Albert Einstein

The man known to history as Albert Einstein was born on the 14th of March 1879 in the city of Ulm in the south of what was then the German Empire. Ulm was a major urban centre of the Kingdom of Wurttemberg, a major constituent part of the German state in the late nineteenth century. His father was Hermann Einstein, an Ashkenazi Jew from Buchau in Wurttemberg. Hermann had been academically gifted and showed a strong ability in the field of applied mathematics when studying in Stuttgart, the capital of Wurttemberg, in his youth. However, the Einstein family were not wealthy, and he was forced to abandon his studies and went to work in the feather-bed shop run by his cousins, Moses, and Hermann Levi, in Ulm in the 1870s. Albert’s mother was Pauline Koch, a member of a family of German Jews who had developed extensive connections as purveyors and merchants in Wurttemberg. She married Hermann Einstein in 1876 and Albert was their first child. A daughter, Maja, or Maria Einstein was born two years later in 1881. Albert’s youth was dictated to a considerable extent by his father’s business dealings. When he was still an infant Hermann Einstein, following the business advice of his brother Jakob, decided to move the family to Munich, the largest city in southern Germany lying some 170 kilometres to the east of Ulm. This occurred in 1880 as Jakob and Hermann sought to establish Einstein and Co. as an electrical engineering company in Munich just as the great age of electrification was about to begin sweeping the western world. There Albert was enrolled in a Catholic elementary school, before being transferred to the Luitpold-Gymnasium in Munich in 1887. Albert remained there until 1894, but at that stage the Einsteins were once again uprooted when Hermann and Jakob failed to secure a contract to begin the electrification of Munich. Instead, they headed for northern Italy, settling first in Milan and then in Pavia. Albert briefly remained in Munich to continue his studies, but after several months became disillusioned with the strict rote learning on offer at the Gymnasium and convinced both his parents and the school authorities to let him leave to join them in Italy. Albert continued his education in Italy from 1894 onwards. He was already showing distinct signs of a precocious ability as a scientist and mathematician, although his father desired for him to take a keener interest in applied engineering and so follow him into the family business. In Munich in the summer of 1891, he had taught himself algebra and the advanced geometry of the ancient Greek mathematician, Euclid. A family tutor by the name of Max Talmud, who excelled himself in the fields of optometry and ophthalmology, was employed by the Einsteins to teach young Albert advanced mathematics and scientific principles, but he soon found his charge was becoming more knowledgeable than he himself was, when it came to subjects such as calculus, algebra, and geometry. Nor was he a prodigy who was solely interested in scientific and mathematical topics. As he entered his teenage years, he was also reading widely of some of the most advanced philosophical writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, notably the German Enlightenment philosopher, Immanuel Kant. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, first published in 1781 and offering one of the most analytical discussions of metaphysics, the study of the nature of reality, is one of the densest philosophical tracts ever written, yet Albert seemed to understand it clearly at age 14, something which bewildered his tutor. Young Einstein’s abilities did not go unnoticed by his teachers, tutor, and parents. Thus, shortly after he arrived in Pavia and following his sixteenth birthday he was sent to take the entrance exams at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in the city of Zurich, an advanced school of science, mathematics, and engineering. Although he scored high on the technical exams, Albert was not admitted at this time, in part owing to his youth. The following year he passed the Swiss Matura, an equivalency exam in the country for those who had not gone through the formal schooling process within Switzerland but wished to complete the secondary education curriculum there. Earlier that year he had also renounced his German citizenship to avoid being called up for the required military service expected of all young men in the country. Thus, it was that as a stateless individual he finally entered the Polytechnic School in Zurich in the autumn of 1896 aged seventeen. There he would study physics and mathematics, the two subjects which he had demonstrated a prodigious ability in since he was a child. He would remain there for four years, eventually acquiring a diploma in 1900. Einstein’s years in Zurich were those in which his research interests began to emerge in a fully formed state. He was becoming an eclectic scientist, one who might broadly be categorised as a physicist, but whose area of expertise covered a wide range of topics such as the discovery of an accurate way to measure the dimensions of tiny molecules, a field of endeavour belonging to quantum mechanics, the broad science of describing the physical properties of nature at the atomic and subatomic level. Additionally, he was concerned to measure how light moves. At the time he was beginning to conduct complex research into this subject in turn-of-the-century Zurich, the prevailing view amongst European and North American scientists was that light travelled exclusively in wave-patterns. As would become clear in the years that followed Einstein doubted this theory and believed a further layer of complexity existed within the mechanism whereby light travelled. These and other aspects of advanced physics were at the heart of Einstein’s research in his mid-twenties. They formed the core of his doctoral thesis which he was studying for part time throughout the early 1900s and which he completed in 1905 in Zurich, entitled ‘A New Determi