Albert Einstein was born on this day: He offered the Nobel Prize as part of the divorce settlement

Albert Einstein, Photo: Profimedia

Albert Einstein is a German theoretical physicist, best known for his Theory of Relativity and the Theory of Equality of Mass and Energy, Einstein won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921 for "his work in the field of theoretical physics, and in particular for his discovery of the photoelectric effect ".

Albert Einstein was born into a Jewish family in Ulm, Württemberg, Germany on March 14, 1879. His father was Hermann Einstein, a salesman and engineer. His mother was Pauline Einstein (maiden name Koch). In 1880, the family moved to Munich, where his father and uncle established a company, Elektrotechnische Fabrik J. Einstein & Cie, which manufactured electrical equipment.

Photo: Profimedia

The Einsteins were not big Jewish religious believers, so Albert attended a Catholic elementary school. Although Einstein had an early speech impediment, he was still among the top students at the school. Revolutionary scientific ideas made Einstein synonymous with genius, but he was also known for his pacifist views and his support for human rights movements. Here are some more interesting details from the life of the famous scientist.

Mathematical genius at 15 years old

Students around the world who struggle with math are often comforted by the claim that Albert Einstein was also a bad mathematician, which turns out to be false because the data actually shows that he was an outstanding student. During his schooling in Munich, Albert achieved high grades, but was frustrated, as he himself said, by the mechanical discipline his teachers insisted upon. The future Nobel laureate dropped out of school even though he was among the best in his class, and was even considered a genius because of the way he understood complex mathematical and scientific concepts. When a newspaper article later appeared claiming that he had failed the mathematics exam, Einstein dismissed it as a complete lie and stated that he had mastered differential and integral mathematics before he was 15 years old.

Einstein's first child was given up for adoption

In 1896, Einstein renounced his German citizenship and enrolled at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich, where he met Serbian scientist Mileva Marić and began a passionate relationship with her. After graduation, they got married and had two sons, but a year before the marriage, Mileva gave birth to a daughter, whom they named Liesl. Einstein never mentioned this child, and biographers did not know it existed until his private papers were made available for examination in the 80s. The fate of this child is still a mystery today, and there are various divided opinions: some believe that she died of the contagious disease scarlet fever in 20, while others believe that she survived the disease and was given up for adoption somewhere in Serbia.

Albert Einstein with his wife Elsa / Photo: Wikipedia

A terrible husband and father who offered his Nobel Prize as a divorce settlement

Mileva Maric Einstein was a talented physicist and the most important and trusted collaborator and wife of Albert Einstein. However, love and marriage with them also brought her years of hardship, misfortune and unrecognized merit - as a scientist, mother and wife.

It was she who solved most of the mathematical problems for the creation of the famous theory. With that, she not only helped her husband, but also participated in one of the biggest discoveries. However, that part of the story is little known, just like her life with Albert.

The private life of Mileva and Albert Einstein was anything but pretty. Albert, like most scientists, was preoccupied with his thoughts and ideas, but even when that was not the case – he was a very bad husband and father. It went to such an extent that the famous genius hid the existence of his family and his first child from the public.

Albert and Mileva in 1902 had an illegitimate child, a girl named Liesel, and according to the strict instructions of Albert, no one was allowed to know and Mileva had to hide in Serbia with their daughter. Albert never saw his daughter.

It is rumored that the girl died of scarlet fever after Albert forced Mileva to leave her in Serbia and join him in Bern. To this day, the fate of Albert's first child has not been fully elucidated, and it became known only 30 years ago, when the letters that the couple exchanged at that time were discovered.

Even more troubling is the fact that Einstein proves what a man he was - his youngest child Edward was born with schizophrenia, and the famous scientist said of him that "he is not quite a man."

As for Albert's attitude towards his wife, who spent all her time helping him with the work and at the same time taking care of the house and the two small children - it can be said that he was insensitive, heartless and unjust.

An example of that is the fact that when he won the Nobel Prize, he was completely silent about Mileva's participation in the theories he was working on, which eventually won him the prize. So, it is safe to say that Mileva Einstein was as much a Nobel laureate as Albert Einstein.

He filed for divorce from Mileva in 1916, and she fell ill. He left his family, moved to Berlin and began a love affair with his cousin Elsa. Close friends claimed that the divorce filing was the reason for her sudden loss of health. After two years, she agreed to divorce him, and he in turn promised to give her money from the Nobel Prize if she eventually won it. They officially divorced in 1919, and Einstein later gave her a small fortune after he won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922 for his work on the phytoelectric effect. At that time he was already married to Elsa, with whom he remained married until her death in 1936. Mileva encountered many problems in her life, her sister Zorka experienced a nervous breakdown, her mother died, and soon after that her sister also died, and her son Eduard was diagnosed with schizophrenia. After one of Edward's violent attacks in 1948, Mileva fainted and was taken to hospital. She died there, three months later, on August 4, 1948, under unclear circumstances. Even the doctors themselves could not determine the cause of death. Her closest friends thought her heart had burst with grief. Mileva was buried at the Nordheim cemetery in Zurich.

Several books have been written about Mileva and Einstein, but the book "The Other Einstein" by the American Mary Benedict stands out, which describes Mileva's life in the first person - from her youth and happy beginning with Albert to the world forgetting it ever existed.

Mileva and Albert Einstein as students: Lost in the dark shadow of a vain man

The eclipse of the Sun brought him world fame

In 1915, Einstein published his theory of relativity in which he argued that gravitational fields cause distortions in the fabric of space and time. Because this sounded to the public like a blind recasting of the laws of physics, the theory remained controversial until May 1919, when a total solar eclipse provided him with suitable conditions to test his claim that a supermassive object, in the case of the Sun, could cause a measurable curve in the motion of the stars that gravitated around him. Hoping to prove Einstein's theory once and for all, English scientist Arthur Eddington traveled to the coast of West Africa to photograph the eclipse. By analyzing the photographs, he came to the conclusion that the Sun's gravity moved the light beam exactly as predicted by the theory of general relativity. This news made Einstein famous almost overnight. Journalists began to hail him as Isaac Newton's successor, and he traveled the world lecturing on his theories about space. According to his biographer Walter Isaacson, in the next 6 years after the 1919 solar eclipse, more than 600 books and articles on the theory of relativity were published.

The FBI spied on Einstein for years

Shortly before Hitler came to power in 1933, Einstein left Germany and moved to the United States where he received a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His support of the pacifist, civil rights, and left-wing movements immediately raised the suspicion of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and after arriving on American soil, the bureau launched a procedure that soon turned into round-the-clock surveillance over the next 22 years. Agents tapped his telephone conversations, opened his mail, dug through garbage cans in the hope of exposing him as a subversive element or a Soviet spy. The FBI was still short-handed, but when Albert died, his file already ran to a whopping 1.800 pages.

Pixabay
Photo: Pixabay

He received an offer to become the president of Israel

Although not particularly religious, Einstein felt a deep connection to his Jewish heritage and often spoke out against anti-Semitism. After the death of the first president of Israel, Chaim Weizman, in 1952, the government of this country offered the presidency to the famous scientist. Einstein refused this offer, and in a letter to the Israeli ambassador, he stated that he had been engaged in objective matters all his life, and therefore he lacked the ability and experience to properly deal with people and perform such a function.

After his death, they stole his brain

Albert Einstein died in April 1955 of an abdominal aortic aneurysm. He left a vow after his death to be cremated, but Princeton pathologist Thomas Harvey removed the scientist's brain during the autopsy and preserved it in the hope of revealing the secrets of this genius. After receiving approval from Einstein's son, Harvey cut the brain into several pieces and sent them to various scientists around the world for examination. Since 1980, several studies have been conducted regarding Einstein's brain, but all have been discredited. Perhaps the most famous of these was the one published by experts at a Canadian university in 1999, which claimed that Einstein had unusual folds in the parietal region, a part of the brain associated with mathematical and spatial abilities.

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