📍Munich, Bavaria, Germany
1867 – 1877“I was born in Kiel in April 1858 into a family of scholars: my great-grandfather and grandfather were theology professors in Göttingen, and my father, Wilhelm, was a professor of law. One of my earliest memories is of Prussian and Austrian troops marching into Kiel in 1864. When I was nine, in 1867, my father was appointed to a professorship in Munich, and we moved south to the capital of Bavaria, where I spent the rest of my school years. Munich was a city of music, churches, museums and the Alps on the horizon, and I loved it. At the Maximiliansgymnasium I was a hard-working but not brilliant pupil, usually somewhere between third and eighth in my class. Then a mathematics teacher, Hermann Müller, took an interest in me and taught me astronomy and mechanics, and it was from him that I first learned the law of the conservation of energy. It struck me like a revelation: a law that held absolutely, everywhere, independent of human beings. Music was my other great love. I sang, played the piano, organ and cello, and even composed songs and an operetta. I wondered whether to become a musician, but in the end I chose physics, studying at the University of Munich and then in Berlin. In 1900 I proposed that energy comes in tiny packets, or quanta, an idea that began quantum theory and won me the Nobel Prize in 1918. I kept playing the piano all my life; Munich had given me both my music and my science.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
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