Albert Einstein Facts

Albert Einstein Facts:
 ”Before God we are all equally wise – and equally foolish” ….Albert Einstein.

 1. HE WAS BORN WITH A LARGE HEAD:

When this genius was born, he was so fat and his head was so large, that his mother  actually thought he was born deformed! Of course, he came back to normal size  within a few months.

2. DID NOT TALK TILL HE WAS 3:

Albert Einstein is called by many the smartest man to have ever lived, but he had a  great deal of difficulty in his early childhood development. Some have wondered if  he suffered from ‘Asperger’s syndrome’ a high function type of autism. But such  speculation is exactly that, speculation. But we do know that he did not learn to  speak until he was three years old and even at the age of nine he is said to have  spoken hesitantly and with uncertainty. This later information could have been a  result of his dislike of this school system, (he went through several and never  seemed to enjoy any of them), and his tendency towards introspection and  thoughtfulness. If nothing else Albert Einstein is a good example of why being a late bloomer isn’t such a bad thing.

3. HIS WORK LARGELY WENT UNNOTICED AFTER THE WAR:

While Einstein gained a lot of popular attention for his eccentricity and public image as a member of the scientific community behind the discovery of the atomic bomb, and while most people knew the sight of his unkempt hair style and that he did not own a pair of socks, his work in the later part of his life, went largely unexamined until recently. Einstein had been working on a Unified field theory, (it involved gravity and electromagnetism being solved by one set of equations), and would do so until he died, but from 1920 onwards he also began to concentrate on quantum theory. Most people will have heard of this area of theoretical physics by now, (if not in class then in any number of Hollywood movies that have exploited it), but the work was neglected until very recently and is now at the centre of the discipline being considered alongside such high sounding things as ‘superstring theory.’

4. HE FAILED HIS UNIVERSITY ENTRANCE EXAM:

In 1895, at the age of 17, Einstein, one of the greatest minds ever born actually failed his university entrance exam into the Swiss Federal Polytechnical School. Actually he passed the Science and the Math sections, but failed in the rest of it like History and Geography. When asked later about this, he said that they were too boring and he didn’t feel like answering them correctly!.

5. PRESIDENT OF ISRAEL:

Here’s a good one. It is largely believed that in 1952 Israel asked Albert Einstein to become Prime Minister. In fact Einstein was asked by the Prime Minister, Ben Gurion, to become Israel’s Second President since it’s foundation in 1948, asking him ‘whether you would accept the Presidency of Israel if it were offered you by a vote of the Knesset.’ Albert, a Jew but not an Israeli citizen, declined the offer saying that while he was honored he was also sad and ashamed to say he could not accept it. There are various reports as to why he turned it down, but by and large they come down to his disinterest at taking on such responsibility, or joining the stress of the political world. After all his entire life had been spent fascinated by physics and the pursuit of scientific answers, his causes and ideology were a necessity brought on by the urgency of his time for good men to say wise words.

6. THE SECRET BEHIND HIS GENIUS:

After Einstein’s death in 1955, his brain was removed from his head by Thomas Stoltz Harvey for research purposes. But this was done illegally. Later Einstein’s son Hans Albert Einstein gave him permission to research on the genius brain. Harvey sent slices of Einstein’s brain to various scientists throughout the world.

From these studies it was discovered that Einstein’s brain had much more glial cells, the cells responsible for synthesizing information, in his brain than an average human being. Also, Einstein’s brain lacked a certain wrinkle in it, called Sylvian fissure. This allowed easier communication of nerve cells with each other. Furthermore, his brain was denser and the inferior parietal lobe associated with mathematical ability was much larger.

7. MARRIED HIS COUSIN:

A number of famous people have married their cousins including Jesse James, Franklin Roosevelt, H.G Wells and Charles Darwin. But so did Einstein and he did so with gusto. His first wife, Melvia Maric, (married in January 1903), was a Serbian woman and has been described as having more of an intellectual partnership with Einstein. He had two sons by her. He married his second wife, Elsa Lowenthal, about four months after divorcing Maric who had been living separately for five years. Elsa had nursed Einstein through an illness and this might have led to his affection for her. In any case she was his first cousin on his mother’s side, but also his second cousin on his father’s side making him her cousin two times over on both sides of the family!

“Einstein said that the hardest thing in the world to understand is income tax” .