moon traveller herald

When he was a year old, Albert Einstein's family moved to Munich, where his father began work in his brother's gas and electrical supply company. Munich was one of the earliest European cities to switch to electric lights. The city had a very small minority of German Jews such as the Einsteins. At four or five, sick in bed, the young Einstein was given a compass, its needle controlled by the invisible field of magnetism. It produced in him a sense of wonder that, according to biographer Walter Isaacson, stayed with him through life. He sought a particularly visual understanding of problems, even when young; relied on the approach later, in his greatest work. In a relatively quick burst of work in the early 20th Century, the brilliant but lowly Zurich patent clerk Albert Einstein upended the conventional Newtonian physics of his time – this despite a mixed academic record, plenty of setbacks associated with anti-Semitism, and a troubled bohemian marriage. He won the Noble ...