“I’m too crazy not to be a genius,” admitted one of the greatest scientists of all times and peoples, Albert Einstein. And this paradoxical statement contains much more truth than it seems at first glance …
It is not clear what combination of circumstances leads to the emergence of geniuses. At one time, a person's abilities were associated with the mass of his brain: the larger he is, the more talented a person is. But this theory has not been confirmed.
The average mass of the human brain is 1300-1400 grams. The great Russian writer Ivan Turgenev's brain pulled at 2012 grams. But the outstanding French writer Anatole France's brain weighed only 1017 grams.
Albert Einstein's brain weighed 1230 grams. But the theory of relativity he created turned the world upside down.
The fruits of enlightenment
Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879 in the old German city of Ulm into a Jewish family of a small businessman. The family soon moved to Munich, where Albert received his primary education and deep religiosity at a Catholic school. The boy loved to retire, indulging in reading popular science literature. The knowledge gained already in adolescence led him to the conclusion about the fabulousness of many provisions of the Bible and forever undermined the faith in the unshakable authority. In his declining years, he described his attitude to religion as follows: "The word" God "for me is nothing more than an expression and product of human weakness, the Bible is a collection of worthy, but nevertheless primitive legends that look very childish." However, he also owns a well-known saying, interpreted in his own way by clerics and atheists: “Science without religion is lame,and religion without science is blind."
One day, five-year-old Albert's father brought a compass for fun. The boy was made to think deeply about the property of the instrument needle to return to the same position. So he first came to the conclusion about the presence in nature of certain forces that are not amenable to observation.
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There is a legend that the future Nobel Prize winner studied badly in a secondary educational institution. But the certificate of maturity received by Einstein in 1896 has been preserved.
At that time, grades in the cantonal school in Switzerland were given on a six-point system. So, in algebra, geometry (which included planimetry, trigonometry, stereometry and analytical geometry), descriptive geometry, physics and history, 17-year-old Albert received sixes, in German and Italian, chemistry and natural history - fives, in geography, artistic and technical drawings - fours. Only in French did he receive a triple and was not certified in English. That did not stop him from making reports in French in the future, and he neglected English, even when he permanently moved to the United States after Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933. Remaining at home, two of his cousins died in Nazi concentration camps.
In 18%, Einstein entered the Zurich Polytechnic Institute at the Faculty of Education, from which he graduated in 1900 with a diploma in mathematics and physics. But the professors who taught the obstinate student, even finding remarkable abilities in him, did not contribute to the entry of the gifted young man into the world of science.
A worthy representative of your gender
This is how Einstein described himself in a letter to his cousin Elsa Loeventhal, who later became his second wife: “I declare with complete conviction that I consider myself a completely worthy representative of my gender. I hope someday I will have the opportunity to convince you of this."
The great scientist was amorous, he burned brightly and infected objects of love with his passion, but he cooled down pretty quickly and did not stand on ceremony with women who fell in love.
His first love was Marie Winteler, the daughter of a professor at the cantonal school in the Swiss town of Aarau, in whose house Albert settled. He was 16 years old, she was two years older. “You mean more to my soul than the whole world before meeting you,” he wrote to his beloved in April 1896. But after leaving for Zurich to study at the Polytechnic Institute, Albert lost interest in his distant friend, telling her that he had found an angel who took the form of a mature woman.
This angel was Einstein's classmate - Serbian Mileva Maric, who was born four years earlier than him. She was not a beauty, and even limped. But she had an extraordinary mind and became the first girl in Austria-Hungary (which then included Serbia), who was allowed to study at the gymnasium with the boys.
A brilliant scientific future could await her, but she did not complete the course at the Polytechnic, until she became pregnant with Einstein before her marriage.
Young people got married only in 1903. At the same time, Einstein notified the bride with a dry business letter about the conditions on which he agreed to marry. The conditions were humiliating, but the loving woman accepted them. And she became Einstein not only a faithful wife, but also a scientific secretary and almost a co-author of the theory of relativity. Soviet physicist, academician Abram Ioffe recalled that initially Einstein's 1905 articles, which laid the foundation for the special theory of relativity, were signed not only by him, but also by Mileva Marich. However, they were published in a German physics journal with one signature.
The articles made Einstein famous. He was invited to Berlin to head the physics research institute that was being created and to accept a chair at the University of Berlin.
In 1914, on the eve of the First World War, he moved to the capital of the German Empire. The wife and two sons remained in Zurich. The relationship of the spouses completely went wrong.
In Berlin, Einstein finally got along with his cousin Elsa Loeventhal. Mileva did not give her consent to divorce for a long time due to the financial uncertainty of the family associated with this.
Only when Albert promised to transfer her a future Nobel Prize, which he had no doubt about receiving, did she agree to a divorce in 1919. This generosity is considered by many to be evidence that his wife played a crucial role in the development of the theory of relativity.
In the same year 1919, Albert and Elsa Loeventhal got married, and he adopted her two children. Remaining "a worthy representative of his gender," Einstein continued to enter into intimate relationships with other women, not hiding his adventures from his wife. She put up with this: she had enough of those rays of glory that fell on her as the wife of a great scientist.
Elsa passed away in 1936. Einstein did not entangle himself with the bonds of Hymen, contemptuously calling marriage "a civilized form of slavery." The last woman for whom he had deep feelings was the wife of the famous Russian and Soviet sculptor Sergei Konenkov, Margarita. She and her husband lived in the United States from the mid-1920s to 1945, being a part-time NKVD agent named Lucas. She was an advanced woman who spoke five languages fluently and knew how to evoke sympathy and confidence in representatives of various sectors of American society. They met when Princeton University invited Konenkov to create a sculpture of the scientist.
Their meetings with Albert ended with Margarita's recall to her homeland.
In order not to fight with stones and sticks
Einstein was repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics for the creation of the theory of relativity, but the Nobel Committee was then not ready to accept the revolutionary theory. The 1921 Physics Prize was awarded to him for a much less significant work on a global scale: the theory of the photoelectric effect. True, the decision to award the Nobel Prize contained a postscript: "… and for other works in the field of theoretical physics."
In 1939, Albert Einstein signed a letter to US President Franklin Roosevelt expressing alarm at the possibility of an atomic bomb by Hitlerite Germany.
After the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, which claimed hundreds of thousands of civilian lives, Einstein took an uncompromising anti-war stance. "If the third world war will be fought with atomic bombs," he said, "then the fourth will be fought with stones and sticks."
Albert Einstein, who died in 1955, entered world history not only as a genius physicist, but also as a passionate fighter for peace.
Leonid BUDARIN