Wikipedia calls him one of the greatest physicists of all time, and ETH acknowledges him as its most famous alumnus. Today, Albert Einstein is synonymous with genius. After the Nazis rose to power in 1933, he emigrated to the US and took on a position at Princeton University in New Jersey, where he stayed for the rest of his career. He then moved to Berlin and the Prussian Academy of Sciences. He only stayed for one and a half years, though he did formulate the first draft of the general theory of relativity during this time. After positions at the University of Zurich and the University of Prague, he finally found his way back to ETH – though not for long. His papers in 1905 helped him to turn back towards a university career path. He did manage to graduate with a diploma, but he was the only one of the five graduates who didn’t secure an assistantship. He hardly attended any of his ‘Physics practical course for beginners’ lectures and received a ‘fail’ mark. The reason that Einstein was not conducting his research at a university at that time was due to his performance as a student at the Polytechnikum in Zurich (as ETH Zurich was known then). ![]() One striking fact about this achievement is that he wrote these papers in his spare time: his day job was at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. ETH’s online biography of Einstein says that 1905 was an annus mirabilis for him. He wrote this paper in 1905, a year in which he wrote five groundbreaking papers, including the one on special relativity. Instead, he received it in 1921 ‘for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect’. But Albert Einstein didn’t win the Nobel Prize for the theory of relativity. With the theory of relativity, he revolutionised the meaning of time and space and articulated a theory that everyone has heard of, though very few people understand. ![]() With E = mc2, he wrote what might be the world’s best-known formula. It is the 100th anniversary of his Nobel Prize: Albert Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921.
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