The Universe in a Nutshell Chapter Summary & Analysis - Chapter 1, A Brief History of Relativity Summary

Chapter 1, A Brief History of Relativity Summary and Analysis

Albert Einstein advanced the special and general theories of relativity, for which he is famous the world over. He was born in 1879. After a year, his family moved to Munich and his father, Hermann, and his uncle, Jakob, started a doomed-to-fail electrical business. Albert was not a child prodigy. In 1894, the business closed shop and the Einsteins immigrated to Milan except for Albert, who was to finish school.

Albert didn't care for the authoritarianism of the school and left after a few months, receiving his degree from the Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich in 1900. However, he had no professor who liked him enough to make him an assistant, so after two years he landed a job at the Swiss patent office in Bern. In 1905, at the patent office, Einstein penned three articles that rocketed him to the top of the scientific community. His papers changed humanity's...
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