This is your Albert Einstein Audio Biography.
Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879 in Ulm, Germany. He was the first child born to Hermann and Pauline Einstein. His father was an engineer and salesman who moved his family to Munich when Einstein was an infant. As a child, Einstein spoke slowly and pausing to consider what to say next. His parents worried that he may be intellectually disabled. However, he showed great curiosity about science and mathematics, making advanced devices and models on his own when given parts.
At age five, Einstein's father showed him a pocket compass. Einstein was struck that invisible forces caused the needle to move, helping develop his fascination with invisible forms of causation and energy that would inform his later scientific work. By age twelve, he had taught himself Euclidean geometry from a book. Contrary to popular myth, there is no evidence Einstein struggled in grade school math. However, he did clash with authoritarian teaching styles. After being expelled, the family relocated to Italy before Einstein left to study in Switzerland.
In 1896, Einstein enrolled at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Zurich where he met his future wife Mileva Maric. They had two sons together prior to their divorce in 1919. Einstein completed his coursework to graduate as a teacher in physics and mathematics in 1900. His early career was hampered by his inability to find a permanent position for several years after graduation, working a series of temporary jobs.
He gained Swiss citizenship in 1901 and found steady work in 1902 at a patent office in Bern, eventually rising to technical examiner second class. In his spare time, he further developed some earlier academic work he had been working on related to the nature of light. This led him to unleash a series of four seminal papers in 1905 later known as his Annus Mirabilis or miracle year.
At age 26, Einstein published these monumental early papers covering his theory of photoelectric effect, mechanical foundation for diffusion laws, determination of molecular dimensions, and the introduction of his special theory of relativity. They rapidly made him a household name within the physics world upon their wider distribution starting in 1906. The University of Zurich awarded him a Ph.D. in 1905 without examination in appreciation of his new ideas. In 1908, Einstein began lecturing at the University of Bern until 1911 when he moved to Prague to become a professor at German Charles-Ferdinand University. By this time he had abandoned a largely fruitless pursuit of coming up with experiment designs to prove his work and settled into further developing the mathematics and theory itself.
In 1912, Einstein returned to Zurich and was soon promoted to full professor at his alma matter, the Swiss Federal Polytechnic. That same year, he had found new ways extending his earlier work in relativity to address gravity and acceleration itself, developing what would eventually become known as the general theory of relativity. At around this time, Einstein also began predicting the phenomenon of light being bent by gravity when passing by a massive object, which would later be confirmed during observations of the bending path of starlight passing by the sun during a 1919 solar eclipse expedition organized by Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington. The global attention this confirmation drew sparked Einstein's rise to scientific superstardom beyond just physics circles.
After decade of effort in fits and starts, by 1915 Einstein had fully formulated the general theory of relativity with help from his long-time friend Marcel Grossman, a mathematician. This cemented his reputation as among the era's most influential physicists. In his later years, Einstein would occupy a professor position within the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin starting in 1914. After relocating permanently to Berlin in 1933, Einstein renounced his German citizenship in reaction the rise of the Nazi party and took on Swiss citizenship once again at the advice of friends. Within a few years, Einstein decided to emigrate from Germany indefinitely given the dangerous political climate for those of Jewish descent like himself. He would settle in Princeton, New Jersey and take up a position at the Institute for Advance Study that lasted the rest of his life.
The 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Einstein in appreciation of for his work explaining the photoelectric effect via energy quanta that would later be called photons. The general theory of relativity itself would not have tangible applications for another several decades when it enabled corrections to GPS positioning technology. Einstein also greatly advanced cosmology and conceptions of the universe through his theoretical work, with astronomy remaining a lifelong hobby.
In addition to his scientific pursuits, Einstein was an outspoken political activist and public figure on topics like racism, education reform, nuclear proliferation and Zionism. He was even offered the position of President of Israel in 1952 by Israel's first Prime Minister David Ben Gurion after Einstein had raised considerable funds to help establish the Hebrew University of Jerusalem during the 1920s and 1930s. He declined on grounds that his lifelong work had been as a scientist rather than in politics or governance.
Einstein married twice more later in life to his cousin Elsa Löwenthal in 1919 who passed away in 1936, then physician's daughter Margot Eisenstaedt in 1935 until her death in 1986. He acquired American citizenship in 1940 while retaining his Swiss nationality. Einstein maintained a broad network of rich personal friendships with contemporaries like Max Planck and Niels Bohr who also made major contributions to 20th century physics. His fame gave him access to many of the era's most influential politicians as well including Roosevelt and Churchill.
On April 17, 1955, Einstein experienced internal bleeding caused by a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm. He took drafts of speech he was preparing for a television appearance celebrating the State of Israel's seventh anniversary with him to the hospital but died in the early hours the next day at age 76. Princeton Hospital's chief of staff noted that Einstein refused surgery, quoting him as saying "I want to go when I want. It is tasteless to prolong life artificially. I have done my share; it is time to go. I will do it elegantly." After a brief private funeral and cremation, his ashes were scattered in secret to not attract public attention or mourners according to his final wishes.
Described as personable and engaging as a younger man, Einstein was also known to have a wry and ironic sense of humor. By the 1940s, with fame taking a toll on his free time, Einstein often lamented his visitors and fame preventing him from dedicating all the time he wished to scientific thought and theoretical work. He remained a modest and kind academic who still made time to explain physics concepts clearly to inquisitive school children who wrote him letters up until the end of his life.
His name would become synonymous with genius itself within popular culture given Einstein's supreme intellect and unique perspective informing his revolutionary ideas. Einstein's work expanding conceptions of space, time, energy and gravity fundamentally reshaped understanding of the natural world and humanity's place within it. Over a century later, the common tongue adaption of his mass-energy equivalence formula E=mc^2 remains instantly recognizable around the globe.
Einstein's special and general theories of relativity profoundly impacted astrophysics, helping demonstrate the equivalence of gravitational and inertial mass later proven by experimental physicists. This revealed that the geometry of space and time are affected by the gravity of massive objects. Even black holes and cosmological gravitational waves retained purely theoretical constructs stemming from his earlier 20th century work until quite recently being finally directly observed experimentally almost exactly a century later.
Modern cosmology connects back to Einstein's work establishing conceptions of an expand universe of galaxies and space-time where relativity informs astrophysics today in everything from neutron stars and light distortion by galaxies to the Big Bang itself as the prevailing model for the universe's origins. Some later theories Einstein developed like the unified field theory were not borne out by experimental evidence available during his lifetime. But Einstein's Nobel Prize winning insights and later theories reshaped forever the direction and progress of modern physics by establishing entirely new paradigms and possibilities to explore for d
