Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein published the special theory of relativity in 1905, while a clerk in the Swiss patent office, along with papers on the photoelectric effect and Brownian motion, and the general theory, which made gravity a curvature of space and time, in 1915. He left Germany when Hitler came to power and spent the rest of his life at Princeton, searching for a unified field theory and arguing against the quantum mechanics he had helped begin. Relativity, written for a general reader, is the book the lists assign; The Evolution of Physics tells the story from Galileo on.