Albert Einstein (1879–1955) is the closest thing science has to a household saint — the wild-haired genius whose name is a synonym for genius itself. What's less well known is that his revolution began not in a university, but at a desk in a Swiss patent office, where the 26-year-old clerk, rejected for academic jobs, did physics in his spare moments.
In a single burst in 1905 — his annus mirabilis — Einstein published four papers that each
could have made a career. He explained
The great irony of Einstein's life is that the quantum world he helped create unsettled him deeply. Its built-in randomness offended him — "God does not play dice with the universe," he insisted — and he spent his later years arguing (and losing) against it. He was also, famously, a reluctant celebrity: he did poorly at rote schooling, couldn't be bothered to memorise his own phone number ("why memorise what you can look up?"), and in 1952 politely declined an offer to become President of Israel, explaining he had no head for people, only for equations. The patent clerk never quite got used to being an icon.