How Much Do You Know About Albert Einstein?

Albert Einstein wasn’t working at a prestigious university when he published the papers that would eventually reshape modern physics, he was a patent clerk in Switzerland, examining other people’s invention applications during the day and quietly reworking the foundations of space, time, and energy in his spare time. That unglamorous origin makes 1905, the year he published four groundbreaking papers including his special theory of relativity, one of the more remarkable single-year outputs in the history of science.

Two British expeditions photographed a total solar eclipse on 29 May 1919, one from the island of Príncipe off West Africa and one from Sobral in northern Brazil, in order to measure whether starlight passing close to the sun bent by the amount general relativity demanded rather than the smaller figure Newtonian gravity allowed. Arthur Eddington presented the results at a joint meeting of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society that November, and the London newspapers ran them the next morning under headlines announcing that Newton had been overturned. Einstein was forty and largely unknown outside professional physics, and by the end of that week he was the most famous scientist alive.

The 1905 papers deserve their reputation partly because they addressed four unrelated problems. One explained the photoelectric effect by treating light as discrete packets of energy, one used the erratic movement of pollen grains in water as evidence that atoms are real objects rather than a convenient accounting device, one dismantled the assumption of absolute time, and a short follow-up derived the relationship between mass and energy that later became the most recognizable equation in science. He completed a doctorate at the University of Zurich in the same period, having been passed over for academic posts repeatedly since graduating.

The Nobel Prize, awarded for 1921, cited the photoelectric effect and his services to theoretical physics, and deliberately avoided relativity, which the committee considered insufficiently settled. The money went to his first wife, Mileva Marić, under the terms of a divorce agreement signed before he knew whether the prize would ever arrive. His own work on light quanta helped establish quantum theory, and he then spent thirty years disputing its implications, arguing with Niels Bohr through the late 1920s and publishing a paper with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen in 1935 designed to show that quantum mechanics had to be incomplete. Experiments have since come down against him on that point, while the prediction he made in 1916 about ripples in spacetime held up exactly, confirmed when detectors in Louisiana and Washington recorded two merging black holes in September 2015.

He was travelling when the Nazis took power in 1933, never returned to Germany, and settled at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He signed a letter to Franklin Roosevelt in August 1939 warning that uranium fission could produce an extremely powerful bomb, then spent years describing that signature as the one great mistake of his life. He turned down the presidency of Israel in 1952, writing that he lacked the aptitude for dealing with people that the office required, and he spoke against American segregation, calling it a disease of white people during a 1946 visit to Lincoln University.

The easy questions cover the equation, the hair, the general standing as the popular image of genius. The harder ones want detail: which discovery the Nobel citation named, what job he held while writing the 1905 papers, whose presidency he declined. Answers to every question appear below the quiz, which makes it straightforward to see where the shorthand ends and the actual record begins.

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