Courtesy of http://rune.biokemi.su.se (see Bibliography)

In his early years, Albert Einstein's mother was disturbed by how long it took him to learn how to talk. His elementary school teachers thought that he was a foolish dreamer, and one teacher even asked him to drop out of his class. He hated sports as a child, and they made him dizzy and tired, but he made up for his hatred of sports in his love for music. He would play Mozart sonatas on the violin, usually accompanied by his mother. He also liked private games, such as building a house of cards.

For academics, he loved math and science. Max Talmud, a medical student and a friend to the family, went to dinner with them every Thursday night and brought young Albert science books. Einstein's Uncle Jacob gave him math problems, and he received a book on geometry when he was twelve. Over the next two years he taught himself calculus.

Even though he loved academics so much, he disliked school and eventually dropped out of high school. Without a high school diploma, he had to take special exams to get into college. He failed the first set and had to re-take them. After graduation, he couldn't get a job anywhere. He was even rejected by the Swiss military because he had flat feet, but he eventually found a tutoring job and earned three francs an hour

He finally got a job at a Swiss patent office, and earned just enough money so that his parents didn't have to support him, his young wife, and their new-born baby. Then, he started to work in solitude in the patent office, in between patent applications, on problems which had intrigued him as a child.

In 1905, Enstein developed his Special Theory of Relativity: As a child, Einstein asked himself, what would a beam of light look like if you caught up with it? The Special Theory of relativity says that the speed of light is the same in all constantly moving frames. One implication of this is that time slows down the closer to the speed of light you get. It also states that as an object approaches the speed of light, its mass proportionally increases, its size proportionally decreases, and time moves slower for it.* Thus it takes more energy to move it. So, travel at the speed of light is impossible because the object's mass would be infinity, and it would take more energy than the entire universe to move an infinitely large object that fast. (This is what leads quantum physicists to believe that photons (particles of light) are point particles, meaning that they have no mass, and are vibrations of higher dimensions.) These measurements have since been confirmed multiple times.

*Imagine that you get into a car and speed away at ninety-nine per cent of the speed of light.

You look outside your window and notice a strange occurrences: Everything in front of you is a bluish tint, while everything behind you takes on a reddish hue. This is due to the Doppler effect.

To an observer outside of the car: Everything inside of the car seems to be moving very slowly. Someone takes out a set of binoculars and looks at your wrist watch, and sees that the second hands are barely moving. A second strange occurrence is that everything inside of the car appears to be squashed like a pancake.

However, you don't think that you are changing because your brain and nervous system are also be squashed and slowed down. So you are not even aware that you are turning into a dim-witted pancake! (Don't worry, though. In everyday life, since the speed of light is so great, the effects of special relativity are minuscule.)

In 1907, Einstein said that when he "was sitting in a chair in the patent office at Bern when all of a sudden a thought occurred to me: 'If a person falls freely he will not feel his own weight.' I was startled. This simple thought ... impelled me toward a theory of gravitation. ..." This was the fundamental principle for his later General Theory of Relativity. Its foundation is that the laws of nature in an accelerating frame are equivalent to the laws of a gravitational field. This is known as the Equivalence principle, and was the foundation for general relativity. In 1915, Einstein proposed a new theory of gravity, which is now called the General Theory of Relativity:

In 1666 Sir Isaac Newton had proposed a different theory of gravity called Newton's Universal Law of Gravitation: F = G * Mm/r². Newton's Law worked very well, but there were slight discrepancies between what was observed and what was mathematically predicted. An example of where Newton's theory couldn't explain Mercury's peculiar rosette-shaped elliptical orbit. However, Einstein's Theory of General Relativity could explain it. It described gravity as a warping of space, not as a force. Einstein pictured space as a three dimensional version of a thin rubber sheet. If you put a heavy object on the sheet, it makes a dent, and therefore an object's path would be affected by that dent. So, planets orbit the sun because the space around the sun is curved like a funnel or a basin.

To describe the exact curvature of space for each object at a given location with a given mass, Einstein used the branch of mathematics called Riemannian geometry, which was developed by Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann in the mid-1800's: Riemannian geometry is very different from Euclidean geometry (the common kind taught in grade school). For example, in Euclidean Geometry, the interior angles of a triangle always add up to 180 degrees. In Riemannian geometry, they do not necessarily:

Image 1. shows normal Euclidean space, where the interior angles of a triangle all add up to 180 degrees, and parallel lines never meet. Image 2. shows positively curved Riemannian geometry where the interior angles of a triangle equal more than 180 degrees, and all parallel lines meet. Image 3. shows negatively curved Riemannian geometry where the interior angles of a triangle equal less than 180 degrees, and all parallel lines meet.

In 1916, Einstein's General Relativity Theory was published, and Karl Schwarzchild used the General Theory of Relativity to connect two black holes with a tunnel, a theory now known as a wormhole.

1919 came along, and Einsteins's Theory predicted that the light passing our sun should be curved about .0005 degrees (.75 to 2 arc seconds). This is called gravitational lensing because the sun's gravity well acts like a lens. Gravitational lensing has applications in real astronomy (real as opposed to theoretical). It can be used to find small, dark stars on the outskirts of galaxies. This theory was tested during the 1919 total solar eclipse across Africa and South America. When shown to be true, Einstein was an instant celebrity all over the world, being celebrated as the successor of Isaac Newton.

In 1932, Einstein predicted that when two stars exactly line up, the one farther away becomes brighter because its light is being lensed. This has since been proven.

In 1955, Einstein died, leaving behind unfinished papers on his desk. He had spent the last years of his life in an attempt to discover a Unified Field Theory. This theory would explain everything in the universe, from the smallest subatomic particle to the largest galaxy. It would unite the laws of nature into one equation. Scientists today are still searching for a Unified Field Theory.

Einstein's equation E = mc² means that any m, mass, when converted to E, energy, produces a huge amount of it (c is the speed of light). In hydrogen fusion in a star, a helium nucleus is 99.3 per cent of the weight of four protons. The remaining .3 per cent is converted into energy.