For Immediate Release Contact: Pat Kremer/Nancy O’Shea (312) 665-7100 (For Media Use Only) Did You Know? Einstein was born with a large, odd-looking head and didn’t speak until he was about 2, when his sister Maja was born. His parents feared for a time that he might be retarded. Though Einstein’s favorite sport was sailing, he couldn’t swim and refused to wear a life jacket. Einstein did not work in a laboratory. He was a theoretical physicist, and made his discoveries with pen and paper. He got an early start on “thought-experiments” when, as a youth, he tried to imagine what it would be like to ride a beam of light. Einstein did not foresee any technological applications of his equation E = mc², much less development of atomic bomb. He had no role in the project to develop the bomb. Einstein won his Nobel Prize not for the theory of relativity, but for another paper, on the photoelectric effect, published the same year. Einstein was an activist for civil rights. He worked on anti-lynching campaigns, attended NAACP meetings, and spoke out forcefully against racial prejudice. The FBI considered Einstein a risk to national security. Beginning in 1932, they collected a secret file on him that eventually came to more than 1,400 pages. An ardent, lifelong Zionist, Einstein was offered the presidency of Israel in 1952, following the death of the country’s first president. He respectfully declined. Though he made major contributions to quantum theory, Einstein never entirely accepted its premise of a universe that is based on probabilities and to some degree unknowable. In September 2002, scientists for the first time measured the speed at which the force of gravity moves. As Einstein predicted, it proved to be the same as the speed of light. Einstein’s work has led, directly or indirectly, to many practical applications, including vacuum tubes, transistors, and computers; televisions, CD players, and remote control devices; and X-ray crystallography (which played a key role in the discovery of DNA and is now used in designing new drugs). His theory of general relativity is important in keeping Global Positioning Satellites on track. In the last 30 years of his life, Einstein’s main scientific interest was the attempt to develop a unified field theory—a single theory that would encompass both gravity and electromagnetism. Nearly half a century after his death, the search goes on. Return to the Einstein Press Kit main page