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Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein was not a boy genius—at least, not as far as anyone knew. Most people thought that he wasn’t very smart. He didn’t talk at all until the age of three, and still didn’t speak well when he reached the age of nine. About the only thing he was good at was playing the violin. Albert didn’t do well in school, and his teachers were often irritated with him. One school even threw him out. They thought he was hopeless.

They were wrong.

There was something going on inside Albert’s head, something wonderful. The first time Albert saw a compass, when he was around age five, he was fascinated. What made the needle move? How did it know which way to point? These questions, along with his love of math, would eventually lead young Albert to the science of physics.

After college, Albert took a job in a patent office. He never stopped thinking about physics, though, and began to write his ideas about time and space. Then, in 1905, he published a paper that shook the world. When people read what he wrote, they were amazed. Some of it was hard to understand; he predicted that time could slow as you approached the speed of light and that space itself could be pulled out of shape. He even showed that anything—a jellybean, a lump of metal, a drop of water—held immense energy inside of it. His ideas took years for other scientists to prove, but one thing was always certain:Einstein’s work would change everything. Albert became very famous. He traveled all over, lecturing and teaching—even at the college where he had been a poor student.

Some of Albert’s ideas were used to build the atomic bomb, the biggest weapon ever made. This made Albert sad, because he was a pacifist—someone who is against war. He spent the rest of his life trying to convince countries not to use the bomb. For this reason, he is remembered not just as a great scientist, but as a great man as well.