The stories behind the Geniuses: Albert

I've been on a real cloth diapering kick lately, rummaging around our stash and seeing which ones we have still to get before I complete my "rainbow". My favorites have got to be my bumGenius 4.0 pocket diapers, which comprise about 98% of our stash. I recently got my hands on two Audrey prints, one of which I traded for an Irwin and another I'm saving because... well, I have to have one of each! But my all-time favorite? My one-and-only Jules.

Do these names sound at all familiar? They should, as each print in the Genius series is named after an iconic person in history, mainly focused on math, science, and literature. When I started really getting into these diapers and learned the backstories to each diaper, I was even more intrigued and sought more information on each one. Little did I know just how much I would take away.

Learning about these diapers makes me even more proud to own them, as they each have their own story. :)

I'll be posting a diaper a day, so be sure to check back for history on the other diapers in this series!

Albert | Maathai | Lovelace | Irwin | Carroll | Jules | Audrey

Diaper name: Albert
Inspiration: Albert Einstein
Contribution: Physics, Theory of Relativity
Birth: 14 March 1879 - Ulm, Wurttemberg, Germany
Death: 18 April 1955 - Princeton, Plainsboro Township, New Jersey

Albert Einstein was a German-born physicist who developed the theory of relativity. He is considered the most influential physicist of the 20th century.

Albert Einstein grew up in a secular, middle-class Jewish family in Ulm, Wurttemberg, Germany. His father, Hermann Einstein, was a salesman and engineer who founded Elektrotechnische Fabrik J. Einstein & Cie, a company that manufactured electrical equipment. His mother, Pauline Koch, ran the family household. Albert had a sister, Maja, born two years after him.

Einstein excelled in his studies throughout elementary school and played classical violin, but a speech difficulty – a slow cadence in his speaking where he’d pause to consider what to say next – left him struggling and feeling alienated.

When Einstein was 10, his family invited a poor Polish medical student, Max Talmud, to come to their house for Thursday evening meals. He became an informal tutor to young Albert, introducing him to higher mathematics and philosophy, and shared with him a children’s science book in which the author imagined riding alongside electricity that was traveling inside a telegraph wire. Einstein wondered what a light bean would look like if you could run alongside it at the same speed: If the light were a wave, then the light bean should appear stationary, like a frozen wave.

In reality, the light beam is moving, a paradox that led him to write his first “scientific paper” at 16, “The Investigation of the State of Aether in Magnetic Fields”. The question of the relative speed of the stationary observer and the observer moving with the light was a question that would dominate his thinking for the next 10 years.

By 1894, Einstein ended up a high school dropout and draft dodger who, repelled by the looming prospect of military duty when he turned of age, left his school in Munich in favor of rejoining his family in Milan, Italy. He was able to apply directly to the Eidgenossische Polytechnische Schule in Zurich, Switzerland, despite lacking the equivalent of a high school diploma and failing much of the entrance exams. His exceptional marks in mathematics and physics saw him through, provided he completed formal schooling first.

Einstein was recommended for a position at the patent office in 1902, where he evaluated patent applications for electromagnetic devices. He quickly mastered the job, leaving him time to ponder on the transmission of electrical signals and electrical-mechanical synchronization, an expansion on his studies of Scottish physicist James Maxwell’s electromagnetic theories. It was then that he discovered a fact unknown to Maxwell: That the speed of light remains constant. However, this violated Isaac Newton’s law of motion because there is no absolute velocity in his theory, which led Einstein to formulate the principle of relativity.

In 1905, a series of his works were published in one of the best-known physics journal Annalen der Physik, one of which suggests that tiny particles of matter could be converted into huge amounts of energy: E=mc2.

The general theory of relativity was completed in November 1915 and was considered his masterpiece. The prediction that a measurable deflection of light around the sun occurred when a planet or another sun orbited near the sun was confirmed in observations by British astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington during the solar eclipse in 1919. In 1921, Einstein won the Nobel Prize for Physics, though for his explanation of the photoelectric effect rather than the still-controversial relativity.

Despite the award, at first, Einstein’s papers were disregarded by much of the physics community, but that all changed when he received the attention of Max Planch, perhaps the most influential physicists of his generation and founder of quantum theory. His complimentary comments and experiments confirmed Einstein’s theories, and Einstein rose rapidly in the academic world. As a result, he served as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics from 1913 to 1933.

In the 1920s, Einstein launched the new science of cosmology; his equations predicted that the universe is dynamic, ever expanding or contracting, which contradicted his earlier held view that the universe was static. Astronomer Edwin Hubble confirmed in 1929 that the universe is indeed expanding.

Einstein decided in 1932 to leave Germany forever, after the rise of the Nazi regime, their attempts to degrade his works as “Jewish physics”, and his name being on a list of assassination targets. In Princeton, New Jersey, Einstein took a position at the newly formed Institute for Advanced Study, and he became an American citizen in 1940.

After his death, a result of an abdominal aortic aneurysm and resulting internal bleeding, his brain was removed by Thomas Stoltz Harvey, seemingly without permission from his family, for preservation and future study by doctors of neuroscience. After decades of study, his brain is now located at the Princeton University Medical Center.


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