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Einstein was born in Ulm on March 14, 1879, and spent his youth in Munich, where his family owned a small shop that manufactured electric machinery. He didn’t talk until the age of three, but even as a youth he showed a brilliant curiosity about nature and an ability to understand difficult mathematical concepts. At the age of 12 he taught himself Euclidean geometry.
He hated the dull regimentation and unimaginative spirit of school in Munich. When continual business failure led the family to leave Germany for Milan, Italy, Einstein, who was then 15 years old, used the opportunity to withdraw from the school. He spent a year with his parents in Milan, and when it became clear that he would have to make his own way in the world, he finished secondary school in Arrau, Switzerland, and entered the Swiss National Polytechnic in Zürich. Einstein didn’t enjoy the manner of teaching there. He often cut classes and used the time to study physics on his own or to play his beloved violin. He passed his exams and graduated in 1900 by studying the notes of a classmate. His professors didn’t think highly of him and wouldn’t recommend him for a university position. For two years Einstein worked as a tutor and substitute teacher. In 1902 he attained a position as an ‘examiner’ in the Swiss patent office in Bern. In 1903 he married Mileva Mariæ, who had been his classmate at the ‘polytechnic’. They had two sons but eventually divorced. Einstein later remarried.
Einstein, whose prime concern was to understand the nature of electromagnetic radiation, consequently urged the development of a theory that would be a fusion of the wave and particle models for light. Again, very few physicists understood or were sympathetic to these ideas.
The difficulty that others had with Einstein’s work was not because it was too mathematically complex or technically obscure; the problem resulted, rather, from Einstein’s beliefs about the nature of good theories and the relationship between experiment and theory. Although he maintained that the only source of knowledge is experience, he also believed that scientific theories are the free creations of a finely tuned physical intuition and that the premises on which theories are based cannot be connected logically to experiment. A good theory, therefore, is one in which a least number of speculations is necessary to account for the physical evidence. This lack of speculation, a feature of all Einstein’s work, was what made his work so difficult for colleagues to understand, let alone tolerate.
Einstein did have important supporters, however. His chief early patron was the German physicist Max Planck. Einstein remained at the patent office for four years after his star began to rise within the physics community. He then moved rapidly upward in the German-speaking academic world; his first academic appointment was in 1909 at the University of Zürich. In 1911 he moved to the German-speaking university at Prague, and in 1912 he returned to the Swiss National Polytechnic in Zürich. Finally, in 1913, he was appointed director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin.
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