Timeline Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein 66

• 1879 Albert Einstein born in Ulm Hermann and Pauline Einstein's first child Albert Einstein was born on 14 March 1879 at Bahnhofstrasse 20 in Ulm, in the Kingdom of Wurttemberg. His mother reportedly worried at the shape of his head. The family left the city within a year and the house was destroyed by bombing in 1944.
• 1880 The family moves to Munich Hermann and Jakob open an electrical business The Einsteins settled in Munich in 1880, where Hermann and his brother Jakob founded a company making dynamos and electrical equipment. Albert grew up around wiring, magnets and machinery. The firm supplied the first electric lighting for Munich's Oktoberfest.
• 1884 The compass A needle that would not stop pointing north Einstein was about five and ill in bed when his father showed him a pocket compass. That something invisible could reach through empty space and move the needle struck him permanently. He described the moment decades later as his first encounter with the idea of a field.
• 1889 Max Talmud brings books A medical student tutors him in science and philosophy Max Talmud, a poor medical student who ate weekly with the family, gave the ten-year-old Einstein popular science books and later Kant. Within a few years the boy had outgrown his tutor in mathematics. He worked through Euclid on his own and called it his holy little geometry book.
• 1894 Left behind in Munich The family business fails and the Einsteins move to Italy When the Munich firm collapsed the family moved to Milan and then Pavia, leaving fifteen-year-old Albert in a boarding house to finish at the Luitpold Gymnasium. He lasted six months, obtained a doctor's note for nervous exhaustion and followed them to Italy.
• 1895 Chasing a light beam A thought experiment at sixteen Einstein imagined riding alongside a beam of light and asked what he would see. By the rules of the day he should see a frozen, stationary wave — which no one had ever observed and which Maxwell's equations forbade. The paradox stayed with him for ten years.
• 1895 Fails the ETH entrance exam Excellent in physics and mathematics, weak in everything else Two years under the normal age, Einstein sat the entrance examination for the Zurich Polytechnic and failed the general section. The principal advised him to finish school first, and he spent a year at the cantonal school in Aarau, which he liked far better than Munich.
• 1896 Renounces German citizenship Stateless for five years With his father's consent Einstein formally gave up his Wurttemberg citizenship in January 1896, partly to avoid military service. He remained stateless until 1901. It was the first of several times he would walk away from a nationality.
• 1896 – 1900 Studies at the Zurich Polytechnic Four years training as a physics and mathematics teacher Einstein entered the ETH in October 1896 in a class of six, among them Mileva Maric, the only woman. He skipped lectures freely and relied on Marcel Grossmann's notes. Hermann Minkowski, who taught him mathematics, later called him a lazy dog.
• 1900 Graduates — and cannot find a job Two years of rejected applications Einstein passed his final examinations in July 1900 but was the only one of his group not offered an assistantship, having annoyed most of his professors. He spent two years tutoring and writing letters to physicists across Europe. None of them replied with work.
• 1901 Becomes a Swiss citizen A nationality he kept for the rest of his life Einstein was naturalised in Zurich on 21 February 1901. He was declared unfit for Swiss military service because of flat feet and varicose veins. He held Swiss citizenship until his death, alongside his later American one.
• 1901 First paper published Capillarity, in Annalen der Physik Einstein's first publication examined the forces between molecules in liquids. He later dismissed it as worthless. It did establish him in print with the journal that would carry the 1905 papers.
• 1902 A daughter named Lieserl Born in Novi Sad, and then unaccounted for Mileva gave birth to a daughter in Serbia in January 1902, before the couple married. The child is mentioned in letters until September 1903 and then never again. Whether she died of scarlet fever or was given up for adoption has never been established.
• 1902 – 1909 The Swiss Patent Office Technical expert, third class, in Bern Grossmann's father recommended him, and Einstein started in Bern in June 1902 assessing electromagnetic patent applications. The work was quick for him and left mental room to spare. He later called the office the worldly cloister where his finest ideas were born.
• 1902 His father dies Hermann Einstein gives his blessing to the marriage Hermann died in Milan in October 1902 after a heart complaint, having finally consented to his son's marriage to Mileva. Einstein described the loss as the deepest shock he had known. He reached Milan in time to be with him.
• 1903 Marries Mileva Maric A civil ceremony in Bern with two witnesses The couple married on 6 January 1903 over the objections of both families. Mileva had failed her own final examinations twice, the second time while pregnant. They shared physics talk constantly in these years, and the extent of her contribution is still argued over.
• 1904 Son Hans Albert born The child who would outlive the myth Hans Albert was born in Bern in May 1904. He became a professor of hydraulic engineering at Berkeley, working on sediment transport. Their relationship was strained for years but recovered in Einstein's old age.
• 1905 The photoelectric effect Light behaves as packets of energy Submitted in March 1905, this paper proposed that light comes in discrete quanta, explaining why shining light on metal ejects electrons only above a threshold frequency. Einstein called it the only truly revolutionary thing he ever did. It won him the Nobel Prize sixteen years later.
• 1905 Brownian motion Proof that atoms are real By treating the jittering of pollen grains in water as the result of molecular collisions, Einstein produced testable predictions about their displacement. Jean Perrin confirmed them experimentally. The paper ended serious scientific doubt that atoms exist.
• 1905 Special relativity On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies The June 1905 paper dropped absolute time and kept the speed of light constant for every observer. Moving clocks run slow, moving lengths contract, and simultaneity depends on who is asking. It cited no sources and thanked only his friend Michele Besso.
• 1905 E = mc squared Mass and energy are the same thing A three-page afterthought to the relativity paper asked whether a body's inertia depends on its energy content, and concluded that it does. The equation itself appeared in that form only later. It became the most recognised formula in science and, forty years on, the one he most regretted.
• 1906 Doctorate awarded A new determination of molecular dimensions The University of Zurich accepted Einstein's dissertation on estimating molecular size from solution viscosity in January 1906. It became one of his most cited papers, useful far beyond physics. He stayed at the patent office and was promoted to technical expert second class.
• 1907 The happiest thought A falling man does not feel his own weight Sitting at his desk in Bern, Einstein realised that a person in free fall feels no gravity at all — so gravity and acceleration are locally indistinguishable. This equivalence principle became the seed of general relativity. It took him eight more years to turn it into equations.
• 1908 Privatdozent at Bern An unpaid foothold in academia Einstein was admitted as a lecturer at the University of Bern in February 1908, after an earlier application was rejected for lacking a habilitation thesis. His first course drew three students, two of them friends. He was still working full time at the patent office.
• 1909 First professorship Associate professor of theoretical physics in Zurich Einstein resigned from the patent office in October 1909 to take a chair at the University of Zurich, at a salary barely above his clerk's pay. He was a nervous lecturer at first. It was the beginning of a decade of restless moves between universities.
• 1910 Son Eduard born The child called Tete Eduard was born in Zurich in July 1910, a gifted musician and reader who wanted to become a psychiatrist. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia in his twenties and spent much of his life in the Burgholzli clinic. Einstein never saw him again after leaving Europe in 1933.
• 1911 – 1912 Professor in Prague Sixteen months in the Austro-Hungarian Empire Einstein took a full professorship at the German university in Prague in April 1911, which required declaring a religion for the state records. He entered Mosaic. He disliked the city and the bureaucracy and left within two years.
• 1911 Predicts that gravity bends light A first, and wrong, calculation In Prague Einstein worked out how much a star's light should be deflected passing the Sun, getting a value half the correct one. An eclipse expedition set out to test it in 1914 but was interrupted by the war. The delay probably saved the theory from early refutation.
• 1911 The first Solvay Conference Brussels, and the physics establishment The inaugural Solvay meeting on radiation and quanta gathered Planck, Poincare, Rutherford, Curie and a 32-year-old Einstein, the youngest present. He found the discussions inconclusive but the contacts invaluable. Solvay became the recurring stage for his later duels with Bohr.
• 1912 – 1914 The mathematics of curved space Working with Marcel Grossmann Back at the ETH as a professor, Einstein turned to his old friend Grossmann for help with the geometry he needed. Grossmann pointed him to Riemann and the absolute differential calculus of Ricci and Levi-Civita. Einstein said he had come to respect mathematics for the first time.
• 1914 Moves to Berlin Prussian Academy, no teaching duties Planck and Nernst travelled to Zurich to recruit him with a research post free of obligations. Einstein accepted and arrived in Berlin in spring 1914, despite disliking Prussian militarism. Within months Europe was at war.
• 1914 Separation from Mileva A list of conditions, then a station platform Einstein handed Mileva written terms for continuing the marriage — meals in his room, no expectation of affection. She left Berlin with the boys in July 1914. He wept on the platform after they went.
• 1915 General relativity completed Four lectures in November, and Mercury falls into place Through November 1915 Einstein presented successive versions to the Prussian Academy, racing David Hilbert to the final field equations. On 18 November he found that the theory accounted exactly for the anomaly in Mercury's orbit. He wrote that he was beside himself with excitement for days.
• 1916 Gravitational waves predicted Ripples in spacetime Einstein showed that his field equations allowed waves of curvature travelling at the speed of light. He doubted they would ever be detected, the effect being so absurdly small. He was right about the difficulty and wrong about the outcome.
• 1917 – 1920 Seriously ill in Berlin Four years of stomach trouble and wartime shortages Einstein collapsed in 1917 with what was probably a duodenal ulcer, losing over twenty kilograms during the blockade. His cousin Elsa nursed him back to health in the flat next door. The illness left him with lifelong digestive trouble.
• 1917 The cosmological constant A fudge to hold the universe still Applying relativity to the whole universe, Einstein found it would collapse, so he added a term to keep it static. When expansion was discovered he dropped it. The constant returned in the 1990s as the best description of dark energy.
• 1919 Divorce from Mileva The Nobel money written into the settlement The divorce was granted in February 1919 on grounds of Einstein's admitted infidelity. He agreed to hand over any future Nobel Prize money to Mileva, three years before he won it. She used it to buy houses in Zurich.
• 1919 The Eddington eclipse expedition Starlight bent by the Sun, photographed from Principe and Brazil Arthur Eddington took his plates during the total eclipse of 29 May 1919 while a second team worked in Sobral. The measured deflection matched general relativity rather than Newton. Eddington, a Quaker pacifist, had pushed the expedition partly to heal British and German science.
• 1919 Marries Elsa A cousin on both sides of the family Einstein married Elsa Lowenthal in June 1919. She was his first cousin through her mother and second cousin through her father, and had known him since childhood. She managed his household, his visitors and his increasingly unmanageable fame.
• 1919 Lights all askew in the heavens The Times and the New York Times make him world-famous overnight The Royal Society announced the eclipse results on 6 November 1919. Newspapers across the world reported that Newton had been overthrown, and Einstein woke to a level of celebrity no scientist had experienced. He was bewildered by it and never entirely escaped it.
• 1920 – 1933 Attacked as a Jewish physicist Antisemitic campaigns against relativity in Germany From 1920 nationalist groups staged meetings denouncing relativity, and Nobel laureates Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark led a Deutsche Physik movement against so-called Jewish science. Einstein was threatened by name. Colleagues urged him to leave Berlin years before he did.
• 1921 First visit to the United States A fundraising tour for the Hebrew University Einstein travelled with Chaim Weizmann in spring 1921, raising money for a Jewish university in Jerusalem and drawing crowds in New York and Washington. He was made an honorary citizen of New York. The trip began his long involvement with Zionism as a cultural project.
• 1922 Nobel Prize in Physics Awarded for the photoelectric effect, not relativity The deferred 1921 prize was given to Einstein in November 1922, the citation carefully avoiding relativity, which the committee still considered unproven. He was at sea en route to Japan and missed the ceremony. The prize money went to Mileva as agreed.
• 1922 – 1923 The journey to Japan Five and a half months across Asia and the Middle East Einstein toured Japan to enormous crowds in late 1922, then visited Palestine and Spain on the way home. In Jerusalem he gave the first lecture at the site of the Hebrew University. The travel diaries from this trip contain remarks about the people he met that were published in 2018 and widely criticised.
• 1924 Bose-Einstein statistics An unknown Indian physicist sends a rejected paper Satyendra Nath Bose wrote to Einstein from Dhaka after journals turned his work down. Einstein translated it into German, had it published, and extended it to matter, predicting a new state in which atoms collapse into a single quantum state. The condensate was finally produced in a laboratory in 1995.
• 1927 The Bohr debates begin God does not play dice At the fifth Solvay Conference Einstein produced thought experiment after thought experiment to show quantum mechanics was incomplete, and Bohr answered each one by breakfast. Ehrenfest told Einstein he was behaving toward quantum theory exactly as his critics had behaved toward relativity. Einstein never accepted the standard interpretation.
• 1930 Eduard's breakdown A diagnosis of schizophrenia at twenty Eduard's condition emerged while he was studying medicine in Zurich and he was admitted to the Burgholzli clinic. Einstein blamed the treatment he received and feared the illness was inherited from Mileva's family. Mileva cared for him for the rest of her life.
• 1930 The Einstein refrigerator A patent with Leo Szilard, and no moving parts After reading about a family killed by leaking refrigerant, Einstein and Szilard designed an absorption refrigerator driven by heat with no mechanical pump. The US patent was granted in 1930. Freon arrived soon after and the design was shelved, though the pump principle was later used in breeder reactors.
• 1932 Leaves Germany for the last time Take a good look, you will never see it again Einstein and Elsa left their Caputh summer house in December 1932 for a visiting term at Caltech. He told her to look carefully at the house as they went. Within weeks of Hitler taking power it was searched and their property seized.
• 1933 Renounces Germany again Surrenders his passport at the consulate in Antwerp Hearing of the Nazi seizure of power while abroad, Einstein gave up his German citizenship and resigned from the Prussian Academy in March 1933. His books were burned in Berlin that May. A magazine printed his photograph under the caption not yet hanged.
• 1933 – 1955 Princeton Twenty-two years at the Institute for Advanced Study Einstein arrived in October 1933 and never left the United States again, walking to the Institute each day from Mercer Street. Asked what equipment he required, he said a desk, paper, a pencil and a large wastebasket for his mistakes. He spent the years there chasing a unified field theory that never came.
• 1935 The EPR paper Spooky action at a distance With Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, Einstein argued that quantum mechanics must be incomplete because it implied instant correlation between distant particles. The paper was meant as a refutation. It instead defined entanglement, and experiments from the 1980s onward confirmed the correlations he found absurd.
• 1936 Elsa dies Heart and kidney failure at Mercer Street Elsa became ill shortly after the move to Princeton and died in December 1936. Einstein worked through the days after her death, which those around him read as grief rather than coldness. His sister Maja and stepdaughter Margot kept the house with him afterwards.
• 1939 The letter to Roosevelt Signed at Szilard's urging Leo Szilard drafted the warning that Germany might build an atomic bomb and Einstein signed it on 2 August 1939. It reached Roosevelt in October and led to the Uranium Committee and eventually the Manhattan Project. Einstein had no security clearance and no part in the work that followed.
• 1940 Becomes an American citizen Sworn in at Trenton, New Jersey Einstein, Margot and his secretary Helen Dukas took the oath on 1 October 1940. He kept his Swiss citizenship alongside it. The FBI had already opened a file on him that would run to 1,400 pages.
• 1943 – 1945 Consultant to the US Navy Explosives research, at a fee of twenty-five dollars a day Barred from the Manhattan Project as a security risk, Einstein worked part-time for the Bureau of Ordnance on the theory of underwater explosions. He learned about Hiroshima from the radio like everyone else. He later said that had he known the German bomb would fail, he would never have signed the letter.
• 1946 Speaks out at Lincoln University Racism is a disease of white people Einstein travelled to the historically Black university in Pennsylvania to receive an honorary degree and lecture on relativity, calling segregation a disease he did not intend to be quiet about. He had joined the NAACP and corresponded with W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson. American newspapers barely covered the visit.
• 1946 – 1951 Chairs the atomic scientists The Emergency Committee and world government Einstein led the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, formed to warn the public that the bomb had changed everything except our ways of thinking. He argued for international control of nuclear weapons through a world authority. The campaign raised money and alarm but little policy.
• 1948 Mileva dies Alone in Zurich, after decades caring for Eduard Mileva Maric died in August 1948 following a stroke, having spent her later years struggling to pay for Eduard's care. The houses bought with the Nobel money had mostly been sold off. Einstein arranged continued payments for his son from Princeton.
• 1952 Declines the presidency of Israel A telegram from Ben-Gurion, and a polite no After Weizmann's death Israel offered Einstein the largely ceremonial presidency in November 1952. He answered that he had neither the aptitude nor the experience to deal with people properly, and was too old. Ben-Gurion is said to have been relieved.
• 1955 The Russell-Einstein Manifesto His last public act, signed a week before his death Bertrand Russell's appeal to the world's governments to renounce nuclear war reached Princeton in April 1955 and Einstein signed it on the 11th. It was released in London in July with eleven signatures. The manifesto led directly to the Pugwash Conferences.
• 1955 Albert Einstein dies in Princeton An aortic aneurysm, and a refusal of surgery Einstein's aneurysm ruptured on 17 April 1955 and he declined an operation, saying it was tasteless to prolong life artificially and that he wanted to go when he wanted. He died early the next morning at Princeton Hospital, aged 76. A sheet of equations for a unified field theory lay beside the bed.
• 1955 The stolen brain Thomas Harvey removes it during the autopsy The pathologist kept Einstein's brain without family permission, later securing reluctant consent from Hans Albert, and sectioned it into 240 blocks. He lost his post and carried the pieces around the country for decades. Einstein had asked to be cremated and his ashes scattered in an undisclosed place.
• 1999 Person of the Century Time names him ahead of Roosevelt and Gandhi Time magazine chose Einstein for the century-closing issue, arguing that the age would be remembered above all for its science. His face had by then become the standard shorthand for genius, used to sell everything from computers to insurance. He had actively disliked the celebrity in life.
• 2016 Gravitational waves detected A hundred years after the prediction LIGO announced on 11 February 2016 that it had recorded the collision of two black holes 1.3 billion light years away, detected the previous September. The signal matched general relativity's waveform precisely. Einstein had assumed the effect was too small ever to measure.
• 2019 First image of a black hole The Event Horizon Telescope photographs M87 A planet-sized array of radio telescopes produced a picture of the shadow cast by a black hole six and a half billion times the mass of the Sun. The ring matched the size and shape general relativity demanded. It was a direct image of a prediction Einstein himself found hard to believe in.