At the same time he had fallen in love with a fellow student, a Hungarian named Mileva Maric. In 1901 they had a child out of wedlock, a daughter, who was discreetly put up for adoption. Einstein never saw his child. Two years later, he and Maric were married. In between these events, in 1902, Einstein took a job with the Swiss patent office, where he stayed for the next seven years. He enjoyed the work: it was challenging enough to engage his mind, but not so challenging as to distract him from his physics. This was the background against which he produced the special theory of relativity in 1905.
阿尔伯特曾爱上一位同学，一位名叫米勒娃·玛丽奇的匈牙利姑娘。1901年，他们没有结婚就生了个孩子，一个女儿。他们很谨慎，把孩子给了人家。爱因斯坦从没有见过自己的孩子。两年以后，他和玛丽奇结了婚。在此期间，爱因斯坦接受了瑞士专利局的一个职位，在那里待了随后的7年。他很喜欢这份工作：它很有挑战性，能使他的脑子忙个不停，但又不至于转移他对物理学的注意力。就是在这种背景下，他于1905年创立了狭义相对论。

Called “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” it is one of the most extraordinary scientific papers ever published, as much for how it was presented as for what it said. It had no footnotes or citations, contained almost no mathematics, made no mention of any work that had influenced or preceded it, and acknowledged the help of just one individual, a colleague at the patent office named Michele Besso. It was, wrote C. P. Snow, as if Einstein“had reached the conclusions by pure thought, unaided, without listening to the opinions of others. To a surprisingly large extent, that is precisely what he had done.”
《论动体的电动力学》，无论是在表达方式还是在内容上，都是发表过的最优秀的科学论文之一。它没有脚注，也没有引语，几乎不用数学，没有提及影响过该论文或在该论文之前的任何作品，只是对一个人的帮助致以谢意。他是专利局的一名同事，名叫米歇尔·贝索。C.P.斯诺写道，爱因斯坦好像“全凭思索，独自一人，没有听取别人的意见就得出了结论。在很大程度上，情况就是这样”。