Albert Einstein, one of the greatest physicists of all times, was born in Ulm, Germany. He left the highly disciplined German school system after one teacher stated, "You will never amount to anything, Einstein." Following a vacation in Italy, he completed his education at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in 1901. Although Einstein attended very few lectures, he was able to pass the courses with the help of excellent lecture notes taken by a friend. Unable to find an academic position, Einstein accepted a position as a junior official in the Swiss Patent Office in Berne. In this setting, and during his "spare time," he continued his independent studies in theoretical physics. In 1905, at the age of 26, he published four scientific papers that revolutionized physics. (In that same year, he earned his Ph.D.) One of these papers, for which he was awarded the 1921 Nobel prize in physics, dealt with the photoelectric effect. Another was concerned with Brownian motion, the irregular motion of small particles suspended in a liquid. The remaining two papers were concerned with what is now considered his most important contribution of all, the special theory of relativity. In 1916, Einstein published his work on the general theory of relativity, which relates gravity to the structure of space and time. The most dramatic prediction of this theory is the degree to which light is deflected by a gravitational field. Measurements made by astronomers on bright stars in the vicinity of the eclipsed sun in 1919 confirmed Einstein's prediction, and Einstein suddenly became a world celebrity.
In 1913, following academic appointments in Switzerland and Czechoslovakia, Einstein accepted a special position created for him at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. This made it possible for him to devote all of his time to research free of financial troubles and routine duties. Einstein left Germany in 1933, which was then under Hitler's power, thereby escaping the fate of millions of other European Jews. In the same year he accepted a special position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton where he remained for the rest of his life. He became an American citizen in 1940. Although he was a pacifist, Einstein was persuaded by Leo Szilard to write a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt urging him to initiate a program to develop a nuclear bomb. The result was the successful six-year Manhattan project and two nuclear explosions in Japan that ended World War II in 1945.
Einstein made many important contributions to the development of modern physics, including the concept of the light quantum and the idea of stimulated emission of radiation, which led to the invention of the laser 40 years later. He was deeply disturbed by the development of quantum mechanics in the 1920s despite his own role as a scientific revolutionary. In particular, he could never accept the probabilistic view of events in nature that is a central feature of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory. He once said, "God does not play dice with nature." The last few decades of his life were devoted to an unsuccessful search for a unified theory that would combine gravitation and electromagnetism into one picture.