"Gravitation elicits just as much respect among my colleagues as skepticism," wrote Einstein in 1914, while working on the Theory of General Relativity that would soon launch him into the spotlight.
Albert Einstein Archive © The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Einstein was still working at the patent office in 1905, his annus mirabilis, or "miraculous year." That year, the 26–year–old Einstein published four papers in the prestigious German journal Annalen der Physik. That would have been a remarkable feat for anyone, particularly an unknown scientist who was not even working in academia. Einstein's papers revolutionized physics.
The first of these papers stated that light behaves as both a wave and a particle, an idea called the photoelectric effect. The second proved the existence and size of molecules, and explained their movement, called Brownian motion. The third was Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, which showed that the speed of light is constant, regardless of the speed of the light's source, and that time passes at different rates for objects moving at different speeds. His final paper in his miraculous year gave science its most famous equation, E=mc2. This equation, in which E is energy, m is mass, and c is the speed of light, establishes that energy and mass are actually different forms of the same thing and that one can be converted into the other.
Although many scientists did not accept the Special Theory of Relativity right away, they were intrigued. Einstein now had a reputation within the scientific community, and in 1908, he left the patent office for a position as a lecturer at the University of Bern. The following years would see him move on to universities in Zurich and Prague before settling in at the University of Berlin. There, in 1916, Einstein completed his work on his revolutionary General Theory of Relativity, which delved into the issue of gravity.
Einstein proposed a way of thinking about gravity radically different from Isaac Newton's explanation of a force pulling objects toward each other. Einstein suggested that space and time are like a piece of cloth stretched taut; objects are like marbles on the cloth that create indentations, or distortions, that cause other objects to move toward them. Gravity is this distortion in the fabric of space and time. According to Einstein's theory, very massive bodies such as the Sun would cause even light to bend.
During a total solar eclipse in 1919, scientists observed that the position of the stars appeared to shift slightly as their light curved around the Sun, confirming Einstein's theory. Newspaper headlines trumpeted Einstein's triumph. "Revolution in Science, New Theory of the Universe, Newtonian Ideas Overthrown," stated the Times of London. Suddenly, Einstein was a worldwide celebrity. Everyone was interested in his new ways of thinking about the universe, and he was mobbed wherever he went. "I have become rather like King Midas, except that everything turns not into gold but into a circus," he said.
In a few short years, Einstein had profoundly changed physics. It was so clear that he would one day be awarded the Nobel Prize that in 1918, when he and his first wife, Mileva, were working out a divorce settlement, Einstein agreed that he would give her the prize money when he won. She didn't have to wait long. Einstein won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics, although not for his revolutionary work on general relativity, which was still controversial within the scientific community, but for his insights into the photoelectric effect.
By this time, Einstein had already witnessed the horrors of World War I. He had been one of the few prominent German scientists who hadn't supported Germany's nationalist ambitions during the war. The suffering caused by the war strengthened his pacifism. "My pacifism is an instinctive feeling," he remarked, "a feeling that possesses me because the murder of men is disgusting."