Albert Einstein: Genius, Rebel, Icon

The Most Famous Scientist in History

Albert Einstein didn't just change physics — he changed how we think about reality itself. Space and time are relative. Mass and energy are equivalent. Light bends around stars.

But Einstein was more than equations. He was a rebel who dropped out of school, a patent clerk who rewrote physics, a pacifist who urged building the atomic bomb, a celebrity who hated fame, a genius who struggled with personal relationships.

What You'll Learn

The Miracle Year (1905)

As a 26-year-old patent clerk, Einstein published four papers that transformed physics:
• Special relativity and E=mc²
• The photoelectric effect (later winning him the Nobel Prize)
• Brownian motion (proving atoms exist)
• The nature of light

Any one of these would have made a career. He published all four in one year.

General Relativity

10 years later, Einstein completed his masterpiece: general relativity. Gravity isn't a force — it's the curvature of spacetime. Massive objects bend space around them. Light follows curved paths.

The 1919 solar eclipse confirmed his prediction that starlight bends around the Sun. Einstein became the most famous scientist in the world overnight.

The Human Story

Beyond the science, Einstein's life was complex:
• Difficult first marriage, controversial treatment of his first wife
• Escape from Nazi Germany
• The letter to Roosevelt that started the Manhattan Project
• Regret about the bomb: "I made one great mistake"
• The final decades: the unified field theory quest that never succeeded

Legacy

Einstein's ideas led to GPS satellites, nuclear energy, lasers, and our understanding of black holes. His image became shorthand for genius itself.