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Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany of Jewish parents. As a child he was moved with his family to Munich, then Milan. His parents were not especially religious, they did not attend synagogue or practice the dietary laws, but in spite of that their son did become deeply religious as a youngster. It all  came to an abrupt end when he was 12 years old. Through the reading of scientific books that he was so interested in he soon reached the conclusion that the stories in the Bible could not be true. It was a crushing blow when he discovered that youth was intentionally deceived by traditional lies.  Einstein later stated that his loss of religion freed him from an existence dominated by wishes, hopes, and primitive feelings.

Einstein had found the inner freedom to contemplate the world and although this road was not as comfortable as the road to a religious paradise, it proved itself more trustworthy and he never regretted having chosen it. After graduating from a Catholic primary school, he passed the rigorous tests required to attend the Polytechnic Academy in Zürich where he studied physics for four years. He graduated in 1900 and became a Swiss citizen, then pursued an unsuccessful teaching career where he was fired for being too informal. Einstein went to work at a Swiss Patent Office and married Mileva Maric. At the age of 26 he began his spectacular career as a productive physicist.

Einstein’s first statement of what came to be called relativity appeared in 1905 in an article in the German scientific journal “Annalen der Physik” It was not an article that the average mind could easily understand and it was slow to take off. It did not cite authorities or have footnotes. And Einstein proposed a new scheme of physics. It was of great significance but barely understandable to the layman. It meant that Newton’s laws were only valid to circumstances limited by our physical senses. It meant time and space were different in stationary and in moving objects. It meant objects in motion travel at speeds in relation to the observer. They plainly contradicted the notion of absolute space and time.

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Einstein became famous to the public not from the truth of his experiments but from an event publicized throughout the world that confirmed his theories. On May 29, 1919 a British astronomical expedition photographed an eclipse of the sun on Principe Island in the Gulf of Guinea. It was a dramatic occasion and confirmed Einsteins basic theory about the nature of mass and gravitation. By Einsteins theory the rays of light from the stars around the sun should bend inward, toward the sun, as rays of light passed through the sun’s gravitational field. Then the effect seen by observers on earth should be to shift the images of those stars outward from their usual position in the sky. The photograph shot by Eddington’s group confirmed it. Einstein became an instant celebrity. In 1921 Einstein came to the U.S. on a lecture tour at the request of Chaim Weizmann to raise funds for the Palestine Fund. He was given the full celebrity treatment as he spoke on  world affairs. The same year he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics.

In 1933 Hitler became chancellor of Germany, Einstein renounced his German citizenship, and in October he went to Princeton. He soon became an American citizen. Einstein spoke out against Hitler and gave up his pacifism when he saw the rising of fascist power. He had reason to fear the Nazis who attacked him and his science because he was a Jew. Einstein alerted President Roosevelt to the peril of an atom bomb when he learned of the Germans trying to control the supply of uranium, and urged the president to speed up Americans atomic experiments and to secure a supply of uranium.

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Einstein was a relentless seeker. He never abandoned his quest for meaning. An individual existence seemed to Einstein to be a sort of prisoner who wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole. He said, “I am truly a lone traveler.” I have never belonged to my country, my house, my friends, or my immediate family, with my whole heart. I have the need for solitude, feelings that increase with age. He was equal to the challenge of conflicting theories of the physical world. He saw it as his task to bridge the gap between the old physics and the new. He never ceased seeking.

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