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all by his lonesome).
In 1894, following the failure of his father's business, the family moved from Munich to Pavia, Italy, a city near Milan. Albert remained behind so that he could finish school, but only completed one more term before rejoining his family in the spring of 1895 without a secondary school certificate. It was during this time that he wrote his first scientific work, "The Investigation of the State of Aether in Magnetic Fields." Later that same year, he performed the experiment known as "Albert Einstein's Mirror" in which he concluded that the speed of light is independent of the observer. This statement would later become one of the two "postulates of special relativity."

He finished secondary school in Switzerland and it was a disappointment to his family when it became clear that he would not become an electrical engineer as his father had been. At The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology he studied a subject that was seldom taught, Maxwell's electromagnetic theory, and received his diploma in 1896. At this time, he met the Serbian, Mileva Marc, and their relationship developed into a romance, although his family disapproved of her. They married on January 6, 1903.

A brilliant mathematician, Marc was both an intellectual and personal partner to the great genius. He himself said of her, "She is a creature who is my equal and who is as strong and independent as I am." In all probability, their relationship worked because she could give him the intellectual isolation that he needed and that she required as well. The extent of her influence on her husband's work has remained an issue of controversy to this day.
In 1905 while working at the Swiss Patent Office, Einstein obtained his doctorate and in his spare time wrote four articles that would prove to be the framework of modern physics. Most scientists agree that three of those papers (on Brownian motion, which provided empirical evidence for the existence of atoms, the photoelectric effect which concerned "energy quanta" or photons, and special relativity, a theory about time, distance, mass and energy) were worthy of Nobel Prizes. This series of papers is commonly referred to as the "Annus Mirabilis Papers" (from the Latin, meaning year of wonders).

In 1911 and 1912 Einstein taught at the University of Zurich and the University of Prague and worked closely with mathematician, Marcel Grossmann. He began to refer to the concept of time as the fourth dimension. In 1914, he moved to Berlin as a

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