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As a direct consequence of the recent astronomical discoveries and a host of new and precise measuring techniques, general relativity is finally enjoying boom times. Thus Einstein, a genius in his own age, remains a powerful intellectual force in this time as well. The number of learned papers on general relativity has risen from only a handful a few years ago to some 600 or 700 a year. The relativistic revival can also be seen in the spirited competition by scientists around the world to be the first to detect the gravity waves, which, Einstein said, are the vehicle by which gravitational force is transmitted, just as light or radio waves are the carriers of electromagnetic force.
Scientists are also conducting ever more sensitive tests of Einstein's theory. M.I.T.'s Shapiro and his colleagues have been sending radio signals past the rim of the sun, bouncing them off other planets and clocking their return to earth to an accuracy of better than a millionth of a second. The object: to see if solar gravity slows the signals down by the amount forecast by Einstein. So far, general relativity has passed these and other tests without exception. Says Yale Physicist Feza Gursey: "Einstein's theories tend to become stronger with time."
In his earliest years, Einstein showed no obvious sign of genius; he did not begin talking until the age of three. At Munich's Luitpold Gymnasium (high school), he bridled at the inflexible system of rote learning and the drill-sergeant manner of his teachers, annoying them with his rebellious attitude. Said one: "You will never amount to anything."
Yet there were also some hints of the man to be. At five, when he was given a compass, he was fascinated by the mysterious force that must be influencing its needle. He went through a deeply religious period before adolescence, berating his freethinking father, a manufacturer of electrochemical products, for straying from the path of Jewish orthodoxy. But this phase passed soon after he began studying science, math and philosophy on his own. He was especially enamored of a basic math text—his "holy geometry booklet." At 16, he devised one of his first "thought experiments." These can only be done in the mind, not in a laboratory, and would eventually lead him to his stunning theories. In this case, he imagined what a light wave would look like to an observer riding along with it.
Within a year after his father's business failed and the family moved to Northern Italy to start anew, Einstein dropped out of school and renounced his German citizenship. To shake off the bitter memories of the Munich school, he spent a year hiking in the Apennines, visiting relatives and touring museums. He then decided to enroll in the famed Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. Though he failed the entrance exam—because of deficiencies in botany and zoology, as well as in languages