When Albert Einstein listed the most important honors of his life, he began with the German Physical Society's Max Planck Medal, named for a physicist he revered. He went on from there to list the prizes and honorary doctorate degrees awarded him in many nations. Conspicuously absent was the plaudit with the highest profile and payout: the Nobel Prize. But in context this omission isn't so surprising. The Nobel nod—17 years after Einstein published his special theory of relativity—came long after recognition by the physics world and even the general public. Even more bizarre, the prize was awarded to Einstein not for his relativity revolution, but for the comparatively obscure discovery of the photoelectric effect. Why? After years of sifting through letters and diaries of the Scandinavian archives, science historian Robert Marc Friedman says it was an intentional snub fueled by the biases of the day—a prejudice against pacifists, Jews, and, most of all, theoretical physics.

In 1905, while working as a patent clerk in Switzerland, 26-year-old Albert Einstein published five seminal papers on the nature of space, light, and motion. One paper introduced the special theory of relativity, which dramatically broke with Newton's universally accepted description of how physics worked. Special relativity did away with the notion of absolute space and time—Einstein said they were instead "relative" to the observer's conditions—effectively flipping the Newtonian model on its apple-bruised head. In 1915, Einstein expanded the theory by incorporating gravity: it was not just a force of attraction between bodies, he said, but the result of distortions in space itself. This new, more robust version was called the theory of general relativity.


Today, general relativity is celebrated as Einstein's most impressive work. But as Friedman wrote in his 2001 book, The Politics of Excellence, in post-War Germany Einstein was despised as a pacifist Jew who renounced his German citizenship, went to meetings of radical groups, and publicly supported socialism. His theories were dismissed as "world-bluffing Jewish physics" by some prominent German physicists, who claimed to practice "true" German science based on observations of the natural world and hypotheses that could be tested in a laboratory.

Luckily for Einstein, British astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington believed there was a way to test the general theory. If massive objects curved space itself, as Einstein proposed, then they should bend nearby rays of light, as well. During six minutes of a total solar eclipse on May 29, 1919, Eddington measured the positions of stars that appeared next to the blotted-out sun. Sure enough, they followed the predictions of Einstein's general theory.

Eddington revealed the results of his eclipse experiment on November 6, and Einstein became a household name throughout the world practically overnight—literally overnight in some places; the next day, the London Times ran the headline, "Revolution in Science, New Theory of the Universe." Within a month, the news traveled through the American press; a New York Times headline declared, "Given the Speed, Time Is Naught."

The nominations for Einstein that poured into the laps of the Nobel Committee members as they were reviewing candidates for the 1920 prize were not exactly well received. The committee did not want a "political and intellectual radical, who—it was said—did not conduct experiments, crowned as the pinnacle of physics," says Friedman. So the 1920 prize was given to the Swiss Charles-Edouard Guillaume for his ho-hum discovery of an inert nickel-steel alloy. When the announcement was made, Friedman says the previously unknown Guillaume "was as surprised as the rest of the world."