Entry for Einstein Contest on ChampChild.com

1. Biography on Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein is probably the world’s most famous scientist but how much about him do
you really know? Here is a short biography of the father of quantum theory.
Fun Facts about Albert Einstein for Kids
Albert Einstein was born in Germany in 1879. He was the oldest child and he had one younger
sister.Einstein first became interested in science when his father gave him a compass.Even though
Einstein didn’t like school, he loved reading and learning on his own.He loved classical music and
played the piano and violin.Einstein wrote his first scientific paper when he was sixteen.He hated war
and worked for peace throughout his life. He was a pacifist. He supported the Civil Rights movement
inAmerica.Einstein became famous after he published his theory of relativity in 1915. He was
awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1921.
But Albert Einstein had personal struggles too. When his grandmother first saw him, she called him
“thick,” which means, “not very smart.” Einstein didn’t talk until he was four years old and he liked to
repeat words and sentences over and over until he was about seven. Some researchers think he had
a form of autism. Albert Einstein didn’t learn to read until he was nine. Although he loved learning,
he didn’t like school. Even as an adult, Einstein was disorganized. He often forgot appointments and
his lectures were hard to follow. He was the classic “absent-minded professor.”
It was 1933 and a charismatic politician called Adolf Hitler had just become Chancellor.
Einstein, a Jew, learned that his name was on a Nazi list of people earmarked for assassination and a
bounty had been put on his head.
One German magazine even included him on a list of enemies of the state under the phrase: “Not
yet hanged.”
He had already been used to being something of a migrant as, by the age of 17, his parents had
already taken him to live in Italy andSwitzerland, where he began training to be a physics and maths
teacher in 1896.
Einstein qualified and became a Swiss citizen but couldn’t find a teaching job so began work as an
assistant in the Swiss Patent Office in 1901, where he was passed over for promotion because he had
not got to grips with “machine technology”.
However, much of his work was linked to the synchronising of time by mechanical and electrical
means, which sowed the seeds that would later transform the understanding of the universe.
His first theoretical paper – on the capillary forces of a straw – was published in a respected journal
that same year and by 1905 he was awarded his doctorate by theUniversity of Zurich.

2. The scientist’s work began to pour out of him – by the end of that year, he published no less than
four revolutionary papers on matter and energy; the photoelectric effect; Brownian motion; and the
idea that perhaps defined him most of all – special relativity.
Despite the acclaim that he began to accrue, he continued working at the patent office until 1909.
Two years later his work on relativity made him world famous when he concluded that the trajectory
of light arriving on Earth from a star would be bent by the gravity of the Sun.
His conclusions ripped up the ideas ofNewtonian mechanics which had stood since the 17th century.
They are modest, intelligent, considerate and have a feel for art. [Einstein on the Japanese]
He returned to Germany where he held several prestigious positions, including president of
the German Physical Society.
By 1921, his groundbreaking theories had transformed the basics of modern physics and he was
awarded the Nobel Prize.
However, it was not given for his most famous work, that of relativity, because it remained too
controversial.
Instead, the judges used his explanation of the photoelectric effect to explain the award.
The famous scientist began to lecture worldwide and travelled to Singapore, Sri
Lanka, Palestine and Japan, where he spoke before the emperor and declared: “Of all the people I
have met, I like the Japanese most, as they are modest, intelligent, considerate and have a feel for
art.”
Wherever he went by this stage he was greeted like a head of state or a rock star, with crowds
thronging to hear him and cannons fired to salute his arrival.
The rise of Hitler and Nazism persuaded him to move to the US, where he later shed his avowal of
pacifism and wrote to President Roosevelt urging him to press ahead with construction of a nuclear
bomb to ensure the Germans did not get there first.
There was always with him a wonderful purity at once childlike and profoundly stubborn. [Robert
Oppenheimer on Einstein]
He later said this letter was his life’s biggest regret because nuclear weapons had such a fierce
capacity for destruction.
He began work at Princeton University and became a US citizen in 1940 (his third passport) where he
was a strident critic of racism, calling it America’s “worst disease”.
Albert Einstein died of internal bleeding on April 17, 1955, aged 76, which was marked with
headlines around the world.

3. But his story did not end there - his brain was removed by the pathologist to try to understand what
made him so intelligent.
At his memorial, Robert Oppenheimer, the developer of the atomic bomb which Einstein had
backed, said: “He was almost wholly without sophistication and wholly without worldliness.
“There was always with him a wonderful purity at once childlike and profoundly stubborn.”