Albert Einstein: The Patent Clerk Who Rewrote Physics

Einstein is one of those people whose actual story is wilder than the legend. The legend says lonely genius. The story says depressed grad-school dropout who failed his first university entrance exam, couldn't get an academic job for years, and produced the most influential physics of the 20th century from a desk in the Swiss Patent Office in Bern.

He was born in Ulm, Germany, in March 1879, the son of a small electrical engineer and a strong-willed mother who pushed him into music early. He didn't speak fluently until he was around four. His teachers thought he was slow. His sister Maja later said he just talked to himself in long sentences before he was willing to talk to other people.

The family business — manufacturing dynamos and electrical equipment — kept failing. They moved from Ulm to Munich to Italy chasing contracts. Albert hated his Munich gymnasium so much that at fifteen he got a doctor's note for a "nervous breakdown" and used it to drop out and follow his parents to Pavia. He spent that summer hiking the Apennines.

Failing his way into Zurich

He sat the entrance exam for the Zurich Polytechnic at sixteen, two years early. He aced math and physics. He failed history, languages, biology, and the rest. They told him to come back after another year of school.

He went to Aarau, finished his Swiss equivalent of high school, and got into the Polytechnic on the second try. There he met Mileva Marić, a Serbian physics student — the only woman in the class. They fell in love over Maxwell's equations. He was a mediocre student of his official courses and skipped most lectures, instead reading Boltzmann, Hertz, and Mach in the cafés.

He graduated in 1900 with adequate marks and zero job offers. Every professor he asked for a recommendation refused to write one — he had been openly contemptuous to all of them. He spent the next two years tutoring high-school students for cash and applying for jobs that didn't materialise. Mileva got pregnant. She went home to her parents and gave birth to a daughter, Lieserl, who disappears from the historical record (probably given up for adoption or died of scarlet fever).

The Patent Office, the best job he ever had

In 1902 a friend's father got him a job as a "Technical Expert, Class III" at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern, evaluating patent applications for things like new clock mechanisms and electromagnetic devices. The pay was decent. The work was not demanding. He could finish a day's work in two or three hours and use the rest of his desk time to think.

He married Mileva in 1903. He had two more children. He met regularly with two friends — Maurice Solovine and Conrad Habicht — to drink coffee and read philosophy and physics in what they called the Olympia Academy. And in 1905, in his evenings and weekends and stolen Patent Office hours, he produced four papers that, as he wrote to a friend, were "very revolutionary."

The miracle year

Each of the four 1905 papers would have been a career on its own.

Photoelectric effect (March). He proposed that light comes in discrete packets — quanta — not waves. This single idea is what the 1921 Nobel Prize was actually awarded for, and it kicked off quantum mechanics. He himself was uncomfortable with the implications for the rest of his life.

Brownian motion (May). He showed that the random jitter of pollen grains in water could be explained by collisions with invisible water molecules — and produced an equation to calculate Avogadro's number from the jitter. This was the first time anyone proved atoms existed.

Special relativity (June). He started from two assumptions: the laws of physics are the same in any non-accelerating reference frame, and the speed of light is the same for every observer. From those two ideas he derived that time slows down at high speed, lengths contract, and simultaneity is relative. Newton was now a special case.

Mass-energy equivalence (September). A three-page footnote to the relativity paper. It contained the equation E=mc². It implied a tiny bit of matter contained an enormous amount of energy. It would take 40 years for the world to find out exactly how much.

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world." — Einstein, 1929 interview

Eight years to crack general relativity

The 1905 papers were noticed slowly. By 1908 he had a junior university position in Bern. By 1911 a full professorship in Prague. By 1914, after Max Planck personally recruited him, he was in Berlin running his own institute.

He was working on a single problem: how to extend special relativity to include gravity. It took him eight years and a serious breakdown. The math was Riemannian geometry, which he didn't know and had to learn from his old friend Marcel Grossmann. Some months he was sure he had it; other months he discovered his solution was wrong.

In November 1915 he submitted the final version of the field equations of general relativity to the Prussian Academy. Spacetime itself was the player; matter told it how to curve, and the curve told matter how to move. Mercury's strange orbit, which Newtonian gravity couldn't quite explain, fell out of his equations exactly. He wrote to a friend that he had heart palpitations for two days.

Eclipse, fame, and a marriage falling apart

Einstein had predicted that gravity would bend starlight. Arthur Eddington's eclipse expedition in May 1919 measured the bending and confirmed his prediction. The Times of London ran the headline "REVOLUTION IN SCIENCE / NEW THEORY OF THE UNIVERSE / NEWTONIAN IDEAS OVERTHROWN" on November 7. Within a month Einstein was the most famous scientist alive — a kind of fame that nobody in science had had before him and almost nobody has had since.

Personally, things were less good. He'd separated from Mileva in 1914 and sent her a long, cold list of conditions for staying married — basically that she serve him three meals a day in his office without speaking to him. They divorced in 1919. He immediately married his cousin Elsa.

Leaving Germany for good

By the late 1920s anti-Semitic attacks on relativity ("Jewish physics") were already common in German nationalist circles. When Hitler took power in January 1933, Einstein was on a lecture tour in California. He never went back to Germany. The SA looted his summer house in Caputh, took his beloved sailboat, and put him on a list of people to be shot on sight.

He landed in Princeton in October 1933 and stayed for the rest of his life. He worked at the new Institute for Advanced Study with John von Neumann, Kurt Gödel, and a small group of refugees. He wore the same wool sweater every day, refused to learn to drive, and gave talks at any high school that asked.

In 1939, urged by Leó Szilárd, he signed a letter to Roosevelt warning that German research could lead to "extremely powerful bombs of a new type." He spent the rest of his life regretting it. He was a pacifist by inclination. The Manhattan Project that resulted didn't include him — the FBI considered him a security risk because of his left-wing politics.

Dying with the equations on his bedside

His last 30 years were spent on a unified field theory — a single set of equations that would describe gravity and electromagnetism together. He never got it. Most physicists thought he was wasting his time, and most physicists were probably right.

He died of a ruptured aortic aneurysm on April 18, 1955, at 76. He'd refused surgery, saying it was "tasteless to prolong life artificially." His desk had a half-finished page of equations on it. His brain was removed during the autopsy without family permission and kept in a jar by a pathologist named Thomas Harvey for the next 40 years.

What he changed

Special and general relativity hold up a century later. GPS satellites have to correct for relativistic time dilation or your phone's location would drift by miles every day. Black holes, gravitational waves (detected in 2015), and the expanding universe were all in the field equations before anyone went looking for them.

Quantum mechanics, which he helped start and never accepted, runs almost everything you touch — semiconductors, lasers, MRI machines, solar panels.

And the Patent Office in Bern still has his desk on the third floor. There's a small plaque. Most days nobody is looking at it.

For more: Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe; Abraham Pais, Subtle Is the Lord.