Life and Work of Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany on Mar, 14, 1879. Einstein's
parents, who were non practicing Jews, moved from Ulm to Munich when
Einstein was a baby. When the family's business, the manufacture of
electrical parts, failed in 1894, the family moved to Milan, Italy. At
this time Einstein decided legitimately to relinquish his German
citizenship. Within a year, still without having completed secondary
school, Einstein sat an examination that would have allowed him to
pursue a course of study leading to a diploma as an electrical
engineer at the Swiss Polytechnic, a top technical university, but he
failed the arts component of the examination.
His family sent him to the Swiss town of Aarau to finish high school.
It was at this school that Einstein first started to develop a love for physics. In 1896,
Einstein returned to the Swiss Polytechnic, where he graduated in 1900
as a secondary school teacher of mathematics and physics.
After two years of teaching, Einstein obtained a post at the Swiss
patent office in Bern. While he was employed at the office
(1902-1909), Einstein completed an astonishing range of publications
in theoretical physics.
The year 1905 was known as "Annus Mirabilis" - Einstein's "Miracle
Year". Einstein's first of three seminal scientific papers,
"Generation and Transformation of Light" was submitted to the
University of Zurich to obtain a PhD degree. In this paper, Einstein
examined the phenomenon discovered by Maxwell Planck, according to
which electromagnetic energy seemed to be emitted from radiating
objects in quantities that were ultimately discrete. The energy of
these emitted quantities, "light-quanta", was directly proportional to
the frequency of the radiation. This circumstance was confounding
because the classical electromagnetic theory had assumed that
electromagnetic energy consisted of waves propagating in a
hypothetical,...