Chapter I: 1905
The Miracle Year
Annus Mirabilis: Four Papers That Changed Physics
In a single calendar year, a 26-year-old patent clerk in Bern (with no university affiliation, no laboratory, no graduate students, and no research funding) published four papers, each of which alone would have secured a major scientific reputation. Together, they constitute the most productive single year in the history of physics.
Albert Einstein, Bern, 1905
The Bern Patent Office, 1902–1909
"A Clerk Who Remade the Universe"
Unable to secure a university position after graduation, Einstein took a post as a technical expert third-class at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. He worked six days a week evaluating electromagnetic device patents, a job he later called a "worldly cloister" that left him free to think. It was here, on lunch breaks and in stolen moments, that he drafted the four papers of 1905.
His colleagues recalled a quiet, affable man who dispatched his official work in two or three hours, then spent the rest of the day lost in thought, scribbling equations into a notebook he would hastily conceal when a supervisor approached.
"A storm broke loose in my mind."