Albert Einstein is known as the greatest genius, mathematician and physicist. But how many of you know that as a toddler, he struggled with speech and needed therapy for the same? Taking you through some interesting episodes from the life of the genius scientist…
Making of a Prodigy
When Albert was four, his mother learnt that he was gifted with the understanding of mechanics. She introduced him to the world of music that helped him broaden his mind. When Einstein was 10 years old, he started educating himself under the guidance of his uncle Jakob Einstein, who bought the boy books for his school years much in advance. This way Albert managed to read them before the classes started and get good grades without active participation in classroom sessions. By the age of 12, much to his mother’s wonder, he was considered to be a Maths and Science prodigy and before he was 15 he had mastered differential and integral calculus.
From a Clerk to a Professor
Though Einstein was good in his academics, his rebellious personality and bunking classes, made his professors give him low recommendations for his graduation. He spent two years searching for an academic position but had to settle for the job of a clerk at the Swiss patent office in Bern. But this job gave him enough of time for writing and conducting research. In 1905, he published four revolutionary articles that introduced his famous equation E=mc2 and the theory of special relativity. Despite this distinction, he got a full professorship job only in 1909.
Genius of Albert Einstein
In 1915, Einstein published his theory of general relativity, which stated that gravitational fields cause distortions in the fabric of space and time. But it remained controversial until May 1919, when a total solar eclipse provided the proper conditions to test its claim that a supermassive object—in this case the sun would cause a measurable curve in the starlight passing by it. English astronomer Arthur Eddington journeyed to the coast of West Africa and photographed the eclipse, to confirm that the sun’s gravity had deflected the light by roughly 1.7 arc-seconds, exactly as predicted by general relativity. The news made Einstein an overnight celebrity.
The Genius Brain for Research
Einstein died in April 1955 from an abdominal aortic aneurysm. After his death, pathologist Thomas Harvey removed his famous brain during his autopsy and kept it aside for research. Harvey had the brain cut into pieces and sent to various scientists for research. Though a handful of studies were done, most have either been dismissed or discredited. The only one study that became famous was done by a team from a Canadian university which published a controversial paper in 1999 claiming Einstein possessed unusual folds on his parietal lobe – a part of the brain associated with mathematical and spatial ability.
-Team ScienceNow
