Albert Einstein was so smart that scientists
studied his brain after he died to figure out why. He was such an icon that Time magazine
named him “person of the century” in 1999. But despite his fame, the world’s
best-known scientist had his secrets. The FBI kept a clandestine file on him. And he had an illegitimate
child, to name just two. This is the story of Albert Einstein in full. Einstein was born in Ulm in
southwestern Germany on March 14, 1879. The family moved to Munich just a few weeks
later where he grew up with his younger sister. When he was five years old, he fell ill one day,
his father gave him a compass to cheer him up. Einstein was amazed that the needle always pointed to the magnetic north no matter
which way he turned the compass. In his Autobiographical Notes, he recalled:
“I can still remember—or at least believe I can remember—that this experience made
a deep and lasting impression upon me. Something deeply hidden had to be behind things.” So began a lifelong fascination with physics. He later said that if he hadn’t become
a physicist he’d probably be a musician. He loved music, especially Mozart
sonatas, and played the violin. Unlike many geniuses, Einstein
wasn’t a child prodigy. He didn’t speak full sentences until he
was five, according to his biographers. His parents were understandably worried. But when
he got into school, Einstein came into his own. His family was Jewish but he attended a Catholic
elementary school where he excelled as a student. There was a rumor going around that he flunked
math but to the contrary, Einstein said that he had already mastered differential and
integral calculus before the age of 15. For a while, his father, Hermann, ran a small
electrochemical plant but he struggled to keep it going. Eventually, he moved his family to
Italy in the hopes of finding new opportunities. Young Albert stayed behind to finish high school. He hated school where success depended
on memorization and obeying authority. He was a rebel and apparently threw
temper tantrums. One exasperated teacher even said he would never amount to
anything. Einstein dropped out at age 15. He also renounced his German citizenship which
got him out of mandatory military service. For a few years, he belonged to no
country, and loathed nationalism, preferring to be a citizen of the world. When he did eventually become
a citizen again, it was Swiss. When he moved to Switzerland, he tried to
get admitted to the prestigious Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. He did well in the math
and physics section of the entrance exam but is said to have done horribly in language, zoology,
and botany. It didn’t help that the exam was in French. So he didn’t get in and instead, continued
his high school studies. He was a good student, scoring the highest possible grade of 6 in
many subjects, including in math and physics. With this under his belt, he was
automatically admitted to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, where
he had originally flunked the entrance exam. He enrolled in a four-year
teaching program in math and physics. That’s where he met his future wife Mileva Maric
- the only female student in his physics class. Einstein’s private letters discovered
in the eighties caused a sensation because they revealed the couple had a child out
of wedlock, a daughter named Lieserl. According to their correspondence, Lieserl was born
in 1902, a year before her parents married. She was cared for by her mother while staying
with her family in her native Serbia while Einstein worked in Switzerland. Maric would
later join Einstein without the child. It’s unclear what happened to their daughter.
Historians believe she either died in infancy, probably from scarlet fever or
was given up for adoption.
Maric and Einstein would have
two sons after they married. The eldest, Hans Albert, said
Einstein wasn’t a good father, remarking: “Probably the only
project he ever gave up on was me.” In 1901, Einstein received his diploma to teach
physics and math. But, he struggled to find an academic position after two years of searching. He
is said to have even applied to teach high school. Eventually, he worked at the Swiss
patent office in Bern for seven years. This job would be a blessing in
disguise. It wasn’t mentally challenging, and he found that when he was done
evaluating patents for the day, he could use the rest of his time to work
on scientific research - his real passion. 1905 was Einstein’s year of miracles. He
wrote four papers in a German scientific journal that changed the way we see the universe. I’ll try to explain them as simply as
possible. Einstein is believed to have said: “If you can't explain it simply, you
don't understand it well enough.” The first was his theory of light. Physicists
at the time believed light was a wave. But it didn’t make sense that light could
create an electric current. Einstein proposed that light was actually made up of a stream
of particles called photons, and these photons could knock an electron off an atom to create
a current. This is the Photoelectric Effect. His second paper made a case for the existence
of atoms. He observed what seemed like the random movement of particles in water and
reasoned that it’s not so random if the water is actually made up of invisible atoms
that cause the particles to jiggle. This was called Brownian Motion after the botanist Robert
Brown who had observed the phenomenon earlier. His third and most famous discovery is his
Special Theory of Relativity. In which it’s impossible to say if two events occurred at the
same time if those events are separated in space. A, B, and C all happen at the same time, however, they appear to occur in a different order
depending on the location of the observer. Or let’s say someone in London starts running
at the same time as someone in New York. They would appear to start running
at different times if the observer is on a plane flying between London and New York. Relativity is the basis of the
world’s most famous formula. E = mc squared. His fourth paper gave us this equation which shows how energy equals mass times
the speed of light squared. In case you’re feeling somewhat intellectually
challenged at this point, Einstein once said: “Do not worry about your
difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.” So under the right conditions, energy can
become mass and mass can become energy. Here’s an example. Take a paper clip. To
find out how much energy is inside of it, you’d multiply its mass by
the speed of light squared. If you could turn every one of the atoms in this
paper clip into pure energy leaving no mass, then this paper clip would be as powerful
as the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Indeed, physicists began to consider whether his equation might actually
make an atomic bomb possible. As Einstein gained greater prestige,
his wife gained more household work. Maric was also passionate about math and
science but gave up her own ambitions to care for their children. There is
even some evidence she helped her husband develop some of the concepts in his
famous papers. In Einstein’s letters to her, he referenced “...bringing our work on
relative motion to a successful conclusion!" The papers would transform him from an unknown
patent office to a renowned genius. He would go on to teach physics at universities in
Prague, Zurich, and Berlin where he reacquired German citizenship and spent his time during
World War I. War, by the way, disgusted him. Although his professional life was going well,
his personal life suffered. Einstein would write to his first love. Marie Winteler whom he met
as a teenager. He spilled his heart to her, saying how much he missed her and how he
thought of her whenever he had a free moment. It was perhaps no surprise when he
and his wife eventually split up. Maric took the boys back to Zurich
while Einstein remained in Berlin. They divorced in 1919 and immediately after,
Einstein married his first cousin, Elsa Lowenthal, with whom he had been having an affair for years.
He would later end up cheating on Elsa as well. As part of the divorce agreement with Maric she
would receive money from a Nobel prize if he were ever to win one. And he did, in 1921, for his
theory of light - not his theory of relativity. There was something about his relativity
theory that kept nagging at him because it didn’t acknowledge the existence of gravity.
So he tinkered with it for ten years before coming up with his General Theory of
Relativity which completed the picture. 200 years before Einstein, Sir
Isaac Newton provided the world with insight into gravity but
didn’t explain how it worked. How is it that the sun pulls on the Earth? Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity
says something heavy, like the sun, causes a warp or a dent in space. The
Earth is impacted by the dent and rolls around the sun like a marble rolling
in a bowl - in other words, orbits. His theory also suggested that light from
another star would be bent by the sun’s gravity. If this were true, then starlight passing
by the sun would be bent so that we on Earth would think that the apparent location of
the star is different than it really is. This theory was considered to be preposterous
at the time and could only be proven during a total solar eclipse when the moon
blocks out the bright light of the sun. And that’s exactly what happened in 1919. English astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington
traveled to the coast of West Africa to photograph the total solar eclipse. The
sun had in fact deflected the light. Recently, Einstein was proved right once again. Stanford University astrophysicists saw
light behind a black hole for the first time which is strange because black holes
have such a strong gravitational pull that light cannot escape them. The
reason we can see light is that the black hole is warping space and bending
light as predicted by general relativity. Einstein became a celebrity overnight. Instantly
recognizable thanks to immense press coverage even though his theory meant very
little to the average person. The world needed something to celebrate
after a long and horrifying war. He began traveling abroad,
going to Asia, the Middle East, and the U.S. where he gave lectures
at Columbia University and Princeton. He published an essay on his first
impression of America in 1921, noting: “What strikes a visitor is
the joyous, positive attitude to life. The American is friendly, self-confident,
optimistic, and without envy." He would make more trips to the U.S., and
while on one of these visits, in early 1933, he came to the stark realization that
he could never return to Germany. The Nazis had come to power under Adolf Hitler
and Einstein was everything the dictator hated. He was Jewish, he was part of the
intelligentsia, and he was a pacifist. A German magazine listed him as an
enemy of the regime with the caption: Not Yet Hanged and reportedly put
a $5,000 price tag on his head. When he returned to Europe, he went to
Belgium where he renounced his German citizenship. He then traveled to England.
Einstein had offers to teach at Oxford and several European universities
but chose to emigrate to the U.S. He took up a faculty position at the Institute
for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey where he remained for the rest of his life. Many
prestigious American universities like Harvard and Yale had very few Jewish faculty or students
back then as a result of discriminatory quotas. By the time he had arrived in the U.S., his
best scientific research was already behind him. Nothing would trump his theory of
relativity or his other earlier work. He tried and failed to find one equation
to explain all of the forces of nature. Despite the stability he found at the research
institution, life wasn’t always easy for Einstein. His younger son Eduard was diagnosed with
schizophrenia and suffered his first breakdown. His wife Elsa suffered from a painful
illness that would take her life in 1936. And to his horror, scientists began to look at whether his equation E = mc squared
could in fact make an atomic bomb. Einstein detested war. He had dedicated much
of his time to writing about peace. However, despite being a pacifist, he was alarmed by the
rise of fascism and signed a letter to President Roosevelt in 1939, warning him that the Nazis
were working on an atomic bomb. This led Roosevelt to set up the Manhattan Project - the secret
American-led effort to develop an atomic weapon. Einstein’s formula was key to its success. But he wasn’t involved with it himself because the
FBI didn’t trust him. Washington considered him a security risk because of his association with
the peace movement and socialist organizations. The FBI kept tabs on him - they had a
dossier that grew to over 1,400 files. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover even
recommended he be kept out of America under the Alien Exclusion Act though this
was overruled by the State Department. Einstein was also a civil rights activist. As a Jewish scientist who
experienced anti-Semitism in Germany, he was taken back by racial
segregation in the U.S. In 1946 he traveled to Lincoln University,
a small university in Pennsylvania that was the first to grant degrees to blacks.
He gave a speech in which he called racism “...a disease of white people.
I do not intend to be quiet about it.” Yet, it appears, he was not immune to
the disease. His private diaries would reveal prejudiced attitudes toward other
races. In the 1920s he traveled throughout Asia and wrote that the Chinese were an
“industrious, filthy, obtuse people.” “It would be a pity if these
Chinese supplant all other races. For the likes of us the mere
thought is unspeakably dreary.” These words are in stark
contrast to his public image. In 1940, Einstein became a
citizen of the United States. His commitment to the cause of peace led him to
champion the creation of a one-world government. He initially rejected the idea of a Jewish
state on the grounds of detesting nationalism. However, after seeing the persecution of
Jews in Europe, he promoted the Zionist cause of a Jewish nation even though
he was personally torn over the issue. Einstein would say: “My relationship to the
Jewish people has become my strongest human bond” though he wasn’t religious, he didn’t believe in a personal God
and preferred to be called an agnostic. The State of Israel was created in 1948. And in 1952, Israel’s prime minister David
Ben-Gurion offered Einstein the post of president. Einstein declined, explaining that
he had spent his life dealing with objective matters and lacked the aptitude
and experience of dealing with people. He was smart enough to know his own shortcomings. On April 17, 1955, Einstein checked himself
into Princeton Hospital in New Jersey after his abdominal aortic aneurysm burst. The aorta
is the largest blood vessel in the body. He had previously had surgery on it. This time, he refused surgery, saying it was tasteless to prolong
life. And that it was time to go. He died the next day, mumbling a few words in
German before taking his last breath. The nurse on duty didn’t understand German and couldn’t
repeat it so what he said is lost to history. Einstein’s remains were cremated and his ashes scattered in a secret spot
along the Delaware River. Those ashes didn’t include his brain. A pathologist named Thomas Harvey
removed his brain so that scientists could try to figure out why he was so intelligent. But he did so without permission! After Einstein’s family members found out, he eventually got the okay to use
the brain for scientific research. Einstein’s brain was found to be missing a
bordering region called the lateral sulcus which researchers believe may have led neurons
in this part of the brain to communicate better. Scientists also believe his neurons used up
more energy because his brain was found to have a higher percentage of glial cells that
nourish, support, and protect the neurons. The pathologist then cut up the brain into pieces, stored it into jars preserved in
formaldehyde, and kept it in his basement. Today, the most celebrated brain in the world is
in pieces at The Mütter Museum in Philadelphia. It’s hard to fathom what Einstein
would think of all this attention. He specifically wanted to be cremated so
that people wouldn’t worship his body. But worshipped he is. The 99th element
of the periodic table is named after him. Einsteinium was discovered
shortly after his death. Albert Einstein lives on as one
of the smartest people in history who changed the way we view and
understand the world and the universe. He was influential in supporting so
many other causes besides science. He lived an extraordinary life. Wouldn’t it be incredible if all of
Einstein’s lectures were available online? Right now, there is a new way of learning
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like what you saw, give it a like, and don't forget to subscribe to my
channel. For Newsthink, I’m Cindy Pom.
