Albert Einstein

My name is Albert Einstein and I was born on March 14, 1879 in Ulm, Germany. When I was 5 I had my first encounter with a compass and I was mystified by the invisible forces that deflected this needle. Since then I have been fascinated by invisible forces. At the age of twelve 12 I discovered my first book of geometry and I called it my "sacred little geometry book."

When I was just born, my family thought that I was deformed because my head was unusually big. It turned out that I was a normal one. In november 1881 I got a little sister, my parents named her Maria but we all called her Maja. A short time after that my family went to Munich where I first attended elementary school and grammar school. I was an "average" pupil but already very early interested in science and mathematics. I did not like lessons in grammar school because they were held with strict discipline and as I was forced to learn. When I turned 15 I left school without any degree and followed my family to Milan. To make up for the missed degree I attended school in Aarau (Switzerland) from 1895 to 1896 when I successfully took my A-levels and began to study in Zurich. My ambition was to obtain the diploma of a subject teacher for mathematics and physics. I successfully finished my studies in July 1900.

If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts.

My family

Einsteins wife Mileva with her sons Eduard and Hans Albert

In the spring of 1896, the Serbian Mileva Marić (an acquaintance of Nikola Tesla) started initially as a medical student at the University of Zurich, but after a term switched to the same section as me, and as the only woman that year, to study for the same diploma. Our relationship had developed into romance over the next few years.

In 1900, I was granted a teaching diploma by the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule and was accepted as a Swiss citizen in 1901. During this time I discussed my scientific interests with a group of close friends, including Mileva. Me and Mileva had a daughter Lieserl. Lieserl, at the time, was considered illegitimate because the Mileva and me were unwed.


"Lieserl" was born in January, 1902, a year before Mileva and I married, in Novi Sad, Vojvodina, present day Republic od Serbia and, was cared for by her mother for a short time while I worked in Switserland before Mileva joined me there without the child. All biographers know about Lieserl is that she either died that same year or she got put up for adoption. They found this out by reading the letters that Mileva and me wrote to each other.

We named our second child or first son Hans Albert Einsten. He was born on May 14th, 1904 in Bern, Switserland where I worked as a Clerk in a patent office. He died on July 26th, 1973.

Our third child (second son) was named Eduard Einstein and was born on July 28, 1910 in Zurich.

In the first of three papers I wrote in 1905, I examined a phenomenon that had been known for some years, but unexplained. I called it the 'Photoelectric Effect'. Electromagnetic energy, previously thought to be 'waves', seemed to be emitted in small bundles called 'photons'. My explanation, and my guess that the energy of a photon was related to its frequency by the equation E = hv, this is what I earned my only Nobel Prize for. My second 1905 paper proposed what is today called the special theory of relativity. I based my new theory on a reinterpretation of the classical principle of relativity, namely that the laws of physics had to have the same form in any frame of reference. Secondly, I assumed that the speed of light remained constant in all frames of reference. This was a brand new way of looking at things, redefining the 'absolute' ideas first proposed by Isaac Newton, and it was the foundation for my General Theory of Relativity, which I would complete some 10 years later. Still in 1905, I proposed an explanation for the equivalence of energy and matter, describing his most famous equation E=mc². After 1905, I continued to work on my ideas, attempting to extend my special theory of relativity to explain what happens when objects accelerate. In 1909, I became a professor of physics at the University of Bern. In 1911, I predicted that if my theories were true, light rays from distant stars passing near the very massive sun would be bent due to gravitational attraction. This prediction was confirmed in 1919, during a solar eclipse. I began my work on the General Theory of Relativity in 1912, with the help of several mathematicians. This explanation of how gravity works, published in 1915, became the foundation for modern relativistic physics, and laid the groundwork for our current knowledge about black holes. When British eclipse expeditions in 1919 confirmed my predictions, I became famous. The New York Times ran the headline on November 10th, 1919:

My Middle Years

Elsa Löwenthal and Albert Einstein

In 1906, I was promoted to technical examiner second class. In 1908, I was licensed in Bern, Switzerland, as a Privatdozent . My second son, Eduard, was born on July 28, 1910. In 1911, I became first associate professor at the University of Zurich, and shortly afterwards full professor at the (German) University of Prague, only to return the following year to Zurich in order to become full professor at the ETH Zurich. At that time, I worked closely with the mathematician Marcel Grossman. In 1912, I started to refer to time as the fourth dimension.

In 1914, just before the start of World War I, I settled in Berlin as professor at the local university and became a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. I took German citizenship. My pacifism and Jewish origins irritated German nationalists. After I became world-famous, nationalistic hatred of me grew and for the first time I was the subject of an organized campaign to discredit my theories. From 1914 to 1933, I served as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin, and it was during this time that I was awarded his Nobel Prize and made my most groundbreaking discoveries.

I divorced Mileva on February 14, 1919, and married my cousin Elsa Löwenthal on June 2, 1919. Elsa was my first cousin (maternally) and my second cousin (paternally). She was three years older than me, and had nursed me to health after I had suffered a partial nervous breakdown combined with a severe stomach ailment. There were no children from this marriage. The fate of my and Mileva's first child, Lieserl, is unknown: some believe she died in infancy, while others believe she was given out for adoption. Eduard was institutionalized for schizophrenia and died in an asylum, while Hans became a professor of hydraulic engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, having little interaction with me. In 1922, Me and mt wife Elsa boarded the SS Kitano Maru bound for Japan. The trip also took us to other ports including Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai.

ReLiGiOuS ViEwS

Even though I was raised Jewish I did not believe in Judaism. I simply admired the beauty of nature and the universe. This is what I once wrote in a letter, dated March 24, 1954, "It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."
I also made a response to Rabbi Herbert Goldstein of the International Synagogue in New York which read, "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings."
I also expressed my admiration for Buddhism which I said had the characteristics of what would be expected in a cosmic religion for the future.

"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."

My PoLiTiCaL vIeWs

I considered myself a pacifist and humanitarian, and in later years, a committed democratic socialist.I once said, "I believe Gandhi's views were the most enlightened of all the political men of our time. We should strive to do things in his spirit: not to use violence for fighting for our cause, but by non-participation of anything you believe is evil."

I opposed tyrannical forms of government, and for this reason (and my Jewish background), opposed the Nazi regime and fled Germany shortly after it came to power. I initially favored construction of the atomic bomb, in order to ensure that Hitler did not do so first, and even sent a letter to President Roosevelt, encouraging him to initiate a program to create a nuclear weapon. Roosevelt responded to this by setting up a committee for the investigation of using uranium as a weapon, which in a few years was superseded by the Manhattan Project.

ThEsE wErE sOmE oF mY qUoTeS

I DiEd

On April 17, 1955, I started feeling chest pains and I went to the Princeton Hospital. I died early the next morning in my sleep leaving the Generalized Theory of Gravitation unsolved. My body was cremated, and my ashes were scattered in an undisclosed location. Before the cremation, however, my brain was saved by Dr. Thomas Harvey, a pathologist at the hospital who wanted to know what it was that made me a genius. He performed an autopsy on my brain but he found nothing unusual. In 1999 however a team at McMaster University revealed that my parietal operculum region was missing and, to compensate, my inferior parietal lobe was 15% wider than normal. The inferior parietal region is responsible for mathematical thought, visuospatial cognition, and imagery of movement.