Born in the Swabian city of Ulm (southwest Germany) in 1879 to a family of non-practicing Jews, who had roots in the area dating back for centuries. Father: Hermann Einstein, a businessman initially in the pillow feather trade, and said to be loved by the ladies even well after marriage to ... Mother: neé Pauline Koch, of more affluent background than Hermann. (Pauline's father and uncle hit it big in the grain/cereal business. Other relatives in Genoa appear to have entered the rather well-to-do bourgeoisee.)
In less than two years after their first child Albert, Hermann moves the family to Munich, starting up an electro-technic firm with his brother Jakob, an engineer by training. Initially, the business is a great success, but monopolization of the industry forces them out of the region to relocate their enterprise in Milan and Pavia, leaving 15 year-old Albert behind to finish gymnasium (the most prestigious category of German high schools). He rejoins the family, having convinced a local doctor to write a phony medical excuse. Albert even renounces German citizenship (to avoid anticipated compulsory military service) to become a ``man without a country,'' though hardly a man, unleashed into an atmosphere of almost complete (and delightful) freedom. But ... what next?
After a half-year of paradise, he strikes a comprimise with his family to become an engineer (so, they think, to join the business). Lacking a high-school diploma, he cannot go to a German university. But the Swiss Polytechnic Institute (ETH) in Zurich demands only passing an entrance exam. Albert fails the exam, but impresses Herr Albin Herzog, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Director of the Institute, who recommends he bone-up on his studies at the Kantonsschule in nearby Aarau. Albert finds a delight educational environment, and more. Even gets an eye for the daughter of Jost Winteler, a history teacher at the Aargau Kanonsschule, with whom he's living. All goes well, and Albert matriculates into the Zurich Polytech a year later.
The ETH, with a few exceptions, turns out to be no more fun than German gymnasium. Einstein regularly cuts class, reads physics on his own, bonds with a female Serbian student, Mileva Maric', and develops some ideas. By relying on the lecture notes of another student, a math-major, Marcel Grossmann, who later becomes a major collaborator in the development of General Relativity, Einstein manages to graduate, but can't find an Assistantship. He does private tutoring, hoping he can either land a job in an insurance firm or else, via connections with an Italian friend (Michele Besso), get hired at the Swiss Patent Office. The situation is pressing, since he needs to find a way to support his girlfriend Mileva. (Why? Let's leave some suspense.) Yet, he intends to write a doctoral dissertation and to continue to pursue physics. In fact, he even publishes a couple of papers in which he applies the laws of thermodynamics to phenomena of capillarity and physical chemistry in the hopes of discovering the laws of intermolecular forces. In 1902 he submits a dissertion to an Alfred Kleiner, Professor of Experimental Physics at the University of Bern, but within a short time retracts it. Is his model of intermolecular forces worth much of anything?
Despite enormous agony in his his personal life, something clicks, resulting in the publication (1902-1904) of three first class papers. Moreover, these give him the tools to re-examine his thinking on what can be reliably determined about the microstructure of matter, the nature of radiation, and its interaction with matter. The result is five remarkable works in 1905: a doctoral dissertation on atomic and molecular dimensions (published the followin year), the Brownian motion paper, the light quantum paper, a paper on the electrodynamics of moving bodies setting out the special theory of relativity, and lastly, a follow up to the special relativity paper in which he derives the famous formula E=Mc^2. But little is left in the way of a paper trail for us to figure out how he has managed this. Can we possibly reconstruct, at least in outline, this amazing development?
Having figured out that E=mc^2, Einstein knows damned well that the edifice of inertial frames in special relativity appears just as spooky (theoretically unfounded) as the rest frame of the stationary aether theories he has just demolished. Should the principle of relativity generalize to arbitrary states of motion? In 1907 he has the "happiest thought" of his life, realizing that everything happens the same in a uniformly accelerating system as in a system subject to a (constant) gravitational field. And it is even possible to predict unexpected physical phenomena from this, e.g., the bending of light rays in strong graviational fields and a gravitational contribution to time-dilation (gravitational redshift). What he can't figure out, though, is the physical meaning of space and time coordinates in this new setting. Collaboration with Grossmann, who introduces him to Riemannian geometry, brings him to the brink of the ultimate solution. But conceptual confusions of, now, a different sort, keep him back from the final field equations of general relativity. Only late 1915 does he finally arrive at these and convinces himself they are correct by deriving a decently accurate prediction for the recession of the perihelion of Mercury. Oddly enough, though, Einstein himself doesn't understand the theory he created. Does it instantiate the principles that motivated it? And what are the implications for the universe as a whole?
Throughout these years Einstein has been a leading contributor to the emerging "quantum theory" of microphysics, a mess if there ever was one. In 1925 Heisenberg appears to have the clue to sorting it all out, but the picture it gives of elementary physical processes is not one that Einstein is comfortable with. He debates extensively with Bohr and others, but the bandwagen seems to have left him behind. Has Einstein just become part of the conservative "old school"? Or are there insights in his objections that (even today) deserve to be taken seriously?
The results of Eddington's eclipse expedition catapault Einstein overnight to world fame in 1920. Moreover, his kookie habits endear him to the masses. Image is everything. And with it, involvment with the League of Nations, the Zionist movement, intimacy with heads of state. The aftermath of WWI, though, creates a movement of "anti-Jewish" physics. The National Socialist Party rises to power, and drives Einstein from his post in Berlin to the US. Then, in 1939, the pacifist Einstein must decide: should Roosevelt be encouraged to build the bomb? And, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, how does he feel?
