All areas3 of 20 fields
Quantum & Particle Physics · Relativity & Cosmology · Electricity, Magnetism & Light
In 1908 I took a junior teaching position at the University of Bern. A 1909 lecture on relativistic electrodynamics won me an associate professorship in Zurich, and in July 1912 I returned to the ETH Zurich to a chair in theoretical physics.
I taught myself the violin without ever practising systematically. What made me study music willingly was falling for Mozart's violin sonatas at 13; by 17 an examiner in Aarau heard my Beethoven and called it remarkable.
In 1926 my former student Leó Szilárd and I co-invented the Einstein refrigerator, patented in 1930 — engineering beyond my physics research. It was an absorption refrigerator, revolutionary technology then for having no moving parts and running only on heat.
In 1915, with Wander Johannes de Haas, I published two research papers claiming the first experimental observation that a change in a body's magnetic moment makes it rotate. This experimental physics showed magnetization comes from aligned electron angular momenta.
In 1917 my research applied general relativity to the structure of the universe as a whole, founding a static model. After Hubble's 1929 discovery that galaxies recede, I abandoned it for dynamic models and discarded the cosmological constant.
I helped found quantum theory, yet I was skeptical that its randomness was fundamental rather than the result of an underlying determinism. Until the end of my life I maintained that quantum mechanics was incomplete.
In 1935, with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, I published the EPR thought experiment: two entangled particles whose properties can be predicted at a distance. We concluded quantum theory does not give a complete description of reality.
In 1916 I predicted gravitational waves: ripples in spacetime curvature that carry energy away from their source. They are possible because gravity in general relativity propagates at a finite speed, unlike in Newton's theory.
In 1917 I published a physics research article in Physikalische Zeitschrift proposing stimulated emission. It showed atomic transitions follow simple statistical laws, and it is the physical process that makes maser and laser technology possible.
In 1924 I received Satyendra Nath Bose's statistical model of light as a gas of indistinguishable particles. I saw it applied to atoms too, translated and submitted his paper, and published my own research predicting the Bose–Einstein condensate.
