Who was Albert Einstein, president of Israel? Communist spy? Married his cousin? You might know him for his theory on special relativity and his equation ‘E = MC2’, but there’s a lot more to learn about the great German physicist, Albert Einstein. Discover the man behind the brains.
Einstein was slow in learning how to speak. His parents even consulted a doctor. He also had a cheeky rebelliousness toward authority, which led one headmaster to expel him and another to amuse history by saying that he would never amount to much. But these traits helped make him a genius.
10Nazi Bounty
In 1931 Nazi Germany denounced Einstein´s work as ´Jewish Physics´ and banned all Jews from teaching. The Nazi put Einstein on their “Not Yet hanged” list as an assassination target for 50.000 dollar and he was forced to flee his homeland for America.
09Never Flunked
It´s an urban myth that Albert Einstein did badly at school – in fact he was a child prodigy. When he was 11 years old he already understood university-level physics, and by the age of 15, he had mastered calculus.
08Lost Child
30 years after Einstein´s death it was discovered he´d a secret illegitimate daughter, called Lieserl. Scholars believe that she was abandoned and sent to an orphanage because she had Down´s syndrome.
07Pacifist
Einstein was a pacifist, but ironically his mass-energy equivalence theory – E=MC2 – helped create nuclear weapons. Fearing Nazi domination, Einstein alerted President Roosevelt to atomic energy, but after the Hiroshima disaster he became an advocate for nuclear disarmament.
06Anti-Racist
Einstein was a dedicated civil rights campaigner, and said that “racism is a disease of while people”. In 1940s he became a member of National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and correspondent with the civil rights activist W.E.B Du Bois.
05Super brain
Just 7 hours after his death, Einstein´s brain was stolen to unlock the secret of his genius – even his eyes were removed. Scientists discovered that his parietal lobe was 15% larger than the average human, which gave him unbelievable mathematical ability and visuospatial cognition.
04Autistic Traits
Many scholars believe that Einstein´s bad memory and social ineptitude were symptoms of Asperger´s syndrome. As a child he was a loner who would repeat sentences obsessively and his university lectures were impossible to follow.
03Married his cousin
Einstein was unfaithful and rude to his first wife, even issuing her marriage “rules”, that she would clean and tidy after him, not expect intimacy and stop talking when he ordered, He even had an affair with his first cousuín, and went on to marry him.
02FBI Target
The FBI tapped Einstein´s phone, opened his mail and even went though his trash to find out if he was a German socialist spy. The bureau produced an 1800-page document to try and get him deported, because they doubted his loyalty to America.
01President of Israel
When Israel´s first president, Chaim Weizman, died in 1952, Israel declared that the greatest Jew alive was Albert Einstein. Einstein was offered the presidency of Israel, but declined because he felt
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