Albert Einstein

His parents worried because he was slow to talk. When he was five and sick in bed his father brought a compass, and the needle's refusal to point anywhere but north convinced him something deeply hidden lay behind things. The family electrical works in Munich failed in 1894 for lack of capital to move from direct to alternating current, and the Einsteins left for Italy without him. He got a doctor to write him out of the Gymnasium and followed them to Pavia. In January 1896, at 16, he renounced his German citizenship rather than be conscripted, and was stateless for five years. He failed the general part of the Zurich polytechnic entrance examination, distinguished himself in physics and mathematics, and finished school at Aarau before enrolling at 17.

Four papers in 1905, written in the hours around a patent examiner's job in Bern: the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity, and the short note that makes mass and energy the same quantity. General relativity followed in 1915. On May 29, 1919 Arthur Eddington photographed a total eclipse and found starlight bent by the sun by roughly the amount Einstein had calculated. The Times of London ran a banner about Newtonian ideas overthrown and he became the first scientist most people could name. The 1921 Nobel Prize, actually awarded in 1922, cited the photoelectric effect rather than relativity, which a number of physicists still doubted. He also laid the groundwork for lasers, for Bose-Einstein statistics, and for the quantum theory of radiation he spent his last decades attacking.

He called racism America's worst disease, joined the Princeton NAACP, offered to be a character witness for W. E. B. Du Bois at his 1951 trial, and put Marian Anderson up in his house after the Nassau Inn refused her a room. He also kept a travel diary in 1922 in which he wrote that Chinese children looked spiritless and obtuse and that it would be a pity if the Chinese supplanted all other races. The family record is harder still. He and Mileva Maric had a daughter, Lieserl, in 1902, and nobody knows what became of her — given up for adoption or dead of scarlet fever, by his own guess in a letter the next year. Their son Eduard developed schizophrenia at about 20 and spent the rest of his life in his mother's care or in an asylum.

At the autopsy the pathologist Thomas Harvey removed his brain and kept it, without asking the family, on the theory that future neuroscience would find the reason for him. The rest was cremated in Trenton and scattered somewhere undisclosed. He had spent three decades insisting that quantum mechanics was incomplete and chasing a unified field theory that never arrived, and physics went on without him — except that the 1935 paper he wrote to expose the theory as absurd now underpins quantum information science. The FBI dossier opened on him in 1932 ran to 1,427 pages by the time he died. Hebrew University in Jerusalem holds his papers and controls the commercial use of his name and face.

Albert Einstein's life against the full span of the corpus.

• On a Heuristic Point of View Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light article
  The photoelectric effect — the paper the Nobel committee cited 1905
• On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies article
  Special relativity, written with no citations 1905
• The Field Equations of Gravitation article
  General relativity, tested by Eddington four years later 1915
• Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete? article
  Written with Podolsky and Rosen to discredit quantum mechanics, now foundational to quantum information 1935
• Einstein-Szilard letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt other
  The warning that helped start American nuclear weapons research 1939
• Russell-Einstein Manifesto other
  On the danger of nuclear weapons, signed weeks before he died 1955

• 1894 aged ~15 The family electrical works fails and the Einsteins leave Munich for Italy They could not raise the capital to switch from direct to alternating current.
• January 1896 aged 16 Renounces his German citizenship at 16 to avoid conscription He was stateless until Switzerland naturalized him in February 1901.
• 1905 aged ~26 Publishes four papers in Annalen der Physik in a single year He was 26 and working full time as a patent examiner.
• May 29, 1919 aged 40 Eddington photographs an eclipse and finds starlight bent as predicted The results were presented in London on November 6 and made him famous within days.
• 1922 aged ~43 Receives the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics while touring Asia A German diplomat took his place at the banquet in Stockholm.
• 1933 aged ~54 Leaves Europe for the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton
• August 2, 1939 aged 60 Signs the letter to Roosevelt warning that Germany might build an atomic bomb He later told Linus Pauling it was the one great mistake of his life.
• November 1952 aged 73 Declines the presidency of Israel Ben-Gurion had to offer it and was relieved to be refused.
• April 18, 1955 aged 76 Dies at Princeton Hospital after refusing surgery He said it was tasteless to prolong life artificially.

• Franklin D. Roosevelt 1882–1945
  32nd President who led the nation through the Great Depression and most of World War II. addressed the 1939 letter to
• W.E.B. Du Bois 1868–1963
  Sociologist, historian, and civil rights activist who was the first African American to earn a Harvard doctorate. offered to testify for
• J. Edgar Hoover 1895–1972
  Longtime FBI director who built a powerful national police institution while conducting extensive political surveillance and abuses. opened a 1,427-page file on him
• Linus Pauling 1901–1994
  Chemist and peace activist who won two unshared Nobel Prizes in Chemistry and Peace. told him the letter was his one great mistake
• Edward Teller 1908–2003
  Physicist and advocate of the hydrogen bomb whose work and policy influence shaped Cold War science and defense. among the refugee physicists who pressed him to write
• J. Robert Oppenheimer 1904–1967
  Theoretical physicist who led the Manhattan Project and became known as the father of the atomic bomb. eulogized him at UNESCO