many scientists, the other, relativity, we owe almost entirely to Einstein’s singular mind. The theory of special relativity that Einstein introduced in 1905 while working as a technical assistant in the Swiss patent office reconfigured our basic notions of space and time. It eventually led to the more comprehensive general theory of relativity ten years later. Together, the theories upended centuries of physics and laid the groundwork for modern cosmology. Who knows if there will ever be another single scientist to demonstrate so rigorously, through thought experiments, mathematical arguments, and bold empirical predictions, that our universe is vastly more strange and wondrous than it ever appeared to common sense or to earlier generations of scientists.