When Albert became Einstein

This book proposes an in-depth investigation carried out in Italy in young
Albert Einstein's footsteps, since his attempt to enter the ETH Zurich in 1895
until his first doctoral work in 1901. We follow his family, who transferred
his electrical engineering company from Munich to Milan, in the rich social,
economic, political and industrial context of post-unified Italy; a milieu
also familiar to Michele Besso, Albert's closest friend and collaborator, whom
he met again daily in Milan on semester-breaks, after their first meeting in
1895. In Pavia, the parish register will lead us to Carlo Marangoni, the uncle
of Ernestina (Albert's friend) and a specialist in capillarity phenomena. In
Milan, we will discover the library of the Lombardo Institute, Academy of
sciences and letters, where Albert worked for his bibliography. Old registers
at the university and at the Polytechnic will draw our attention to his
connection with Giuseppe Jung, one of Michele's uncles, an academician. This
young Albert environment sheds a new light on his scientific remarks to his
fiancée Mileva Marié: his first article on capillarity and molecular forces;
his interest in wireless telegraphy; his search to evidence the motion of the
Earth through the ether; his thesis extended to weakly compressed gases and
even his early questionings on the nature of light. All of this we will
discover in a trip round Lombardy in the beginning of the 19th century.