Chapter 4: A Truly Beautiful Mind Poem: The Lake Isle of Innisfree

(i) Einstein’s equation – 9

(ii) Einstein meets his future wife – 7

(iii) The making of a violinist – 3

(iv) Mileva and Einstein’s mother – 10

(v) A letter that launched the arms race – 15

(vi) A desk drawer full of ideas – 8

(vii) Marriage and divorce – 11

(i) He was boring – Einstein’s playmates

(ii) He was stupid and would never succeed in life – Einstein’s headmaster

(iii) He was a freak – Einstein’s mother

(i) Einstein left the school in Munich for good because he disliked the school’s regimentation and often had arguments with his school teachers.

(ii) Einstein wanted to study in Switzerland rather than in Munich because Switzerland was a city that was much more liberal than Munich.

(iii) Einstein saw an ally in Mileva because just like him, she too was against ‘Philistines’, i.e., the people in Einstein’s family and at the university with whom he was constantly at odds.

(iv) The above things tell us that Einstein was a very liberal person who liked freedom. He was a person who had his own views about life.

Answer: Einstein called his desk drawer at the patent office the ‘bureau of theoretical physics’. He called it so because he was secretly developing his own ideas and inventions related to physics.

Answer: Einstein wrote a letter to Franklin Roosevelt because he wanted to warn America that Germany had the ability to build and use an atomic bomb, which if exploded in a port, would destroy the entire port as well as some of the surrounding territory.

Answer: He was deeply shaken by the extent of destruction due to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He wrote a public missive to the United Nations and proposed the formation of a world government.

Answer: The world remembers Einstein as a “world citizen” because he agitated for an end to the arms buildup and campaigned for peace and democracy in the world.

Solution coming soon.