Einstein, Albert(Einstein, Albert)

1879 - Albert Einstein, Swiss-US physicist, was born in Ulm, Germany.

1884 - Albert Einstein gets his first compass.

1889 - Albert gets into a program of self education.

1894 - The Einsteins moves from Munich to Pavia, Italy and stays on Munich to finish school year.

1895 - Albert Einstein skips high school and goes to Swiss to finish high school.

1896 - Albert graduates from high school.

1898 - Albert falls in love with Mileva, a classmate in ETH.

1900 - Graduates from ETH. Moved to Switzerland, becoming a Swiss citizen.

1900-1907 - Examiner in Swiss Patent Office in Bern.

1903 - Einstein and Mileva marries in January.

1905 - Discovered special relativity.

- Discovered mass-energy equivalence.

- Correctly explained photoelectric effect in terms of light quantization.

- Correctly explained physical cause of Brownian motion.

1907 - Enunciated principle of equivalent reference frames.

1912 - Einstein turns into a professor of physics in ETH.

1914 - Correctly formulated Maxwell's equations in presence of gravitational field (early version 1907).

         - Returned to Germany.

1915 - Discovered general relativity (published 1916).

1917 - Predicted possibility of stimulated emission, anticipating operation of lasers.

1919 - Hailed as world's preeminent physicist upon experimental confirmation of key prediction of general relativity, confirmed by Royal Society's expedition to Principe Island in Gulf of Guinea to observe solar eclipse.

1921 - Nobel Prize in Physics.

1932 - Einstein gets feared by the Nazis.

1933 - Upon Adolf Hitler's rise to power, left Germany, renounced German citizenship, and immigrated to US (naturalized US citizen 1940).

         - Rejected probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics and unsuccessfully attempted to develop non-probabilistic unified theory.

         - Upon learning of Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann's successful fission of uranium in Nazi Germany, wrote letter to Franklin Roosevelt urging initiation of US atomic-bomb research (Manhattan Project), though taking no direct role in bomb research.

         - Following World War II, strongly advocated pacifism and arms limitation.

         - Offered presidency of Israel following death of Chaim Weizmann 1952, but declined.

1955 - He died in Princeton hospital in Princeton, New Jersey, on the 18th of April, at the age of 76 from internal bleeding, which was caused by the rupture of an aortic aneurism, leaving the Generalized Theory of Gravitation unsolved.

• "He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder."
• "A human being is part of a whole, called by us the'Universe,'a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest--a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
• "If a cluttered desk signs a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?"
• "Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character."
• "Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction."