5 Facts About Albert Einstein

If someone asks you to name a famous physicist, almost everyone answers with ‘Albert Einstein’. The name ‘Albert Einstein’ is well known all over the world, but do we actually know as much about him as we think? Or are there still many things about Albert Einstein that we don’t know? This article contains 5 facts about Albert Einstein that you probably haven’t heard of yet. 

  1. Einstein’s brain was stolen after his death

In 1955, Einstein found out after a medical control that a blood vessel near his heart had burst. As a result, he was suffering from internal bleeding. A medical procedure could fix this problem, but Einstein wanted nothing to do with it. Besides thinking his life had been long enough and was therefore ready to go, he also found it distasteful to just make life longer in an artificial way.  

Consequently, Einstein died in the same year. Despite the fact that he had requested for his body to be cremated, Princeton pathologist Thomas Harvey removed his brain 7.5 hours after Einstein’s death during his autopsy. Thomas Harvey kept the brain, hoping to one day find out the secret behind this master brain. Thomas Harvey sent parts of Einstein’s brain to several scientists for research. Over the years, they found out that Einstein’s brain was indeed different from the average brain. Namely, his prefrontal cortex was larger and he was said to have more glial cells than average. These studies have been criticized, though. It is thought that too few brains were compared and researchers knew in advance which brain was Einstein’s, and this can lead to bias.  

2. Einstein was watched by the FBI for decades

Before the Second World War began, Einstein left for America to escape Germany’s strict regime. Among other things, he believed that people should not blindly follow the authorities, nor did he believe in patriotism. However, once he arrived in America, the FBI was watching him for decades, despite his contribution to science. The FBI looked through his mail, tapped his phone calls and followed all his meetings. 


Einstein was thought to be a communist, a radical and/or a spy for the Soviet Union. People thought this partly because the scientist had once said that a country like Switzerland has much more respect for its people than America. The project from the FBI came up empty handed, but by the time Einstein died in 1955, his FBI file totaled a whopping 1,800 pages. 

3. No one knows what happened to his first daughter. 

In 1896, Einstein entered the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich. There he got a relationship with Mileva Maric. She was a physicist by training from Serbia. After their studies, this couple married and had two sons. In the late 1980s, it was discovered that Maric had given birth to an illegitimate daughter named Lieserl a year before their marriage. Biographers found this out after studying private documents from Einstein. Einstein never spoke about the child with his family and he probably never saw her. Her fate remains a mystery to this day. It is not clear whether Lieserl died of scarlet fever in 1903 or whether she survived the disease and was given up for adoption in Maric’s native ‘Serbia’. 


 4. Einstein was asked to be the president of Israel, but he declined this offer.  

Although, Einstein was not traditionally religious, he did have a close relationship with the country of ‘Israel’ because he was originally Jewish. After the Israeli head of state ‘Chaim Weizmann’ died in 1952, the Israelis preferred to have the famous scientist as president.  
Nevertheless, after the Israeli government offered Einstein as the country’s second president, he declined the request. Einstein wrote in his letter to the Israeli ambassador, “All my life I have been engaged in objective matters, therefore I lack both the natural aptitude and experience to deal with people in the right way and hold an official position.” The scientists did not want to disappoint the people of Israel by being a bad president for them, so he preferred to pass up the opportunity. 

5. Einstein urged the building of the atomic bomb, but he became a proponent of nuclear disarmament later. 

Einstein, along with the Hungarian physicist, wrote a brief to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. With this letter, they tried to urge the president to develop and use atomic bombs. Einstein wanted this because he feared the Nazis would get ahead of America. Hitler was one of Einstein’s great archenemies and the scientist knew that the Germans were already developing atomic bombs. Einstein therefore thought it was very important that America was also able to use atomic bombs when needed. 

However, after the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Japan), Einstein saw the disastrous consequences of nuclear weapons. From then on, Einstein favored nuclear disarmament, control of weapons testing and a unified world arms control regime. In 1955, shortly before Einstein’s death, he and the philosopher Bertrand Russel signed the “Russell-Einstein Manifesto.” This was an open-letter emphasizing the risks of violence with nuclear weapons.  

From now on, the next time that someone ask you to name a famous physicist and you answer with ‘Albert Einstein’, you know 5 more facts about him than others do. Nonetheless, keep in mind that Einstein once said: “Never give up on what you really want to do. The person with big dreams is more powerful than the one with all the facts”. 

13 October, 2022

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