Albert Einstein – from mediocre student to Nobel Prize winner
The new Explora story is online: this year marks the 100th anniversary of Albert Einstein’s Nobel Prize in Physics. But how much ETH was there really in Einstein? And how much Einstein is there in ETH?
He was awarded the Nobel Prize for his services to theoretical physics, and in particular for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect. For ETH Zurich today, Albert Einstein is part of the furniture. But Einstein’s life was not all plain sailing: he failed his baccalaureate examination first time around, hated tedious laboratory work and much preferred studying the masters of theoretical physics by himself.
Polytechnic = love2
Had Einstein not studied at ETH Zurich, it is unlikely that he would ever have met his first wife Mileva Marić. In contrast to Einstein’s rather poor grades, his fellow student Mileva’s were very good, until her final examination, when she twice failed to secure enough points to graduate.
Zurich’s contribution to the theory of relativity
Over nine months of intense concentration under enormous pressure, Einstein and his former mathematics classmate Marcel Grossmann produced a first draft of the general theory of relativity and gravitation, which was published in 1913. It was very similar to the later final version. Einstein wrote down the (almost) correct equations in his Zurich Polytechnic notebook.
GPS, lasers and solar cells
Albert Einstein died in April 1955 at the age of 76 in Princeton, USA, where he had pursued his research career after 1933. But his revolutionary findings live on in our everyday lives and scientific research.
Don’t miss ...
More new content is coming in November! New episodes of our mini-series “When cows meet robots – Agricultural sciences at ETH Zurich” will be published over the course of November.
And don’t forget: the Explora story “Across rivers and gorges – Switzerland and its bridge-builders” is now available to stream or download as an audio file.
The Explora storytelling platform features fascinating and informative stories in different formats and on topics relating to the holdings of the ETH Library.