Physical Forces


Albert Einstein

There was one extraordinary feature of Einstein the man I glimpsed that day, and came to see ever more clearly each time I visited his house... he had a unique sense of the world of man and nature as one harmonious and someday understandable whole, with all of us feeling our way forward through the darkness together.

~ John Archibald Wheeler, theoretical physicist

Albert Einstein during a lecture in Vienna in 1921.
Photo by Ferdinand Schmutzer, restored by Adam Cuerden.
Albert Einstein, the man whose surname is used as a synonym for genius, was hardly a model student during his early years in Munich, Germany. He was a voracious reader, however, and during his time as a university student in Switzerland became intimately familiar with the works of many legendary figures of the Enlightenment, including the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Obtaining a degree in mathematics in 1896, Einstein would ultimately turn to physics, preoccupying himself with uncovering the principles that govern order in the natural world.

In 1904, Albert Einstein moved to Berlin where his association with contemporary academics sparked his own prolific career. First introduced in 1905, the theory of relativity is the benchmark of Einstein’s career, and represents an achievement so significant that today it rings familiar even to laymen unversed in the physical sciences. This theory explains the dynamics of space and time in a way that has had far-reaching implications for the fields of nuclear physics and astronomy, as well as our understanding of the origins of the universe. For these contributions and many others, Albert Einstein was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics.