Albert Einstein in Vienna, 1921 — photographic portrait by Ferdinand Schmutzer — Albert Einstein in Vienna, 1921 — a photographic portrait by Ferdinand Schmutzer (public domain).

Albert Einstein, in Reference

Physicist (1879–1955), author of relativity and the quantum explanation of the photoelectric effect. This site is a neutral reference: documented facts with citations, verified quotations only, and honest flags wherever the evidence runs thin.

Where to begin

New to the subject? Start with Start Here — a five-minute orientation.
The life in sequence: Biography and the Timeline.
The physics: Key Ideas explains special and general relativity, the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, E=mc², and Einstein’s cosmology — with the limits of each theory marked.
In his own words: Sayings collects quotations verified against primary sources, plus a misattributed-quotations section for the famous lines he never said.
The people around him: People.
Terms defined: Glossary.
Myth vs. evidence: Reception tests popular Einstein stories against the record.
Go deeper: ten researched deep dives — Relativity, Explained, The Miracle Year, The Nobel Question, Einstein vs. Bohr, The Cosmological Constant, The Unified Field Quest, The Roosevelt Letter, The Political Einstein, Princeton, and The Myth Machine.
How this site was made: Methodology and Sources.

Why this site is careful

Einstein is one of the most quote-mined figures in history, and much of what circulates about him — quips, anecdotes, grades, politics — is distorted or invented. Every page here ends with Source notes. Dates use documented evidence. Uncertain claims are labeled as uncertain. Quotations that cannot be verified against a primary source are excluded or flagged.

What the record establishes

Born 14 March 1879 in Ulm; died 18 April 1955 in Princeton, New Jersey.
In 1905, his annus mirabilis, he published four papers that reshaped physics: the photoelectric effect (light quanta), Brownian motion (evidence for atoms), special relativity, and the mass–energy equivalence (E=mc²).
In 1915 he completed the general theory of relativity; the 1919 solar-eclipse expeditions confirmed its prediction of starlight bending, making him world-famous.
The 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics (awarded 1922) cited the photoelectric effect — not relativity.
He spent his later years at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, working unsuccessfully on a unified field theory and arguing about the meaning of quantum mechanics.

The animated stream

A separate project — a YouTube live channel featuring an animated, dramatized Einstein character for discussion of his ideas — is documented on the Stream page. That page describes the character as AI-generated dramatization art, not a historical depiction, and currently embeds a temporary owner-supplied mockup video, clearly labeled as a placeholder rather than a live broadcast. Downloadable character art lives on the Social Pack page.

Source notes

Biographical facts summarized here are documented in biography.md and timeline.md (Source notes there cite the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein — CPAE — the Einstein Archives Online at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, NobelPrize.org, and the Institute for Advanced Study).
Quote policy: only quotations with a traceable primary source are used; see sayings.md and methodology.md.
Images: all historical photographs are public-domain images from Wikimedia Commons; see the image credits on this page for each file’s source and rights note.