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(Eventually he became a Swiss citizen.)
Yet Einstein's rebelliousness continued. He cut lectures, read what he pleased, tinkered in school labs and incurred the wrath of his teachers.
Mathematician Hermann Minkowski, who later made valuable contributions to Einstein's new physics, called him a "lazy dog." Only scrupulous notes kept by a classmate, Marcel Grossmann, enabled Einstein to cram successfully for his two major exams and to graduate in 1900.
Having antagonized his professors, Einstein failed to obtain a university teaching post. He eked out a living by doing calculations for an astronomer, tutoring and substituting as a teacher. At 23 he got a job as an examiner with the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. His title: technical expert, third class. His pay: a modest 3,500 francs, then about $675, a year.
Still, as Einstein said, the post "in a way saved my life." It enabled him to marry a fellow physics student Mileva Marie, from Serbia. In reviewing patent applications, he also learned to get to the heart of a problem and to decide quickly if ideas were valid. That left him time to think about physics.
There was plenty to ponder. For more than two centuries, the basic laws of motion and gravitation postulated by Isaac Newton had prevailed. They were more than adequate tc describe planetary movements, the behavior of gases and other everyday physical phenomena. But by the end of the 19th century serious cracks had developed in the Newtonian edifice. For example, Newton had regarded light as a stream of particles ("corpuscles"). Experiments had already shown that light was wavelike. Perhaps more significant, the English scientist Michael Faraday and the Scot James Clerk Maxwell had demonstrated that electromagnetism, which includes light, comprised a class of phenomena that did not fit easily into the Newtonian system.
If light consisted of waves, however, how were they transmitted? Scientists realized that space was largely empty of conventional matter. So, to carry light over such vast distances as that between sun and earth, they postulated the existence of a tenuous, invisible substance called the ether. To detect the ether, the Americans Albert Michelson and Edward Morley performed a clever experiment in 1887. As the earth moved around the sun at about 30 km (19 miles) per second, the motion-would generate an ether "wind" in the opposite direction, just as a bicyclist pedaling on a calm day creates a wind that blows into his face. Thus the velocity of light should be greater when light moves with this wind, or across it, than against it. To test the ether theory, Michelson and Morley constructed an ingenious rotating apparatus with a light source and mirrors. To their amazement, they found that no matter in what direction light was beamed, its velocity remained exasperatingly constant. Could it be that the ether did not exist?
In an attempt to preserve the ether, Irish Physicist George FitzGerald offered a novel theory: perhaps motion through the ether causes an object to shrink slightly in the direction of its travels. Indeed, by his argument, the contraction would be just enough to compensate for the change in the velocity of light caused by the ether wind. Thus the wind would be