What academic degree did Einstein have at the time he published his Special Relativity?

I hear that he was not even a scientist when he published his special theory of relativity. Just a clerk working at a patent office. But how's that even possible? How did he work out all his formulas and calculations?|||He had a doctorate degree when he was working as a clerk. After he obtained his phd, he was unable to find a job in academia. While at the patent office, he did not come up with the theories by writing equations, but he would formulate thought experiments. For example, he imagined that he was going 99.99% of the speed of light, but next to him was a light beam. He realized that he would never be able to catch up with the light beam because that is the speed limit of the universe. Therefore, the light beam would continue to get farther and farther away from him.





I disagree with a lot of the previous answers. It is true that Einstein had a lot of his ideas from other people, but he was the one who put two and two together.





For instance, after he published the begining of his theory of relativity, he was competing with Hilbert(Mathematician) to finish his equations of gravity. However, Hilbert was not even in the picture until after einstein published his first paper on gravity. In fact, Einstein and Hilbert were competing to complete the equation before each other.





Funny thing is that Hilbert did publish the same equations Einstein did a few days before, but he gave all the credit to the person who deserved it. The people who say he copied Hilbert's work is ridiculous. This is not some easy homework problem, in fact, you would have to be extremely comfortable with general relativity to understand it. In conclusion, most people agree that the majority of the credit should go to Einstein, but we should still look up to Hilbert's intelligence for coming up with the general relativity before Einstein himself.








So the majority of his work was not something he thought of by himself without any knowledge of physics. His extraordinary creativity was what gave him the ability to connect the dots and revolutionize science. I do not care what other people think, Einstein was nothing less than a genius.|||Not surprising when one sees that much of the relativity was known before Einstein even published his papers. He didn't start his work from scratch. All he did was eliminate luminiferous aether(the medium in which light was thought to travel) from the ether theory because experiments to detect it had shown null results. In fact relativity does not belong to Einstein alone, it also contains work of Hendrik Antoon Lorentz and Jules Henri Poincaré. Also relativity is shrouded in dispute over who it really belongs to. Read more on that dispute below-


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_…


Einstein was not some genius of epic proportions as he is generally heralded.


edit:


The questioner never asked about GR or Einstein Hilbert dispute.|||When Einstein published his first paper on SR, he had recently received his doctorate in physics from the University of Zurich.





Please note that there was very little new in the 1905 paper that hadn't been known in the physics community for 15 years or so. Einstein was not working in a vacuum; Lorentz and Poincare had already pretty much invented Relativity by then. The novelty of the 1905 SR paper was a calculation showing that all energies must obey the E=mc^2 rule, not just electromagnetic ones.