Albert Einstein did not speak until he was three years old. His teachers found him slow.
One called him "mentally slow, unsociable, and adrift forever in his foolish dreams."
In 1905 — working as a third-class patent clerk in Bern, Switzerland —
he published four papers that rewrote physics. Any one of them would have made a career.
Together, they changed everything.
He did not arrive at his discoveries through calculation alone. His method was imagination.
He called them thought experiments. He imagined riding alongside a beam of light.
He imagined an elevator falling in free space. The mathematics came after — to confirm
what intuition had already told him was true.
Einstein was also a deeply political man. He fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and never returned.
He was a pacifist who nonetheless signed the letter urging Roosevelt to develop the atomic bomb —
a decision that haunted his final years. He was offered the presidency of Israel and declined.
The FBI kept a file on him for decades.
He played the violin. He loved sailing, even though he couldn't swim and refused to learn.
He was married twice, had complicated relationships with his sons, and was devoted to his
sister Maja until her death. He died in Princeton in 1955, having refused surgery,
saying: "I want to go when I want. It is tasteless to prolong life artificially."
