Einstein

The book I read to research this post was Einstein for Dummies by Carlos I Calle which is a excellent book which I bought from Kindle. One thing I want to mention is if you go to the Kindle homepage on the Amazon web site they do what they call a daily deal, that's not how I got this book, but I've noticed the daily deal which changes each day is often an ebook that Kindle normally sell for approximately 5 pounds & they often do them on the daily deal for 99 pence & they seem to do a good variety over several days.
Anyway getting back to Einstein he was born in Ulm in Germany to jewish parents & a year later they moved to Munich. Despite them being they weren't very religious & sent him to a catholic school which had lower tuition fees & was a better school than the nearest jewish school. They thought Einstein had learning difficulties because he was slow learning to talk. A lot of what helped him academically was his mother gave him a magnetic compass which fascinated. He started learning all he could about how compasses worked & electromagnetism, then he started learning physics & maths & went on from there. The schools he went to were very strict regimes & he rebelled against that. His greek teacher said that he would never amount to anything & he hated ancient greek. A bit before he went to university which was in Zurich, Switzerland he left school & tutored himself. When he went to the university he was just 16 & took the entrance exam 2 years early which he failed part but impressed them so much with his knowledge of maths & physics that one of the professors let him join his class. He was still a bit of a rebel & only went to lectures that he thought were interesting & if he liked the lecturer. As a result of this he had to borrow his friends notes & cram all his revision into towards the end of the course. Despite this he came 1st in the 1st year exams & did pass his degree. He wanted a research job with a university but one of his lecturers whom he didn't get on with put all the universities off hiring him. Instead he got a job in the Patents Office in Berne which left him plenty of time to do research. 1905 is often called the year of miracles because it's the year Einstein got 6 papers published that turned Physics on its head. He also won the Nobel Prize for Physics that year which is amazing when you consider he wasn't working in a university research lab. That year he also submitted one of his papers as a dissertation for his doctorate which was accepted. Later on he was instrumental in getting the americans to work on the atomic bomb during World War 2 & has said he wouldn't have bothered if he had known the germans wouldn't be able to develop it. He died in 1955.