http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/181349/Albert-Einstein
Encyclopædia Britannica
Albert Einstein
Primary Contributor: Michio Kaku
ARTICLE from the Encyclopædia Britannica
Albert Einstein, (born March 14, 1879, Ulm, Württemberg, Ger.—died April 18, 1955, Princeton, N.J., U.S.), German-born physicist who developed the special and general theories of relativity and won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921 for his explanation of the photoelectric effect. Einstein is generally considered the most influential physicist of the 20th century.
In 1902 Einstein reached perhaps the lowest point in his life. He could not marry Maric and support a family without a job, and his father’s business went bankrupt. Desperate and unemployed, Einstein took lowly jobs tutoring children, but he was fired from even these jobs.
The turning point came later that year, when the father of his lifelong friend Marcel Grossman was able to recommend him for a position as a clerk in the Swiss patent office in Bern. About then, Einstein’s father became seriously ill and, just before he died, gave his blessing for his son to marry Maric. For years, Einstein would experience enormous sadness remembering that his father had died thinking him a failure.
With a small but steady income for the first time, Einstein felt confident enough to marry Maric, which he did on Jan. 6, 1903. Their children, Hans Albert and Eduard, were born in Bern in 1904 and 1910, respectively. In hindsight, Einstein’s job at the patent office was a blessing. He would quickly finish analyzing patent applications, leaving him time to daydream about the vision that had obsessed him since he was 16: What would happen if you raced alongside a light beam? While at the polytechnic school he had studied Maxwell’s equations, which describe the nature of light, and discovered a fact unknown to James Clerk Maxwell himself—namely, that the speed of light remains the same no matter how fast one moves. This violates Newton’s laws of motion, however, because there is no absolute velocity in Isaac Newton’s theory. This insight led Einstein to formulate the principle of relativity: “the speed of light is a constant in any inertial frame (constantly moving frame).”
During 1905, often called Einstein’s “miracle year,” he published four papers in the Annalen der Physik, each of which would alter the course of modern physics
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1435153/releaseinfo
IMDb
The Internet Movie Database
Release dates for
"Nova"
Einstein (1979)
Country Date
USA 15 March 1979
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1435153
IMDb
The Internet Movie Database
Nova (TV series documentary 1974– )
Einstein (#6.9)
Release Date: 15 March 1979 (USA)
