Albert Einstein

In a cramped room of the Swiss Patent Office in Bern, as a technical expert third class, I judged devices by day and pursued light by night. In 1905 I wrote on quanta to explain the photoelectric effect; I analyzed Brownian motion to show atoms are no fantasy; and I set down a special relativity in which simultaneity depends on how we synchronize clocks. From that fell E=mc², a simple relation with heavy consequences.

A decade later, after stubborn work in Zurich, Prague, and Berlin, I made gravitation a matter of geometry: matter tells spacetime how to curve, and curved spacetime tells matter how to move. Mercury’s troublesome perihelion advance yielded; and in 1919 starlight bent near the Sun as calculated. The newspapers made me into a curiosity; I preferred my desk and a violin.

Quantum theory grew quickly. I had helped sow it with light quanta, yet I mistrusted its indeterminism and said so plainly. With Bohr I argued to clarify, not to prevail. The Nobel Prize recognized the photoelectric effect in 1921. I spent later years seeking a unified field, content to fail honestly.

Hatred drove me from Germany in 1933 to Princeton. I call myself a pacifist, yet in 1939 I signed a letter urging President Roosevelt to take uranium research seriously, fearing a German bomb. I spoke for civil rights in America and supported the Hebrew University in Jerusalem; in 1952 I declined the invitation to be Israel’s president. I died in 1955 with unfinished pages but an undiminished taste for simple questions.