Einstein also made important contributions to quantum mechanics. Born in the German Empire , Einstein moved to Switzerland in , forsaking his German citizenship the following year. In , at the age of seventeen, he enrolled in the mathematics and physics teaching diploma program at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich , graduating in He acquired Swiss citizenship a year later and afterwards secured a permanent position at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern.
In , he submitted a successful PhD dissertation to the University of Zurich. Horrified by the Nazi persecution of his fellow Jews, [ 8 ] he decided to remain in the US, and was granted American citizenship in Roosevelt alerting him to the potential German nuclear weapons program and recommending that the US begin similar research.
In , he published four groundbreaking papers , sometimes described as his annus mirabilis miracle year. In , he proposed a general theory of relativity that extended his system of mechanics to incorporate gravitation.
A cosmological paper that he published the following year laid out the implications of general relativity for the modeling of the structure and evolution of the universe as a whole. In the middle part of his career, Einstein made important contributions to statistical mechanics and quantum theory. Especially notable was his work on the quantum physics of radiation , in which light consists of particles, subsequently called photons.
For much of the last phase of his academic life, Einstein worked on two endeavors that ultimately proved unsuccessful. First, he advocated against quantum theory's introduction of fundamental randomness into science's picture of the world, objecting that God does not play dice. As a result, he became increasingly isolated from mainstream modern physics.
