ALBERT EINSTEIN IS revered for his scientific intellect, which laid the foundations for modern-day physics and earned him introductions with some of the most exclusive people on Earth.
His opinions on race, politics, and war were also incredibly progressive for their time. Some even say that we will never see the likes of another Einstein again.
Here’s how a man, who “had no understanding of how to relate to people,“ became history’s most beloved scientist.
Albert Einstein was the elder of the two – his younger sister, Maria Einstein, was born about two years later in November 1881.
Einstein reportedly was slow in learning how to talk. That, combined with his tendency to whisper words softly to himself before saying them aloud led the family maid to nickname him “der Depperte” — the dopey one, according to Einstein: His Life and Universe
One year after Einstein was born, his father, mother, and uncle moved to Munich — to establish an electrical engineering company — where Einstein earned the bulk of his early education.
The secondary school he attended was eventually named after him and called the Albert Einstein Gymnasium before merging with another school in 2010.
Einstein began violin lessons at age five, but didn’t enjoy music until age 13, when he discovered Mozart’s violin sonatas. After that, the young genius was hooked and would play the violin in string quartets later as a young adult and throughout the rest of his life.
“Mozart’s music is so pure and beautiful that I see it as a reflection of the inner beauty of the universe itself,” Einstein later told a friend, according to Charles Chaplain: My Autobiography.
Originally, Einstein was destined to take over the family business, but when it failed in 1894, Einstein’s family moved to northern Italy.
It was there in Italy that a teenage Einstein wrote what today is referred to as his first scientific paper, which investigated the nature of the ether — a hypothetical consequence of how light travels through space that Einstein later disproved. Before his death, Einstein published a total of more than 300 scientific papers.
Source: The Golden Age of Theoretical Physics
Einstein graduated with his teaching diploma from the Zürich Polytechnic, Switzerland in 1900. Though Einstein showed exceptional skill in his theoretical physics courses, he scored lower in his math courses.
“It was not clear to me as a student that a more profound knowledge of the basic principles of physics was tied up with the most intricate mathematical methods,” an older, wiser Einstein later admitted, according to Encyclopedia
In 1902, Einstein’s father died, leaving him to care for his mother and sister, which was incredibly difficult because he was unemployed.
Moreover, the family was in significant debt to Einstein’s uncle. This financial strain, which was largely due to the failing business, is what ultimately led Einstein to favour the ideals of socialism over capitalism. In his later years, Einstein envisioned a single government to rule the globe.
The same year his father died, Einstein fathered a child with Mileva Marić, whom he’d met while at the Zürich Polytechnic, Switzerland.
Marić had been in the same physics teaching program as Einstein, but never graduated. The two married in 1903, yet little is known about the fate of their first child — a daughter who historians expect was either adopted or died of scarlet fever.
In 1904, the couple welcomed the first of their two sons, Hans Albert Einstein.
Even with his physics teaching diploma, Einstein could not find work in academia and was thwarted by his initial efforts to attain higher education — a doctoral degree — which would have helped him in job hunting.
Instead, he took a position as a clerk at the Federal Office for Intellectual Property patent office in Bern, Germany in 1903 — two years before he introduced his Special Theory of Relativity, as Einstein: His Life and Universe, notes.
Here’s an explanation — in his own words taken from a letter he wrote to a friend — of some of the papers:
Source: Einstein: His Life and Universe
Subsequently, 1905 was dubbed Einstein’s “miracle year.” Before the year was up, he published a fifth paper, which included an addendum to his earlier one on the Special Theory of Relativity.
The addendum identified a novel relationship between energy and mass, which ultimately spawned the most famous equation in the world: E=mc2.
Einstein accepted a temporary apprenticeship at the University of Bern in 1908. However, after two teaching semesters, he canceled his lectures because attendance had waned to just one student.
The following year, in 1909, Einstein was offered his first permanent academic position as a full professor at the University of Zurich. But he declined the offer, at first, because the pay was lower than his salary at the patent office.
It was only after the university raised their offer that Einstein accepted, says Einstein: His Life and Universe
In 1910, Einstein and Marić had their second son, whom they named Eduard Einstein. By that point, despite Einstein’s growing fame within the scientific community, the couple’s relationship was getting rocky.
In 1912, Einstein began an affair with his cousin and childhood friend Elsa Löwenthal, who would later become his second wife.
Source: Encyclopedia
Somehow, despite his rocky relationship and the start of World War I, Einstein managed to develop one of the greatest contributions to science of the 20th century: his General Theory of Relativity, which he introduced in 1915.
This new theory, which allowed for a broader application of his Special Theory of Relativity, introduced the counter-intuitive concept that space and time were not separate entities but a single element, which he called spacetime.
But there was a problem.
While Einstein’s genius lay with his thought experiments that challenged conventional science, he struggled to think of a way to prove his General Theory of Relativity through experimentation and observation.
In 1917, Sir Frank Watson Dyson conceived of a way: measure the apparent position of stars near the sun.
But this could only be done during a rare event called a total solar eclipse, when the sun’s light is obstructed by the moon. (Without an eclipse, the bright sun would otherwise drown out the light from the nearby stars, making them impossible to observe.)
If Einstein was right, the stars near the sun at the time of the eclipse would appear in a slightly different location from normal because the sun’s gravity would warp the spacetime around it, bending the starlight’s path, and therefore changing the apparent position of the star, explained Wired.
Sir Arthur Eddington performed the experiment during a total solar eclipse in 1919, proving Einstein right and making him an instant celebrity over night.
Later in life, Einstein’s second-son Eduard once asked why his father was so famous. Einstein replied:
When a blind beetle crawls over the surface of a curved branch, it doesn’t notice that the track it has covered is indeed curved. I was lucky enough to notice what the beetle didn’t notice.
By that point, Einstein was fairly confident that he would eventually win the Nobel Prize in Physics.
And to convince Marić to sign the divorce papers, which she was at first reluctant to do, Einstein offered her all of the money that came with the Nobel prize, if he were to win. Back then, the prize winnings were 37 times more than she earned in a year. She accepted his offer. Less than four months after his divorce, Einstein married Elsa.
Sure enough, Einstein won the 1921 Nobel Prize for Physics “for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect,” which transformed the way physicists understand the behaviour of light and, ultimately, the nature of the universe.
Einstein did not win for either of his relativity theories, as is the common misconception. All of his earnings went to Marić and their two sons.
So, in 1921 and 1922, Einstein gave lectures on his theories around the world including Palestine, Japan, the US, France, and elsewhere. Everywhere he went, he was greeted with cheering crowds.
He was mostly alone in the endeavour to discover a theory of everything because scientists were busy delving into quantum mechanics, a field that Einstein himself had helped develop.
But Einstein did not like the incompleteness of quantum mechanics theory and therefore searched for something grander that would tie the four leading physics fields — electricity, magnetism, quantum mechanics, and gravity — together.
And this time, when Einstein was ready to introduce his unified theory, the entire world was watching. In 1929, he published his first crack at a theory of everything and was subsequently featured on the cover of Time magazine — the first of five appearances on Time.
But the theory he introduced had holes that other scientists quickly surfaced, indicating that it was not the theory for which Einstein endlessly sought to the end of his life.
In April, 1933 Germany’s new government passed a law that prevented Jews from holding any official positions — including academic ones.
For the following few months, Einstein was unemployed. He eventually emigrated to the US in October 1933 where he took a position at Princeton University, but not before writing letters to countries asking that they take in unemployed German-Jewish scientists. His letters reportedly saved over 1,000 individuals.
Two years later, Einstein applied for US citizenship, eventually earning it in 1940.
After Einstein moved to New Jersey, he soon became aware of the separate schools and theaters for blacks and whites. These blatantly racist elements of the American culture was what Einstein called the country’s “worst disease”, as the book Einstein on Race and Racism explains.
To counteract racism in America, Einstein openly befriended African Americans such as actor Paul Robeson and opera star Mariam Anderson, and publicly encouraged the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
But there was another problem that Einstein was aware of by the late ’30s: nuclear fission.
Einstein warned President Franklin D. Roosevelt that a massive nuclear chain reaction involving uranium could lead to the construction of “extremely powerful bombs of a new type” — the atomic bomb.
“A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory,” Einstein wrote to Roosevelt. He later met with the president in person to discuss the prospect of a nuclear bomb in more detail.
Two years later, and after multiple letters from Einstein, the US created the “Manhattan Project,” America’s plan to design and build the most devastating weapons ever produced up to that time.
Einstein was denied clearance to work on the Manhattan Project by the U.S. Army Intelligence office who deemed him a potential security risk. And the scientists on the project were forbidden to speak with him.
He admitted later in life that he would have never signed that letter to Roosevelt if he knew the Germans would have failed in their attempts to build an atomic bomb.
On April 17, 1955, Einstein suffered an abdominal aortic aneurysm and was taken to the University Medical Center in Princeton, New Jersey.
He refused treatment by saying, “It is tasteless to prolong life artificially. I have done my share, it is time to go. I will do it elegantly.” The next morning, at the age of 76, Einstein died in his sleep, as Postcards from the Brain Museum explains.
According to Brian Burrell, author of “Postcards from the Brain Museum,”Einstein did not want his brain to be studied or worshipped.”
However, Thomas Harvey, a doctor on call at the hospital took Einstein’s brain without permission and carved it into 240 pieces in order to further study the scientists’ unique brain.
Einstein’s brain is currently located at Princeton University Medical Center.
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