Word: einstein
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Einstein staged his first great rebellion. Left behind in Munich when his family relocated to northern Italy after another of his father's business failures, he quit his prep school because of its militaristic bent, renounced his German citizenship and eventually entered the famed Zurich Polytechnic, Switzerland's M.I.T. There he fell in love with a classmate, a Serbian physics student named Mileva Maric. Afflicted with a limp and three years his senior, she was nonetheless a soul mate. He rhapsodized about physics and music with her, called her his Dolly and fathered her illegitimate child--a sickly girl...
...easygoing engineer father, an unsuccessful entrepreneur in the emerging electrochemical industry, had less influence, though it was he who gave Einstein the celebrated toy compass that inspired his first "thought experiment": what, the five-year-old wondered, made the needle always point north...
...Einstein's galvanizing effect on the popular imagination continued throughout his life, and after it. Fearful his grave would become a magnet for curiosity seekers, Einstein's executors secretly scattered his ashes. But they were defeated at least in part by a pathologist who carried off his brain in hopes of learning the secrets of his genius. Only recently Canadian researchers, probing those pickled remains, found that he had an unusually large inferior parietal lobe--a center of mathematical thought and spatial imagery--and shorter connections between the frontal and temporal lobes. More definitive insights, though, are emerging from...
Unlike the avuncular caricature of his later years who left his hair unshorn, helped little girls with their math homework and was a soft touch for almost any worthy cause, Einstein is emerging from these documents as a man whose unsettled private life contrasts sharply with his serene contemplation of the universe. He could be alternately warmhearted and cold; a doting father, yet aloof; an understanding, if difficult, mate, but also an egregious flirt. "Deeply and passionately [concerned] with the fate of every stranger," wrote his friend and biographer Philipp Frank, he "immediately withdrew into his shell" when relations became...
...Einstein himself resisted all efforts to explore his psyche, rejecting, for example, a Freudian analyst's offer to put him on the couch. But curiosity about him continues, as evidenced by the unrelenting tide of Einstein books Amazon.com lists some 100 in print...