1. Einstein was a slow learner in childhood. He was also slow in learning how to speak. His parents even consulted a doctor.
2. He had a rebellious nature towards authority from the beginning. Once, his headmaster had expelled him, but in the end these traits helped make him a genius.
3. Once, his father gave him a compass at age five, and he puzzled over the nature of magnetic field for rest of his life.
4. He was curious about things like Space and time from beginning and his slow verbal development may be the reason behind it.
 |
| Albert Einstein in childhood |
6. His power lies in visual experiments performed in his head rather than experiments performed in the lab. He used the language of nature which is maths to visualize the equations in realities. So for many years he wrestled with this thought experiment until he came up with the special theory of relativity.
7. Einstein’s mother, Pauline, was an accomplished pianist and wanted her son to love music too, so she started him on violin lessons. At first, Einstein hated playing the violin. When Einstein was 13-years old, he quickly changed his mind about the violin when he heard the music of Mozart. With a new passion for playing, Einstein continued to play the violin until the last few years of his life.
8. He won the 1921 Nobel Prize for Physics. This alone isn’t particularly surprising. What is surprising is the fact that he didn’t receive it for the general or special theory of relativity, but rather for the photoelectric effect.
9. When Einstein attended college at the Polytechnic Institute in Zurich, Switzerland, he fell in love with sailing. He would often take a boat out onto a lake, pull out a notebook, relax, and think. Even though Einstein never learned to swim, he kept sailing as a hobby throughout his life.
10. Part of Einstein’s charm was his disheveled look. In addition to his uncombed hair, one of Einstein’s peculiar habits was to never wear socks. To Einstein, socks were a pain because they often would get holes in them.
11. Einstein loved to smoke. In 1950, after accepting a life membership in the Montreal Pipe Smokers Club, Einstein said he believed “that pipe smoking contributes to a somewhat calm and objective judgment in all human affairs.”
12. More than two decades after publishing his Special Theory of Relativity, Albert Einstein co-invented a refrigerator that operated on compressed gases. Einstein was moved to create the device after reading about a Berlin family killed by toxic fumes from their fridge. The Einstein-Szilard refrigerator was patented in 1930 but was soon overshadowed by freon-based compressors that were more efficient, but more damaging to the environment.
13. He loved to build houses of cards in childhood and once he build 14 stories high one!
14. After Einstein divorced his first wife, Mileva Maric, in 1919, he married his cousin, Elsa Loewenthal (nee Einstein).
15. Albert Einstein had a illegitimate child. In 1901, before Albert Einstein and Mileva Maric were married, the college sweethearts took a romantic getaway to Lake Como in Italy. After the vacation, Mileva found herself pregnant. Since Einstein did not have the money to marry Maric nor the ability to support a child, the two were not able to get married until Einstein got the patent job over a year later. So as not to besmirch Einstein's reputation, Maric went back to her family and had the baby girl, whom she named Lieserl.
 |
| Albert Einstein with his wife Mileva Maric. |
17. He could be president of Israel but he denied. A few days after Zionist leader and first President of Israel Chaim Weizmann died on November 9, 1952, Einstein was asked if he would accept the position of being the second president of Israel. Einstein, age 73, declined the offer. In his official letter of refusal, Einstein stated that he lacked the “natural aptitude and the experience to deal properly with people.
18. When Einstein died in 1955, before his body was cremated, pathologist Thomas Harvey at Princeton Hospital conducted an autopsy in which he removed Einstein's brain, for study. Harvey did not have permission to keep Einstein's brain, but days later, he convinced Einstein's son that it would help science.
19. You may have a question in mind that What thought picture did Einstein use for special relativity? Among other things, he pictured lightning striking at both ends of a moving train. A person on the embankment might see the strikes as simultaneous, but to someone on the speeding train they would appear to have happened at different moments. Because the train is speeding forward, the light from the strike at the front of the train would reach him a moment before the light from the strike at the back of the train. From that he realized that simultaneity is relative to your state of motion, and from that he came up with the idea that there is no such thing as absolute time. Time is relative. Hence the special theory of relativity.
20. What was the thought experiment that led Einstein to general relativity? He imagined a man in free fall. To understand what he saw, imagine a man in a closed elevator chamber that is falling toward the earth. He would float freely in the chamber, and anything he pulled from his pocket and dropped would float freely next to him — just as if he were in a closed chamber sitting still in a gravity-free region of deep outer space. On the other hand, imagine a woman in a closed chamber who is accelerating upward in outer space, far from any gravity. She would feel pulled down to the floor, just as if she were being pulled down by gravity. From the equivalence of gravity and acceleration, he constructed his general theory of relativity.
{ Source: time.com, history1900s.about.com }
