📖 Chapter 4: A Truly Beautiful Mind

Heading	Paragraph Number(s)
(i) Einstein's equation	9
(ii) Einstein meets his future wife	7
(iii) The making of a violinist	3
(iv) Mileva and Einstein's mother	10
(v) A letter that launched the arms race	15
(vi) A desk drawer full of ideas	8
(vii) Marriage and divorce	11

(i) He was boring.
His playmates called him "Brother Boring."

(ii) He was stupid and would never succeed in life.
A headmaster once told his father that what Einstein chose as a profession wouldn't matter, because "he'll never make a success at anything."

(iii) He was a freak.
His mother thought Albert was a freak because his head seemed much too large.

(i) Einstein leaving the school in Munich for good.
Einstein hated the school's regimentation and often clashed with his teachers. At the age of 15, he felt so stifled there that he left the school for good.

(ii) Einstein wanting to study in Switzerland rather than in Munich.
Einstein wanted to study in Switzerland because the city was more liberal than Munich. The University in Zurich was one of the few in Europe where women could get degrees, and the atmosphere was freer.

(iii) Einstein seeing in Mileva an ally.
Einstein saw in Mileva an ally against the "philistines" — those people in his family and at the university with whom he was constantly at odds. She was a "clever creature" who shared his intellectual interests.

(iv) What do these tell you about Einstein?
These tell us that Einstein was a non-conformist who valued freedom of thought. He was rebellious against rigid discipline, loved intellectual companionship, and was willing to go against social norms.

Answer: Einstein called his desk drawer at the patent office the "bureau of theoretical physics." He called it so because while he was supposed to be assessing other people's inventions, he was actually developing his own ideas in secret.

Answer: Einstein wrote a letter to Franklin Roosevelt to warn him that the Nazis might build and use an atomic bomb. He warned that "a single bomb of this type exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory."

Answer: Einstein was deeply shaken by the extent of the destruction caused by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He wrote a public missive to the United Nations, proposing the formation of a world government.

Answer: The world remembers Einstein as a "world citizen" because after the destruction caused by the atomic bomb, he got increasingly involved in politics. He agitated for an end to the arms buildup and used his popularity to campaign for peace and democracy. He was celebrated as a visionary and world citizen as much as a scientific genius.

Correct chronological order:

• [1] Einstein is born in the German city of Ulm. (14 March 1879)
• [2] Einstein attends a high school in Munich.
• [3] Tired of the school's regimentation, Einstein withdraws from school.
• [4] Einstein's family moves to Milan.
• [5] Einstein joins a university in Zurich, where he meets Mileva.
• [6] He works in a patent office as a technical expert. (1902)
• [7] Einstein publishes his special theory of relativity. (1905)
• [8] He provides a new interpretation of gravity. (1915)
• [9] He is awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. (1921)
• [10] When Hitler comes to power, Einstein leaves Germany for the United States. (1933)
• [11] Einstein writes a letter to U.S. President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and warns against Germany's building of an atomic bomb. (1939)
• [12] Einstein dies. (1955)

1. A few years later, the marriage faltered. (failed, broke, became weak)

2. Einstein was constantly at odds with people at the university. (on bad terms, in disagreement, unhappy)

3. The newspapers proclaimed his work as "a scientific revolution." (declared, praised, showed)

4. Einstein got ever more involved in politics, agitating for an end to the arms buildup. (campaigning, fighting, supporting)

5. At the age of 15, Einstein felt so stifled that he left the school for good. (permanently, for his benefit, for a short time)

6. Five years later, the discovery of nuclear fission in Berlin had American physicists in an uproar. (in a state of commotion, full of criticism, in a desperate state)

7. Science wasn't the only thing that appealed to the dashing young man with the walrus moustache. (interested, challenged, worried)

1. Working round the clock, the firefighters finally put out the fire.

2. She watched the sunset above the mountain, noticing the colours blending softly into one another.

3. The excited horse pawed the ground rapidly, neighing continually.

4. Having taken the wrong train, I found myself in Bangalore, instead of Benaras.

5. Not having bathed for two days, I was desperate to get to the bathroom.

6. The stone steps, worn down, needed to be replaced.

7. The actor received hundreds of letters from his fans, asking him to send them his photograph.

Student Unearthes Einstein Manuscript

21 August 2005. An original handwritten Albert Einstein manuscript has been unearthed at a university in the Netherlands.

The manuscript was discovered by a student named Rowdy Boeynik at the University of the Netherlands. He found it while researching papers belonging to an old friend of Einstein. The papers bore the fingerprints of Einstein himself.

The document is a 16-page manuscript dated 1924. It contains Einstein's work on his last theory concerning the behaviour of atoms at low temperature. This work is now known as the Bose-Einstein condensation.

The manuscript will be kept at Leyden University, the same university where Einstein received the Nobel Prize.

Paragraph 1:
In 1931 Charlie Chaplin invited Albert Einstein, who was visiting Hollywood, to a private screening of his new film, City Lights. As the two men drove into town together, passersby waved and cheered. Chaplin turned to his guest and explained: "The people are applauding you because none of them understands you and applauding me because everybody understands me."

Paragraph 2:
One of Einstein's colleagues asked him for his telephone number one day. Einstein reached for a telephone directory and looked it up. "You don't remember your own number?" the man asked, startled.

"No," Einstein answered. "Why should I memorise something I can so easily get from a book?" (In fact, Einstein claimed never to memorise anything which could be looked up in less than two minutes.)