Word: einstein
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Demoniac Possession. The force that drove Einstein to genius he called "a demoniac possession . . . like that of a lover." Yet for all his scientific wisdom, he was a worldly innocent. He had a lamblike helplessness in the face of everyday problems; he was easily presumed upon. He once agreed to buy an elevator for his two-story home because "the man who came to interest me in it-I liked him so much, I could not say no." He loved jokes and laughed easily. He loved humanity, but he was comfortable with few of its members. "My passionate interest...
Family to Support. Einstein's family lived in Bavaria, where his father sold electrical goods. Albert was born in Ulm, in 1879. As a child he would make up songs, which he chanted in his room. But at school he was shy and backward, and his parents wondered whether his brain was up to par. When he was twelve, he got a copy of Euclid's Geometry, Thirty years later, Einstein recalled: "It made me realize that man is capable, through the force of thought alone, of achieving . . . stability and purity." At 13 he read Kant...
After graduation, Einstein settled in Switzerland, married Mileva Marie, a Serbian mathematician. With a family to support, he got a job as an examiner in the Swiss Patent Office. But "I soon learned to scent out that which was able to lead to fundamentals. I turned aside from everything else." During working hours he would scribble his ideas down on scraps of paper. Evenings, he could be seen wheeling a baby carriage through the streets, halting now and then to jot down rows of mathematical symbols...
...those obscure symbols came the most explosive ideas of the century. They were the algebraic catalysts that set in motion a reappraisal of every premise and postulate of modern natural science, a physical revolution whose end is far from sight. In 1905 Einstein published his jottings in five papers. In the fifth, and shortest, paper (Does the Inertia of a Body Depend on its Energy Content?) lay the mathematical nuclei of the atomic...
...Einstein's calculations filled the void, and stretched it far into the cosmos with a brief, daring equation that tripped off the tongue with the doomful simplicity of the first few notes of Beethoven's Fifth: E=mc².This meant that a mass (m) of one gram of matter contains within itself energy (E) which is the equivalent in ergs to the square of the velocity of light (c²) in centimeters per second. Einstein went on to demonstrate mathematically that there can be no absolute measure of time or space because all spatial bodies...