Einsteinpedia

In Memoriam · 1879 – 1955

In Memory of Albert Einstein

A tribute to the man, his life in dates from birth to death, and an account of how far his ideas have carried the world.

E=mc2

14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955

Albert Einstein was born in a small city in southern Germany and died, seventy-six years later, in a hospital in New Jersey. In between he changed what human beings mean by space, time, light, matter, and gravity.

He did it largely by thinking. He had no laboratory. His tools were pencil and paper, and a refusal to stop asking questions that sounded childish: what is time, what is light, why do things fall.

He has no grave: his ashes were scattered at a place that was never disclosed. This site is not a monument. It is a place to read about what he worked out, written by admirers, for anyone curious.

His Life in Dates

From Ulm to Princeton: the events of his seventy-six years, each with its source.

  1. Born in Ulm

    Albert Einstein is born in Ulm, in the Kingdom of Württemberg, to Hermann Einstein and Pauline Koch. Source

  2. The Family Moves to Munich

    His father and uncle set up a business building electrical equipment. Source

  3. The Compass

    His father shows him a pocket compass. He later recalls the sense of wonder that something unseen moved the needle. Source

  4. First Violin Lessons

    He begins the violin at about six, and grows to love it in his teens through Mozart's sonatas. Source

  5. Left Behind in Munich

    The family business fails and his parents move to Italy. He stays to finish school, then leaves without a diploma and follows them. Source

  6. Aarau

    After falling short on the Zurich Polytechnic entrance examination, taken two years early, he enrolls at the cantonal school in Aarau. Source

  7. Stateless

    He gives up his German citizenship and remains without a nationality for five years. Source

  8. Enters the Zurich Polytechnic

    He graduates from the school in Aarau and begins training as a teacher of mathematics and physics. Source

  9. Graduates, and Finds No Job

    He receives his teaching diploma and fails to obtain an assistantship at the Polytechnic. Source

  10. Swiss Citizen

    He becomes a citizen of Switzerland, and remains one for life. Source

  11. Lieserl

    A daughter is born to Mileva Marić before their marriage. Her fate after 1903 is unknown. Source

  12. The Patent Office

    He starts work at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern as a technical expert, third class. Source

  13. Marries Mileva Marić

    The wedding takes place in Bern. Source

  14. Hans Albert Is Born

    His first son, later a professor of hydraulic engineering at Berkeley. Source

  15. The Miracle Year

    In seven months he completes papers on light quanta, Brownian motion, special relativity, and mass–energy equivalence, plus his doctoral thesis. Source

  16. The Happiest Thought

    He realizes that a person in free fall does not feel their own weight, the seed of general relativity. Source

  17. Professor at Last

    He leaves the patent office for his first academic post, at the University of Zurich. Source

  18. Eduard Is Born

    His second son, known as Tete. Source

  19. Prague, and the First Solvay Conference

    He becomes a full professor in Prague and joins the leading physicists of Europe in Brussels to discuss the quantum. Source

  20. Back to Zurich

    He returns to his old Polytechnic as a professor and begins work on gravity with Marcel Grossmann. Source

  21. Berlin

    He takes up a research position at the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Mileva and the boys return to Zurich within months. Source

  22. Against the War

    He signs a manifesto calling for European unity, in answer to one by ninety-three German intellectuals defending the war. Source

  23. General Relativity

    He presents the final field equations of gravitation to the Prussian Academy. Source

  24. Predicts Gravitational Waves

    He shows that his equations allow ripples in spacetime that travel at the speed of light. Source

  25. The First Model of the Universe

    He applies general relativity to the cosmos as a whole and introduces the cosmological constant. Source

  26. Divorce

    He and Mileva divorce. The settlement promises her the money from a Nobel Prize he has not yet won. Source

  27. The Eclipse

    British expeditions to Brazil and the island of Príncipe photograph stars near the eclipsed Sun. Source

  28. Marries Elsa

    He marries his cousin Elsa Löwenthal in Berlin. Source

  29. World Fame

    The eclipse results are announced in London: light bends as he predicted. He becomes the most famous scientist alive. Source

  30. Attacks Begin

    An organized antisemitic campaign against relativity holds public rallies in Berlin. Source

  31. First Visit to America

    He tours the United States with Chaim Weizmann to raise funds for the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Source

  32. The Nobel Prize

    He is awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics, especially for the law of the photoelectric effect. The award is announced while he is travelling to Japan; the news reaches him in Shanghai. Source

  33. Palestine

    On his only visit, he lectures on Mount Scopus at the site of the future Hebrew University. Source

  34. Bose–Einstein Statistics

    Building on a paper sent by Satyendra Nath Bose, he predicts a new state of matter at extremely low temperatures. Source

  35. The Debate With Bohr

    At the fifth Solvay Conference he begins his long argument with Niels Bohr over the meaning of quantum mechanics. Source

  36. A Refrigerator Patent

    He and Leo Szilard are granted a United States patent for a refrigerator with no moving parts. Source

  37. Eduard Falls Ill

    His younger son develops schizophrenia at about twenty, and spends much of his life in a Zurich clinic. Source

  38. The FBI Opens a File

    A women's patriotic organization tries to have him barred from the United States. The file is kept until his death. Source

  39. Exile

    With Hitler in power, he resigns from the Prussian Academy and applies to give up his German citizenship. He never returns to Germany. Source

  40. Princeton

    He arrives in the United States and joins the Institute for Advanced Study. Source

  41. The EPR Paper

    With Podolsky and Rosen he argues that quantum mechanics is incomplete, bringing entanglement to the attention of physics. Source

  42. Elsa Dies

    His second wife dies at their home in Princeton. Source

  43. A Guest at Mercer Street

    When the singer Marian Anderson is refused a hotel room in Princeton, he invites her to stay at his home. Source

  44. The Letter to Roosevelt

    He signs a letter warning the President that uranium could be used to build extremely powerful bombs. Source

  45. American Citizen

    He takes the oath of United States citizenship, keeping his Swiss citizenship as well. Source

  46. Lincoln University

    He visits a historically Black university in Pennsylvania to accept an honorary degree and speaks out against racism. Source

  47. The Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists

    He becomes its chairman, campaigning for international control of nuclear weapons. Source

  48. Mileva Dies

    His first wife dies in Zurich. Source

  49. "Why Socialism?"

    His essay appears in the first issue of the magazine Monthly Review. Source

  50. The Tongue

    On his seventy-second birthday a photographer catches him sticking out his tongue. He likes the picture and orders copies. Source

  51. Offered the Presidency of Israel

    After the death of Chaim Weizmann he is offered the largely ceremonial post, and declines. Source

  52. Defying McCarthy

    The New York Times prints his advice to a teacher called before a congressional committee: refuse to testify. Source

  53. The Russell–Einstein Manifesto

    In one of his last acts he signs Bertrand Russell's appeal to governments to renounce war in the nuclear age. Source

  54. Dies in Princeton

    He dies at seventy-six of a ruptured aortic aneurysm, having declined surgery. He is cremated the same day. Source

The Full Timeline, Including What Came After →

What He Changed

Before Einstein, space was a fixed stage and time a universal clock. Light was a wave, matter was matter, energy was energy, and gravity was a force that reached mysteriously across emptiness. Atoms were a hypothesis.

After him:

Any one of these would have secured a place in the history of science. He produced four of them in a single year, at twenty-six, while working six days a week in a patent office.

A Century of Consequences

He worked for understanding, not for use. The uses came anyway.

In Your Pocket

  • The map on your phone works because satellite clocks are corrected for relativity, by 38 millionths of a second every day. See GPS.
  • The camera beside it turns light into pictures by the effect that won him the Nobel Prize. See Solar Cells and Camera Sensors.
  • The message you send travels as pulses of laser light, produced by a process he identified in 1916. See Lasers.

In the Hospital

  • A PET scanner finds tumors by detecting matter and antimatter annihilating, each flash carrying exactly the energy his most famous equation says it must. See Medical Imaging.
  • Laser surgery, radiotherapy machines, and the isotopes of nuclear medicine all rest on physics he helped lay down.

In the Power Grid

  • Solar panels make electricity from light, one photon and one electron at a time.
  • Nuclear power stations turn a little mass into a great deal of energy. See Nuclear Energy.

In the Sky

  • In 2015, detectors four kilometers long felt two black holes collide more than a billion light-years away. See Gravitational-Wave Astronomy.
  • In 2019, a telescope the size of the Earth photographed the shadow of a black hole. See Black Holes.
  • The Big Bang, dark matter, and dark energy are all described in the language of his equations. See Modern Cosmology.

In the Laboratory

  • The state of matter he predicted in 1925 is now made aboard the International Space Station. See Bose–Einstein Condensates.
  • The strange connection between particles that he raised as an objection is the foundation of quantum computing. See Quantum Technology.
  • Clocks have become so precise that they register the difference in the flow of time across a single millimeter of height. See Atomic Clocks.

An Honest Tribute

It does Einstein no honor to exaggerate. So this site tries to say plainly where his contribution ends.

He did not build the atomic bomb, invent the laser, or design GPS. He did not predict black holes or the expanding universe, and for years he doubted both. He spent his last three decades on a theory that did not work, and argued against an interpretation of quantum mechanics that experiments have since upheld. Each Legacy page ends with a section called "How Direct Is the Link?" for this reason.

Nor was he a saint. He was a difficult husband and a distant father, and some of what he wrote in private is ugly. See Family and Relationships.

What remains, when all of that is said, is still astonishing: a body of work that reshaped physics from top to bottom, and a public life spent on the side of peace, of refugees, and of people denied their rights, at real cost to himself. See Convictions.

The Person Worth Remembering

He was funny and unpretentious. He answered letters from schoolchildren. He loved playing Mozart on the violin. He walked to work, sailed without knowing how to swim, and wore no socks.

He believed that the most beautiful experience available to a human being is the sense of mystery, and that curiosity needs no further justification. He kept his own for seventy-six years.

About This Site

Einsteinpedia is an independent, non-commercial fan project. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Einstein estate or by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, to which he left his papers and literary rights.

  • Every article is written in our own words from the sources listed at the foot of the page. Where historians disagree or the evidence is thin, we say so.
  • Quotations are kept short and are included only when they can be traced to a documented source. See Quotes for the famous lines he never said.
  • The site uses no trackers, no cookies, no advertising, and no photographs of him.
  • If you find an error, we want to fix it. A contact form is on the way.

The best memorial to Einstein is to understand a little of what he understood. Start anywhere: with the Theories, the Timeline, or the person himself.

Sources

  1. Nobel Prize in Physics 1921 — facts
  2. Hebrew University of Jerusalem — Albert Einstein
  3. American Institute of Physics — Einstein chronology
  4. Historical Society of Princeton — Albert Einstein
  5. SWI swissinfo.ch — Capital ideas, made in Bern
  6. National Maritime Historical Society — Albert Einstein, sailor
  7. American Institute of Physics — The World As I See It
  8. Ohio State University, Richard Pogge — GPS and relativity
  9. NIST — JILA atomic clocks measure general relativity at millimeter scale
  10. LD OnLine — Dear Professor Einstein: letters to and from children