Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist whose theories of special and general relativity reshaped modern physics. He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for his explanation of the photoelectric effect.

Mileva Marić: A Serbian physicist and mathematician who studied at the Zurich Polytechnic and was Einstein’s first wife. She studied physics alongside Einstein in Zurich; claims about her contribution to his theories remain disputed.
Special relativity: A theory of space and time in which physical laws are the same in inertial frames and light has the same vacuum speed for all inertial observers. It introduced Einstein’s account of time dilation, length contraction, and the equivalence of mass and energy.
ETH Zurich: A public research university in Zurich, Switzerland, founded in 1855 as the Federal Polytechnic School. Einstein studied mathematics and physics there before graduating in 1900.
Gravitational waves: Ripples in spacetime produced by accelerating masses and propagating outward at the speed of light. Einstein’s general theory predicted them; their direct detection came a century later.
Newtonian mechanics: A framework describing motion through Newton’s laws of motion and universal gravitation. It remains an accurate approximation at everyday speeds and weak gravitational fields, but not Einstein’s broader framework.
Marcel Grossmann: A Swiss mathematician who helped Einstein apply tensor calculus to general relativity. His mathematical expertise helped Einstein formulate the field equations of general relativity.
General relativity: A theory of gravity in which matter and energy shape spacetime, and free-falling bodies follow its geometry. It replaced Newtonian gravity with a geometric account that Einstein developed from 1907 to 1915.
Swiss Patent Office: The Swiss government office that examines and registers patent applications. Einstein worked as a patent examiner in Bern while publishing his landmark 1905 papers.
GPS: A satellite-based navigation system that determines position and time using signals from orbiting satellites. Its timing corrections account for relativistic effects predicted by Einstein’s theories.
Quantum mechanics: A physical theory describing matter and radiation through quantized states and probabilistic predictions. Einstein helped establish quantum ideas but objected to their standard probabilistic interpretation.

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