...about Einstein James May's Things You Need to Know


...about Einstein

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Mention the name "Einstein" and most people will immediately picture

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a wrinkly faced old man with a massive shock of white hair.

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However, there is much more to this iconic thinker

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than simply an interesting barnet.

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For example - how did Einstein become a celebrity pin-up?

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What does E=mc2 actually mean?

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And what happened to his brain?

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Luckily for me, you don't have to be a genius to figure out

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the Things You Need To Know About Einstein.

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Right, let's kick off with a really obvious question -

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did Einstein spend seven years as a cobbler?

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Germany, 1879. Mr and Mrs Einstein gaze upon their newborn baby -

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concerned about his large, misshapen head.

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They needn't have worried.

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This head contained one of the greatest brains in history.

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But as a young boy, little Albert was slow to talk.

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The maid even called him "the dopey one."

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So his parents took him to see a doctor.

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It turned out he just preferred speaking in complete sentences.

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Einstein, as a young boy,

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started to query the world he was living in.

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He was fascinated by natural phenomena.

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One of these was when he was given a compass at the age of five

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and he was mesmerised by the needle that would move around

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and these mysterious forces causing it to move.

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The other thing that he loved was his geometry book

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which he was given when he was 12.

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He devoured this book.

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His understanding of science was perhaps different to most other children.

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You'd think that for a budding genius like young Einstein,

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school would be an absolute doddle.

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But you'd be wrong.

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Einstein certainly wasn't a dummy in the classroom.

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But he didn't like being told what to do

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which often got him in trouble with his teachers.

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In fact, he called the schools "barracks"

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and the teachers "lieutenants".

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To make matters worse, when Einstein was just 15 years old,

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his entire family moved to Italy - leaving him behind in Munich.

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So he got himself a doctor's note

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and he quit school more than a year early.

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Genius!

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Without a single qualification to his name,

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Private Einstein became a teenage high school dropout.

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He also flunked the entrance exam to Zurich Polytech,

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but tried again at 17 and aced it

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only to become a bit of a rebel,

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skipping classes and arguing with teachers.

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He would be not paying attention, he would be questioning

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some of the things that the teachers would be telling him.

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He didn't like rules,

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and that doesn't go down well in schools - still doesn't.

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Or at least, it didn't when I was at school!

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One professor was so miffed by Einstein's disobedience

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that he did his best to sabotage his academic career.

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Which is why at the age of 22, Einstein was unemployed,

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with no prospects, and a pregnant girlfriend.

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Luckily, he landed a junior post at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern,

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doing the sort of work he referred to as his cobbler's trade.

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So, no. Einstein didn't spend seven years mending stilettos.

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But he DID do plenty of what he loved best - thinking.

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In fact, during his years at the Patent Office,

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this humble clerk did some of the finest thinking in the entire history of science,

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which begs the question - what was Einstein's big idea?

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Imagine you're chasing after a bus.

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It's doing 30 miles an hour, but you only manage 29.

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The bus is faster than you by one mile an hour.

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Speed up just a bit, and you'll catch it.

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But if the bus were a beam of light,

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then no matter how much you speed up,

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it's always faster than you by the same amount - the speed of light.

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This doesn't seem to make much sense,

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but by the start of the 20th century,

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experiments had shown that it was true.

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What on earth was going on?

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No matter whether you are moving towards it or moving away from it,

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you will always perceive light to be moving at the same speed.

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It's always 300,000km/s or thereabouts,

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and this is a little bit odd.

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It's not what we experience in everyday life.

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That flies in the face of common sense.

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I mean, it sounds like the statement of a lunatic.

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It really is a ridiculous thing to suggest.

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It took one of Einstein's famous "thought experiments" to sort it out.

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Let's say Mr and Mrs Einstein each have identical "relativity" clocks.

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These super-accurate timepieces work

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by bouncing a photon of light between two mirrors a few feet apart.

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Now, if Albert hurtles past at near the speed of light,

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Mrs Einstein would say that his photon has to travel much further

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between ticks than hers.

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So to keep the clocks ticking together,

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his photon would have to speed up.

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Except we already know that light doesn't do that!

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Einstein reasoned that time itself, not light, changes speed.

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He simply took this idea seriously - that the speed of light IS constant

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and that means that the very notion of what space and time is has to give.

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So this meant that time itself was no longer absolute.

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It had to be relative,

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and this is the big breakthrough that Einstein made.

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This fundamental shift in the way we see the universe

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meant that different clocks could show different times and still be right.

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Relative to Mrs Einstein, Albert's clock ticks slower than hers.

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The faster he goes, the slower it ticks

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until, at the speed of light, it would stop altogether.

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Bingo! Einstein had shown how nothing travels faster than light -

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not even celebrity gossip!

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Einstein published his universe-shattering theory in 1905,

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followed by a small postscript.

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This contained a tiny little equation,

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one that just about everybody knows, but almost no-one fully understands.

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So what does E=mc2 actually mean?

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The world's most famous equation simply states that E,

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or energy, equals mass - m, times c - the speed of light, times itself.

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And because c squared is a really big number,

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even a really small piece of matter like a paperclip equals a lot of energy.

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18 kilotons of TNT's worth to be exact.

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Or - one atom bomb.

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It doesn't even matter what that matter is.

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Marmalade, moon-rock, or a monkey's earwax - it's all atoms,

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which, in theory, can be converted to energy.

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So why can't we power our cities with paperclips

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and heat our homes with earwax?

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The problem is - releasing that energy requires an awful lot of well, energy.

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One way to do it is nuclear fission.

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Take one large atomic nucleus like uranium.

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Split it in two, and a little bit gets converted to energy,

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along with some nasty radioactive by-products.

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Then there's fusion.

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Take two hydrogen nuclei and stick them

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together to produce one helium nucleus.

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And some energy.

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But, first you'll need about 100 million degrees Celsius.

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Which is why stars like the sun can do it.

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If we could crack it here on earth,

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controlled fusion would give us unlimited clean energy.

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Einstein's equation raises this possibility, the possibility

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to use nuclear fusion to generate energy.

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It means that if we crack fusion, we can actually generate

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a huge amount of energy with a small amount of matter.

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A fusion power station in one day would use about one kg of fuel.

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That's like a big bag of sugar, whereas a coal-fired power station

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every day uses hundreds of truckloads of coal.

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So it gives you an idea

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of the amount of energy that we can get from fusion.

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Sounds too good to be true? Well, so far, it is.

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The only energy-efficient fusion we have achieved is

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the hydrogen bomb - and that's most definitely not controlled!

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If all this can be explained by one tiny equation containing just three numbers,

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then Einstein's next big idea would really shake things up.

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Einstein knew that his first theory of relativity was missing something.

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Gravity.

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So he relabelled it "Special" and got cracking on a new version,

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which he called "General Relativity".

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If I'd just overthrown hundreds of years of scientific thinking,

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I think I'd probably settle down, have a bit of a nap.

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But then again, I'm not a genius.

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The story goes that Einstein was sitting in his office

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when he saw a man fixing a roof.

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He imagined the poor chap falling off

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and had what he called the happiest thought of his life.

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As the man starts to fall, he is effectively in zero gravity.

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Put him inside a large windowless box that's also in free fall,

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and he has no way of knowing that he's moving.

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That is, until he hits the ground.

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Einstein realised that gravity is actually an illusion.

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Although its effects were still as real as ever.

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If you think about how you feel on a roller coaster,

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for example, when you're going up and down,

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that just like having gravity turned on and off.

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So if you just jump off the top of a building,

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then as you're falling down, it's like somebody's just turned gravity off.

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And Einstein had come up with a profound new understanding

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of how the universe behaved.

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It took him ten years to work out the details,

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but in 1916 he produced a brand-new picture of time, space and gravity.

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And in this new universe, gravity slows time.

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He took space, 3D space, and merged it with time,

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and came up with the concept of space-time.

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Four-dimensional space-time is something that is impossible to visualise

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because we live in a three-dimensional world.

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There's up/down, left/right, forward/back,

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and then there's another direction which I can't point in,

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unfortunately because I can only ever point in space,

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but this other direction if I could point in it -

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it's the time direction.

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So we get this curved four-dimensional space-time,

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and this is actually equivalent to gravity.

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If I have a planet and I put it in my space-time,

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it deforms space-time, and that is my gravitational well.

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So we're not just thinking of it as a force,

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we're thinking of it as a perturbance in space-time.

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Because Earth's gravity gets weaker

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the further away from its centre you are,

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your head ages faster than your feet

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by a hundredth of a billionth of a second every day.

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By your 80th birthday,

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your cranium has gained a good 300 nanoseconds on your tootsies.

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Or, about a millionth of the time it takes to blink.

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Einstein's brilliance may have changed the universe,

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but it didn't actually make him a lot of money.

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Apparently, he once quipped that his thought-experiments

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placed clocks all over the cosmos,

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and yet he couldn't actually afford to buy one for himself!

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It's Einstein's 72nd birthday party.

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A photographer asks him to smile for the camera.

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Instead, the ageing professor engages in a cheeky spot of glossal protrusion.

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This snapshot became so famous

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that in 2009 an autographed copy sold at auction for nearly 75,000.

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So just how did a wrinkly old physicist

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become such a bankable icon?

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Ironically, Einstein's meteoric rise to fame began with the stars.

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In 1919, Sir Arthur Eddington photographed them during a solar eclipse,

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and confirmed that gravity bends light.

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So Einstein was right and just about everything we thought we knew

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about space, time and the universe was wrong.

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Almost overnight, Einstein's mug became global front-page news.

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When it hit the newspapers

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Einstein became an overnight celebrity throughout the whole world,

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not just among scientists.

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The Newtonian view of the world was utterly shattered.

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This was something completely new and something that people weren't expecting

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so when this theory was actually shown experimentally to be correct,

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it caused a lot of excitement.

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At first, he didn't exactly welcome the attention.

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He told a friend, "I dream I'm burning in Hell

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"and the postman is the Devil, eternally roaring at me."

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But he soon got used to the glare of the spotlight.

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By the time the Einsteins relocated to America in 1933,

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they were hobnobbing with the rich and famous.

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Albert's wild hair and drooping moustache were a cartoonist's dream,

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as instantly recognisable as Mickey Mouse

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and almost as easy to draw.

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Which is why ever since, just about every absent-minded professor

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and mad scientist looks a bit like you-know-who.

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Today, anybody as famous as Einstein would have their own chat show, they'd have a private jet

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and a temper shorter than a yardstick in a black hole.

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Frankly, they'd be unbearable.

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During his girlfriend Mileva's pregnancy,

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Einstein wrote her a soppy letter.

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"I am filled with such happiness and joy", he wrote, "that I must share it with you".

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Aw, sweet - except the previous line of her Valentine read,

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"I have just read a wonderful paper on the generation of cathode rays".

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Albert and Mileva did tie the knot, and had two more children,

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but you'd hardly call them love's young dream.

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A few years into their nuptial arrangement,

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they shared a passion for physics, but not much else.

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He once said, "Marriage is the unsuccessful attempt

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"to make something lasting out of an incident."

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And called Mileva an employee he couldn't sack.

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He even drew up a kind of legal contract,

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ordering her to do his cooking and laundry,

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prohibiting any sort of intimacy,

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and demanding that she stop talking to him if he requested it.

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Sounds more like a Hollywood pre-nup!

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This marriage probably didn't get off to a good start.

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The work that Einstein was doing required intense concentration.

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He spent a lot of time lost in thought,

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which is kind of incompatible with having a young baby around,

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which is very distracting.

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He was having to earn money,

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he was having to do his physics in the evening

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and he was having to be a father as well as a husband.

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Hardly surprisingly, it ended in divorce -

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partly because Einstein had at least one affair -

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with his first cousin Elsa, who then became his second wife.

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But despite many rumours to the contrary,

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he didn't have an affair with screen goddess Marilyn Monroe.

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The two never even met.

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Talking of goddesses, we know that Einstein developed a deep and philosophical sense of wonder

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at the beauty of the cosmos,

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and he obviously had an eye for a heavenly body,

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but he wasn't exactly a big fan of organised religion.

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So how did this born-again atheist end up bringing the Almighty

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into one of his most famous arguments?

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Einstein spent his last 30 years attempting to pull off

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his greatest trick yet -

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a Unified Field Theory to explain just about everything in the universe.

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His own Relativity Theory described a sort of "clockwork" universe.

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Measure it accurately enough, and you could work out the past

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and even predict the future.

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Relativity was great at big stuff like universes,

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but rubbish at little things, like atoms.

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Quantum Theory did this brilliantly, but said some really crazy things -

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objects could be in many places at once.

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A cat in a box could be both alive and dead until someone takes a peek.

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Worst of all, it said the fabric of reality is essentially fuzzy.

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When I say "fuzzy",

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I mean that by the time you get down to the level of subatomic particles,

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things stop being actual things,

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and they become probabilities -

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which means they might be where you think they are,

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but then again...they might not.

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Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle said we can never be 100% sure of absolutely everything,

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including the past and the future.

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Quantum mechanics is definitely weird, and very counter-intuitive.

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The most twisted and surreal imagination would never have come up with quantum physics

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if we weren't battered into it by the weight of the experimental evidence.

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Electrons can be in many different places at once.

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We've got a particle travelling from A to B.

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In the quantum world,

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it can take many different paths at the same time.

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So the object itself may or may not be there!

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Einstein hated this idea,

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rejecting it by saying "God does not play dice with the universe."

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Niels Bohr, the champion of this disturbing new science, replied,

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"Stop telling God what to do!"

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It was more than 50 years before quantum mechanics could be tested by experiment,

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and Einstein was finally proved wrong!

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Yes, it's official. The world IS essentially uncertain.

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God, it seems, DOES play dice after all.

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But if Einstein made a mess of that, what else did he get wrong?

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Or in other words...

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Some might argue that Einstein's work gave us the atom bomb,

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which is a pretty big faux pas in anyone's book.

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But it seems his worst mistake was one of even greater gravity.

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Einstein used his equations to build a model of the universe,

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only to find that it should be expanding, or contracting,

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but not remaining static as everyone at the time knew it was.

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For once, Einstein wasn't thinking weird and far out.

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He was maintaining conventional wisdom

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that the universe was static, as we all expected.

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I think he thought the universe was static

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because there wasn't anything really to convince him otherwise.

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So the idea was, he'd made a mistake somewhere.

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Einstein bodged up a last-minute fix, adding a number

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he called the Cosmological Constant into his equations,

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a kind of "negative gravity"

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to counterbalance the effects of regular gravity.

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Even at the time, he knew this was very dodgy science.

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He had to introduce a fudge factor,

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and the fudge factor stopped him from having an expanding universe.

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And this was like a mysterious repulsive force that

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went against gravity,

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and actually stopped the universe collapsing, and kept it static.

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He had to introduce a fudge factor into his mathematics,

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which turned out to be a mistake.

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12 years later, Edwin Hubble discovered that due to the Big Bang

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the universe IS expanding.

0:21:450:21:48

Hubble worked out that all the galaxies in the universe are flying apart from each other,

0:21:480:21:53

exactly like...

0:21:530:21:55

..the spots on the surface of an inflating balloon.

0:21:580:22:02

So Einstein had been right about the expanding universe,

0:22:040:22:07

and wrong to add his Cosmological Constant,

0:22:070:22:11

the so-called biggest blunder of his life.

0:22:110:22:14

Einstein then realised that in fact

0:22:150:22:17

he had the solution all along.

0:22:170:22:18

He actually had the solution of an expanding universe.

0:22:180:22:21

His equations, taken at face value, actually predict an expanding universe,

0:22:210:22:26

so he kind of missed that trick.

0:22:260:22:28

The universe was actually expanding, so there was no need for this

0:22:280:22:32

Cosmological Constant to keep it static.

0:22:320:22:33

And this was his biggest blunder.

0:22:330:22:35

But as recently as 1998,

0:22:350:22:38

scientists discovered that the universe isn't just expanding.

0:22:380:22:42

It's speeding up, too.

0:22:420:22:43

Shocked by this result, they had to quickly invent a repulsive force to explain it away,

0:22:450:22:51

and they called it "Dark Energy" -

0:22:510:22:54

basically another name for the Cosmological Constant.

0:22:540:22:57

So, even when Einstein got it wrong, he ended up being right.

0:22:590:23:05

OK, so once in a blue moon Einstein stuffed up, dropped the ball, made a boo-boo.

0:23:070:23:13

But at least he was honest about it.

0:23:130:23:15

And scientists are good at that - admitting they're wrong

0:23:150:23:18

when somebody comes up with a better idea.

0:23:180:23:21

Unlike that other bunch.

0:23:210:23:23

You know - politicians.

0:23:230:23:25

Which makes me wonder...

0:23:250:23:27

They say that politics is just show business for ugly people.

0:23:300:23:35

Well, Einstein certainly never won any beauty contests -

0:23:350:23:38

maybe that's why he became so interested in the affairs of state.

0:23:380:23:43

In Zurich, when he should have been studying physics,

0:23:430:23:46

he was often found at the Odeon Cafe - a notorious hang-out

0:23:460:23:50

later frequented by the likes of Trotsky, Lenin, and Mussolini.

0:23:500:23:54

Perhaps inspired by this free-thinking atmosphere,

0:23:580:24:02

Einstein soon proved he wasn't one to shy away from a political argument.

0:24:020:24:07

Maybe he should have laid off the coffee.

0:24:080:24:10

After the outbreak of World War One, nearly 100 prominent scientists

0:24:130:24:16

signed a paper supporting Germany's military aggression.

0:24:160:24:21

Outraged, Einstein added his John Hancock to a pacifist counter-petition,

0:24:210:24:27

bringing the final number of signatures to a total of...four!

0:24:270:24:32

Before the next war, Einstein - who was Jewish -

0:24:320:24:35

had a reward placed on his head by the Nazi Party.

0:24:350:24:38

And his work became the target of their infamous book-burning campaign,

0:24:380:24:43

which might explain why he decided not to stick around.

0:24:430:24:47

But even after he settled in the Land Of The Free,

0:24:470:24:50

things weren't much better.

0:24:500:24:52

Wary of Einstein's socialist views and political influence,

0:24:520:24:55

the FBI opened a file on him collecting 1,800 pages

0:24:550:25:00

of so-called "derogatory information".

0:25:000:25:03

They tapped his phone, opened his mail, and even went through his bin.

0:25:030:25:09

But while America treated Einstein like the enemy,

0:25:100:25:13

other countries were a little more welcoming.

0:25:130:25:17

In 1952, the newly formed State of Israel

0:25:170:25:20

asked him if he'd like to have a bash at being their President.

0:25:200:25:25

He turned it down.

0:25:250:25:26

If the thought of President Einstein strikes you as maybe a little bizarre,

0:25:280:25:34

it's nothing - nothing! - compared with what happened after his death.

0:25:340:25:39

What happened to Einstein's brain?

0:25:390:25:42

Sadly, Einstein departed these four dimensions in 1955.

0:25:440:25:49

Against his wishes,

0:25:490:25:51

and without the family's permission,

0:25:510:25:54

autopsy pathologist Thomas Harvey removed the ex-genius's brain.

0:25:540:25:59

Curiously, he also removed the eyeballs,

0:25:590:26:01

which today reside in a New York safe-deposit box.

0:26:010:26:05

He actually stole Einstein's brain!

0:26:070:26:10

He was really interested in finding out

0:26:110:26:13

if there was a physical connection between the brain and genius.

0:26:130:26:19

Instead of handing over his cerebral trophy,

0:26:190:26:22

Harvey sliced it into 240 pieces,

0:26:220:26:25

pickled them in two jars of formaldehyde

0:26:250:26:28

and stashed them in his basement.

0:26:280:26:30

After losing his wife, his job and his medical certificate as a result of the scandal,

0:26:310:26:38

Dr Harvey set off around the USA in search of an expert

0:26:380:26:42

who could unlock the secrets of a genius's brain.

0:26:420:26:47

He even kept the brain in a beer cooler,

0:26:470:26:51

before eventually shoving it into the trunk of his Buick Skylark

0:26:510:26:54

and heading west to California.

0:26:540:26:58

He thought it would make a nice gift for Einstein's granddaughter,

0:26:580:27:02

but strangely enough, she didn't want it.

0:27:020:27:04

After 41 years, Harvey finally contacted a university researcher in Canada.

0:27:040:27:11

She spotted that thanks to an under-developed Sylvian fissure,

0:27:110:27:15

Einstein's parietal lobe was about 15% wider than normal.

0:27:150:27:20

This bit of the brain deals with mathematics and spatial awareness -

0:27:200:27:24

definitely two of Einstein's better subjects!

0:27:240:27:27

Later, a neuropathologist placed some of the sliced cerebrum under a microscope,

0:27:290:27:34

and discovered something rather remarkable.

0:27:340:27:36

Einstein's 76-year-old grey matter showed almost no sign of ageing.

0:27:360:27:42

So, the key to Einstein's genius may have been simply that he was young at heart -

0:27:440:27:49

or brain, at least.

0:27:490:27:51

Whatever the cause, Einstein's impressive cerebral abilities

0:27:530:27:57

have assured him a place as THE foremost thinker of the 20th century.

0:27:570:28:03

The by-products of his work have affected every single one of us on the planet,

0:28:030:28:08

not to mention quite a few people off it,

0:28:080:28:10

while he himself has become an icon -

0:28:100:28:13

a pipe-smoking, tongue-poking, sock-dodging symbol of true genius,

0:28:130:28:19

with a natty little 'tache and the worst hairdo in physics.

0:28:190:28:24

Relatively speaking, that is!

0:28:260:28:29

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