As a child Albert Einstein was a slow learner
and spoke very slowly. So much so that his parents actually feared he may have learning
difficulties. Thankfully, it turned out, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Here’s
some amazing facts you probably didn’t know about the man who spearheaded the theory of
relativity and the world’s most renowned genius. Albert Einstein was born in Ulm in Germany
on 14th March 1879. It is said that the story of Einstein’s brilliance started when he
was just four years old. His father gave him a magnetic pocket compass to play with. He
became obsessed with the way the needle seemed to move around as if by magic. It’s believed
that was the event from where Einstein’s deep passion for physics originated. Even
as an old man, Einstein wrote about the compass, saying “I can still remember...that this
experience made a deep and lasting impression on me. Something deeply hidden had to be behind
things.” Einstein became a professor at the Berlin
Academy of Sciences. However, in 1933 he was visiting America just as Hitler came into
power back in Einstein’s home country of Germany. Being born to Jewish parents he rightly
thought it would not be a good idea to return to Germany. The Nazis were so offended by
Einstein’s intellect that they burned all his books still remaining in Germany and included
him on a list of enemies of the Nazi state entitled “not yet hanged” and put a $5,000
bounty on his head. Einstein responded to the Nazis by calling their actions a “spontaneous
emotional outburst“ and stating that "more than anything else in the world, they fear
the influence of men of intellectual independence." Einstein was granted refugee status and became
a citizen of the United States of America, where he stayed for the remainder of his life. Einstein considered himself to be agnostic,
not an atheist. He criticised personal gods, i.e. gods that are believed to resemble a
human form. Einstein instead had pantheistic beliefs. Which is the idea that the universe
and nature itself, is equal to divinity, as apposed to an anthropomorphic, or human-like,
god. Einstein was well known for his iconic
shabby look. Which consisted of wild, uncombed hair and baggy, oversized clothes. Also he
never wore socks. He saw socks as unnecessary and got frustrated that whenever he wore socks
he got holes in them. He wouldn’t even wear socks or comb his hair when visiting the White
House. Also part of Einstein’s “look” was
his pipe. Einstein loved to smoke, whether it be cigarettes, cigars or his iconic pipe,
which was his favourite method of tobacco inhalation. When he walked between his house
and his office at Princeton University, he would almost always be seen leaving behind
a trail of smoke. Einstein once had the following to say on the matter: “I believe that pipe
smoking contributes to a somewhat calm and objective judgment in all human affairs.” It was well known by everyone that knew
him that Einstein had an incredibly bad memory. He couldn’t remember most people’s names
and couldn’t remember any phone numbers, including his own. In 1952, after Israel’s first President,
Israel Chaim Weizmann, died, Einstein was offered the position of Israel’s presidency,
because the Israelis believed him to be the greatest Jew alive. Einstein, then aged 73,
politely declined the offer. He said he lacked the “natural aptitude and the experience
to deal properly with people”. Einstein used to charge people for his
autograph then donate all the money to charity. Einstein was a prolific adulterer. During
his first marriage to Mileva Marić, Albert had at least six affairs with other women.
Knowing that his marriage was falling apart, Einstein made one final attempt at keeping
the marriage together, for the sake of this children. So what did he do exactly? He demanded
his wife signed a contract he drew up in order to maintain the impression that they were
a happily married couple. The contract included the following clauses: “You will make sure…
- that my clothes and laundry are kept in good order;
- that I will receive my three meals regularly in my room; You will renounce all personal relations with
me insofar as they are not completely necessary for social reasons. Specifically, you will
forego… - my sitting at home with you;
- my going out or traveling with you. You will obey the following points in your
relations with me… - you will not expect any intimacy from me,
nor will you reproach me in any way; - you will stop talking to me if I request
it; - you will leave my bedroom or study immediately
without protest if I request it.” Way to be tactful Albert. Amazingly his wife
actually agreed to the terms, after much persuasion. After he divorced Mileva Marić in 1919,
Einstein married his cousin, Elsa Loewenthal. She was very closely related to Einstein;
he was actually related to her on both sides of his family. They had played together as
kids but their romance didn’t flourish until later on in their lives. Einstein’s favourite hobbies were sailing
and playing the violin. But neither came close to his love for theoretical physics. Einstein
would play the violin to himself when he became stuck in the thinking process whilst practicing
physics. The prestigious Nobel Prize was awarded
to Albert Einstein in 1921. But not for his work on the theory of relativity. He actually
got it for his work on helping to discover the photoelectric effect. Which is the now,
well known phenomenon, that metals emit electrons when light is shined upon them. However all of Einstein’s Nobel Prize
money went to his ex-wife, Mileva, as a divorce settlement. About a week after Einstein died in 1955
at Princeton, before being cremated, an autopsy was performed on his body by Thomas Harvey,
a pathologist at Princeton University. He removed Einstein’s brain for study, which
he intended to kept permanently as a keepsake and personal research project. Harvey was
eventually fired from Princeton after refusing to hand over Einstein’s brain. After finding
it wasn’t any different to a normal brain, Harvey dissected it into over 200 pieces,
some of which he sent off to other researchers for examination. It was eventually discovered
that Einstein’s parietal lobes, the parts of the brain responsible for mathematical,
visual and spatial cognition, were 15% larger than the average person’s. Einstein’s brain was eventually transferred
and put on display at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia. His eye’s however were also
removed and handed to Henry Abrams, Einstein’s eye doctor. To this day they remain in a safe
deposit box in New York City. Einstein’s last words are not known
because he said them in German and the only person that heard them was a night nurse who
only spoke English. But all these facts pale in comparison
to the most amazing fact about Albert Einstein. In 1905 whilst working in Bern, Switzerland,
Einstein published a paper on his Special Theory of Relativity”. Which challenged
the world’s idea of how space and time behaves in the universe and set the tone of theoretical
physics for the next century, and counting. The ideas Einstein put forward in this revolutionary
paper had enormous consequences that completely changed the way we think about, mass, energy,
space and time. Oh and by the way, Einstein published
over 300 scientific papers over his lifetime. His paper on the Special Theory of Relativity
also included, what has become the most famous equation in the world, E=mc2, otherwise known
as the mass-energy equivalence. On a very basic level it is the concept that the mass
of any object is a measure of how much energy is contained within it. There were actually
numerous scientists who all claimed to have discovered the equation around the same time.
But it was eventually decided that Albert Einstein should be given the credit for it
as he put the most effort into its discovery. E=mc2 gave rise to the atomic bomb and
the nuclear arms race. Knowing that he was mostly responsible for causing the atomic
bomb’s eventual discovery, Einstein slipped into a period of great depression. He believed
himself to be a pacifist. In 1915, Einstein completed his General
Theory of Relativity, which implied the existence of black holes and gravitational waves and
many other things, up until which point had been nothing more than hypotheses. Together
with his Special Theory of Relativity, Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity formed the Theory
of Relativity. The cornerstone of modern physics and arguably the most important discovery
in physics of the past century. Sure the Theory of Relativity is used
every day by physicists in their increasingly complex endeavours. But its effects can be
seen in our everyday lives too. None of the following things would be possible without
Einstein’s two theories of relativity: GPS systems, televisions, nuclear power plants,
remote control devices, lasers, DVD-players and many others. Oh and I nearly forgot to
mention, the universe itself.
