Albert Einstein

• 1. Introduction

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  When Albert Einstein was five and sick in bed, his father brought him a compass. The trembling needle, always pointing the same way, convinced the boy that "Something deeply hidden had to be behind things." That conviction never left him. Born on the 14th of March 1879 in Ulm, a subject of the Kingdom of Wurttemberg, he would become "perhaps the world's first celebrity scientist." His mass-energy equivalence formula has been called "the world's most famous equation." Yet the man behind it failed an entrance exam, worried his parents with how slowly he learned to talk, and spent his early career examining patents for gravel sorters in a Bern office. How does a fractious schoolboy who renounced one citizenship after another arrive at a new idea of space and time? Why did the architect of relativity spend his final decades fighting the very physics he helped create? And what made a self-described pacifist sign a letter urging the United States to build a bomb? The answers run through patent offices, eclipse expeditions, dinner with a film star, and a brain removed without his family's permission.

• 2. The Mathematical Child

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  At twelve, Einstein began teaching himself algebra, calculus and Euclidean geometry. He discovered an original proof of the Pythagorean theorem before his thirteenth birthday. His family tutor, Max Talmud, gave him a geometry textbook and watched in astonishment. The boy "had worked through the whole book," Talmud recalled, and the "flight of his mathematical genius was so high I could not follow." By fourteen, Einstein recorded, he had "mastered integral and differential calculus." Talmud also handed the thirteen-year-old Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, which became his favorite work. "Kant's works, incomprehensible to ordinary mortals, seemed to be clear to him," Talmud said. Formal schooling, by contrast, repelled him. He attended St. Peter's Catholic elementary school in Munich from the age of five, then the Luitpold Gymnasium. He later wrote that the school's strict rote learning was harmful to creativity. When his family's electrical company failed its 1894 bid to light Munich and moved to Italy, the fifteen-year-old was left behind to finish his schooling. A doctor's letter secured his release at the end of December 1894, and he rejoined his family in Pavia. In Italy he wrote an essay titled "On the Investigation of the State of the Ether in a Magnetic Field," a foreshadowing of the entity he would later declare superfluous.

• 3. A Patent Clerk's Year

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  Patent applications that crossed Einstein's desk in Bern included a gravel sorter and an electric typewriter. He had taken the post as an assistant examiner, level III, after Swiss schools turned him down for nearly two years and his friend Marcel Grossmann's father intervened. His employers made the position permanent in 1903, though they withheld promotion until he had "fully mastered machine technology." The work may have shaped his greatest insight. He reached his ideas about space, time and light through thought experiments about the transmission of signals and the synchronization of clocks, the very matters that figured in inventions submitted for his assessment. In 1905, the year celebrated as his annus mirabilis, he published four papers in the journal Annalen der Physik. One paper on the photoelectric effect proposed that energy is exchanged only in discrete amounts. Another explained Brownian motion as firm evidence that molecules exist. A third, "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies," reconciled Maxwell's equations with mechanics and discredited the luminiferous ether. The fourth derived the equivalence of mass and energy. The year has been likened to Isaac Newton's miracle year of 1666. Einstein's relativity work remained controversial for years, but Max Planck was among the first leading physicists to accept it.

• 4. Wives, Lovers, And A Lost Daughter

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  Correspondence discovered and published in 1987 revealed a secret: Einstein and his first wife, the Serbian physicist Mileva Maric, had a daughter named Lieserl. She was born in early 1902 while Maric was visiting her parents in Novi Sad. When Maric returned to Switzerland, the child was gone. In a letter written in September 1903, Einstein suggested the girl was either given up for adoption or died of scarlet fever in infancy. Einstein and Maric married in January 1903 and had two sons, Hans Albert and Eduard. Even before Eduard's birth, Einstein wrote to an earlier love, Marie Winteler, calling his love for his wife "misguided." In 1912 he began a relationship with his cousin Elsa Lowenthal. Maric, learning of the infidelity after moving to Berlin, returned to Zurich with both sons. Their divorce, granted on the 14th of February 1919, included an unusual term: if Einstein won a Nobel Prize, the money would go to Maric. He won it two years later. He married Lowenthal in 1919, then began a relationship with a secretary, Betty Neumann, in 1923. Letters released by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2006 named still more women, among them a Berlin socialite and a wealthy widow, from whom he accepted gifts while married. His son Eduard, diagnosed with schizophrenia around the age of twenty, was eventually committed permanently to Burgholzli, the Psychiatric University Hospital in Zurich.

• 5. The Eclipse And The Headline

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  A total eclipse of the Sun on the 29th of May 1919 turned a physicist into a global icon. Observations by Sir Arthur Eddington of light bending around the Sun matched Einstein's calculations from general relativity, the theory he had completed by the fall of 1915. He had begun the journey in 1907 with his equivalence principle, the idea that an observer falling freely in a gravitational field would find no evidence the field exists. By modeling gravitation with the Riemann curvature tensor of a four-dimensional spacetime, he also explained the long-puzzling precession of the perihelion of Mercury. On the 7th of November 1919, The Times printed a banner headline: "Revolution in Science. New Theory of the Universe. Newtonian Ideas Overthrown." Fame followed Einstein across continents. He arrived in New York City on the 2nd of April 1921, welcomed by Mayor John Francis Hylan, and spent three weeks lecturing and attending receptions. In 1922 he toured Asia, met Emperor Yoshihito in Tokyo, and spent twelve days in Mandatory Palestine, where the British High Commissioner greeted him with a cannon salute. His 1916 prediction of gravitational waves would wait far longer for proof. Researchers at LIGO confirmed it on the 11th of February 2016, nearly one hundred years later.

• 6. Flight From The Reich

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  In February 1933, while visiting the United States, Einstein understood he could not return to Germany under Adolf Hitler. The Gestapo raided his Berlin apartment repeatedly that February and March. On the 28th of March, landing in Antwerp, he walked into the German consulate, surrendered his passport, and renounced his citizenship. The Nazis later sold his sailboat and turned his cottage into a Hitler Youth camp. That spring, new German laws barred Jews from university positions, and his works were burned by the German Student Union, with propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels proclaiming, "Jewish intellectualism is dead." One magazine listed him among enemies of the regime with the phrase "not yet hanged" and a $5,000 bounty. He found brief refuge in De Haan, Belgium, then in a secluded wooden cabin on Roughton Heath in Norfolk, where guards with shotguns watched over him. The Member of Parliament Oliver Locker-Lampson took him to meet Winston Churchill, and Einstein asked for help bringing Jewish scientists out of Germany. He wrote to Turkey's Prime Minister, Ismet Inonu, in September 1933; the resulting invitations eventually saved over a thousand individuals. On the 3rd of October 1933, he spoke on academic freedom at the Royal Albert Hall, then sailed for Princeton and the Institute for Advanced Study, where he would remain until his death.

• 7. The Letter And The Conscience

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  In July 1939, the refugee physicists Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner visited Einstein to explain the possibility of atomic bombs, something the pacifist said he had never considered. They feared German scientists might win the race to build such a weapon and that Hitler would willingly use it. Einstein agreed to lend his name, signing a letter with Szilard to President Franklin D. Roosevelt urging American nuclear research. The letter has been called "arguably the key stimulus" for the United States investigating nuclear weapons on the eve of its entry into the war, work later carried out as the Manhattan Project. The decision haunted him. In 1954, a year before his death, he told his friend Linus Pauling, "I made one great mistake in my life, when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be made; but there was some justification, the danger that the Germans would make them." In 1955 he and ten others, including Bertrand Russell, signed a manifesto warning of nuclear danger. His convictions ran beyond physics. In Princeton he joined the NAACP, called racism America's "worst disease," and offered to be a character witness for W. E. B. Du Bois, prompting the judge to drop the case. When the contralto Marian Anderson was refused a room at the Nassau Inn in 1937, Einstein invited her to stay at his house, and she did so on every return visit, the last just two months before he died.

• 8. Music, God, And A Vanished Brain

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  "If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician," Einstein wrote in his late journals. "I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music." His mother wanted him to learn the violin, and he began at five, though he disliked it until he discovered Mozart's violin sonatas at thirteen. At seventeen, a school examiner in Aarau heard him play Beethoven and called it "remarkable." He preferred Bach above all, once saying, "Give me Bach, rather, and then more Bach." He played chamber music with Max Planck and, near the end of his life, with the young Juilliard Quartet in Princeton. On matters of faith he resisted easy labels. He said he had sympathy for the impersonal pantheistic God of Baruch Spinoza, rejected belief in a personal god, and preferred to call himself an agnostic or a "deeply religious nonbeliever." In a 1954 letter to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, he called the Bible "a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends." Late in life he also embraced vegetarianism, writing in March 1954, "It almost seems to me that man was not born to be a carnivore." On the 17th of April 1955, he suffered internal bleeding from a ruptured aneurysm and refused surgery, saying, "It is time to go. I will do it elegantly." He died the next morning at age 76. During the autopsy, the pathologist Thomas Stoltz Harvey removed his brain without the family's permission, hoping a future neuroscience might explain his mind.