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Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany, the son of a featherbed salesman. His family moved to Munich in 1880 and then to Pavia, Italy, when Albert was 15. He remained in Munich to finish his schooling but left within a year. Famously mediocre in his early studies, he gained admittance to the prestigious Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich on a second try and graduated in 1900, a good but not exceptional student. He became a Swiss citizen and fell in love with a Serbian woman, Mileva Malic. They had a daughter, who was given up for adoption, but they married in 1903 and would later have two sons. Because his grades had not been high enough to earn him a teaching position at ETH, Einstein worked first as a high-school teacher and, in 1902, took a job at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. A most unlikely stage was set for a major revolution in modern science, which would permanently alter our conception of time.

Time, in the view of Isaac Newton (1642-1727), and according to our common sense, existed independent of any observer and flowed at a constant rate everywhere in the universe. But experiments performed in the late 19^th century involving the propagation of light called these self-evident principles into question.

According to Newton, motion in space must be measured in relation to the speed of the observer. Light, for example, would move away at the same speed in every direction from a body at rest in absolute space, but it would seem to move slower relative to a body moving in the same direction (you would subtract the speed of the body from that of light) and faster relative to a body moving in the opposite direction (you would add the speed in this case). However, in an experiment measuring the speed of light performed in 1881 by Albert Michelson and Edward Morley, Newton and common sense were contradicted. Earth is a body moving in absolute space, and therefore light moving in the same direction as Earth should appear to be moving more slowly than light moving in the opposite direction. But Michelson and Morley found that light appeared to travel at the same speed in all directions, despite the Earth's movement. The electromagnetic laws of James Clerk Maxwell also showed troubling deviations in calculations when the observer was in motion. These results could be explained only by questioning the experimental methods and execution or by acknowledging that since the speed of light remained constant in all directions regardless of the speed of the observer with relation to any arbitrarily fixed frame of reference, there must be distortions in space and time to accommodate the data.

As early as 1899, Einstein, as he indicated in a letter to Mileva, had suspected that the classical Newtonian model of the universe was at fault. Working in the same patent office in Bern was Michele Besso, of whom Einstein said he "could not have found a better sounding board in the whole of Europe." In May 1905, Besso helped Einstein get past the difficult-to-abandon claims of classical physics. Einstein realized that neither time nor space was absolute, since the speed of light was. Time and space are relative: Time moves slower and space contracts for a person or object the greater the speed relative to an observer. Newtonian calculations and Einsteinian calculations are difficult to distinguish in everyday life, that is, while traveling at comprehensible speeds. But as bodies approach the speed of light, the differences are highly significant. And the consequences even for our commonsense reality are momentous as well. Relativity, when applied to mass and energy, yields the famous equation E=mc² (energy equals the mass multiplied by the speed of light squared), the underlying principle of the atomic bomb.

As the 19^th century ended, many scientists were proclaiming the "end of physics," insisting that all major theories were in place and that there was nothing left for physicists to do but to fill in the details. On June 30, 1905, with Einstein's submission of his paper "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies," a decisive challenge had been offered to the Newtonian universe, and new worlds of inquiry would soon open.

In 1911, Einstein became a professor at the German University in Prague. By 1912, he was professor of theoretical physics at ETH. In 1915, with his marriage to Mileva falling apart, Einstein completed his general theory of relativity. (The special theory of 1905 had dealt with bodies in isolation from other forces; the general theory took gravity into account.) In the following years, he became seriously ill, near death, in fact, and was nursed back to health by his cousin Elsa, whom he married in 1919. In 1921, Einstein won the Nobel Prize for physics, but steering away from controversy, the committee honored him for neither the special nor the general theory of relativity, but for his work on the photoelectric effect, also completed in 1905.

Einstein had never been a practicing Jew, but with the rise of Nazism his position in Germany became untenable. In 1933, he and Elsa sailed for the United States, where Einstein accepted a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 1936, Elsa died.

The menace of Nazi Germany continued to grow. In August 1939, nuclear physicist Leo Szilard drafted a letter, which was signed by Einstein and sent to President Franklin Roosevelt, warning that a nuclear weapon could be developed in the near future and that Germany might already be working on it. There were three follow-up letters, which contributed significantly to the launching of the Manhattan Project and the development of America's first atomic weapons. Einstein himself never took part in the project. He became an American citizen in 1940 and remained at Princeton until his death from heart failure in 1955.

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