Nordström then moved to Göttingen, Germany, where he had been recommended to go to study physical chemistry. However, he soon lost interest in the intended field and moved to study electrodynamics, a field the University of Göttingen was renowned for at the time. He returned to Finland to complete his doctoral dissertation at the University of Helsinki in 1910, and become a docent at the university. Subsequently, he became fascinated with the very novel and soon burgeoning field of gravitation and wanted to move to the Netherlands where scientists with contributions to that fields such as Hendrik Lorentz, Paul Ehrenfest and Willem de Sitter were active. Nordström was able to move to Leiden in 1916 to work under Ehrenfest, in the midst of the First World War, due to his Russian passport. Nordström spent considerable time in Leiden where he met a Dutch physics student, Cornelia van Leeuwen, with whom he went on to have several children. After the war he declined a professorship at the University of Berlin, a post awarded instead to Max Born, in order to return to Finland in 1918 and hold at first the professorship of physics and later the professorship of mechanics at the Helsinki University of Technology.