26. Albert Einstein’s Greatest Breakthroughs Were Accomplished by the Time He Was 26
When most people picture Albert Einstein, they picture an aging man, with disheveled and wild white hair. It stands to reason that most people would assume that Einstein’s most important work must have occurred at the tail end of a long life, spent doing complex physics and math stuff.
It might sound weird – especially to those of us who spent our 20s in a haze – but Einstein did most of his heavy intellectual lifting by the time he was in his mid-twenties. His greatest contributions to science, such as his theory of relativity, had taken place by the time he was 26. In 1905, after graduating from the University of Zurich, Einstein was working as a patent office examiner, and dabbled in physics in his free time. During a span of a few brief months, he came up with four theories that revolutionized science.