Albert
Einstein (1879-1955) was unquestionably one of the greatest thinkers of
all time, and an Einstein is still widely used as a synonym for a genius.
Einsteinium, a man-made radioactive element, was named for the physicist
in 1953 by its American discoverer Albert Ghiorso, who formed it in the
laboratory after it had been detected among the debris of the first H-bomb
explosion the year before. Einstein’s genius wasn’t apparent in his early
years. Born in Ulm, Germany, he had been regarded as a dullard and even
“slow, perhaps retarded” in his first years at school there. The same
opinion may have been shared by his parents, for he did not learn to walk
until a relatively late age, not begin to talk until he was past three.
The backward boy, always something of a loner and mystic, developed an
interest in mathematics in his youth, however, and slowly began to assert
himself. Einstein was graduated from the Polytechnic Institute of Zurich
and took employment with the Swiss Patent Office, devoting all his spare
time to pure science. In 1905, at age 26, his genius suddenly,
inexplicably, burst into full bloom with three discoveries in theoretical
physics that included his revolutionary theory of relativity, which
reshaped the modern world. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1921 – but
not specifically for his theory, which few understood at the time.
Stripped of his German citizenship in 1934 because of his Jewish origin,
Einstein became an American citizen, appointed as a member of the
Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey. Ironically, his
famous E = mc2 formula, energy equals mass times the square of the speed
of light, came to be practically applied in the first atomic bomb. For,
though his letter to President Roosevelt led to this country’s development
of the weapon. Einstein had been a lifetime humanitarian and pacifist,
only fears of Nazi world dominion causing him to write his appeal. He
protested the bombing of Hiroshima and in his remaining years crusaded for
the abolition of atomic weapons. It is probable that no other scientist,
not even Copernicus, or Newton, or Darwin, so profoundly revolutionized
scientific thought.