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Demoniac Possession. The force that drove Einstein to genius he called "a demoniac possession . . . like that of a lover." Yet for all his scientific wisdom, he was a worldly innocent. He had a lamblike helplessness in the face of everyday problems; he was easily presumed upon. He once agreed to buy an elevator for his two-story home because "the man who came to interest me in it — I liked him so much, I could not say no." He loved jokes and laughed easily. He loved humanity, but he was comfortable with few of its members. "My passionate interest in social justice," he wrote in 1949, "has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of desire for direct contact with other human beings ... I ... have never belonged to my country, my home ... or even to my immediate family with my whole heart."
Family to Support. Einstein's family lived in Bavaria, where his father sold electrical goods. Albert was born in Ulm, in 1879. As a child he would make up songs, which he chanted in his room. But at school he was shy and backward, and his parents wondered whether his brain was up to par. When he was twelve, he got a copy of Euclid's Geometry, Thirty years later, Einstein recalled: "It made me realize that man is capable, through the force of thought alone, of achieving . . . stability and purity." At 13 he read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Still, it took him two attempts to pass the entrance exams to Zurich Polytechnicum.
After graduation, Einstein settled in Switzerland, married Mileva Marie, a Serbian mathematician. With a family to support, he got a job as an examiner in the Swiss Patent Office. But "I soon learned to scent out that which was able to lead to fundamentals. I turned aside from everything else." During working hours he would scribble his ideas down on scraps of paper. Evenings, he could be seen wheeling a baby carriage through the streets, halting now and then to jot down rows of mathematical symbols.
Out of those obscure symbols came the most explosive ideas of the century. They were the algebraic catalysts that set in motion a reappraisal of every premise and postulate of modern natural science, a physical revolution whose end is far from sight. In 1905 Einstein published his jottings in five papers. In the fifth, and shortest, paper (Does the Inertia of a Body Depend on its Energy Content?) lay the mathematical nuclei of the atomic age.
E=mc2. For more than 200 years, science had accepted Newton's laws of motion as unalterable. In easily parsed schoolboy terms, they seemed to explain everything, from the behavior of gases to the nature of heat. But in the 1880s, more sensitive instruments were uncovering awkward phenomena, particularly in the physics of light. These phenomena operated in open violation of Newton's laws. To make Newton's physics work, scientists presumed the existence of a substance called ether, which they thought was necessary to carry light waves through space. But experiments soon proved that ether does not exist. Scientists were plunged into a paralyzing dilemma, caught between their reliance on the old Newtonian concept and the undisputable results of their experiments. For close to 20 years they floated in an etherless void.