4 Chapter 3 Albert Takes a Very Deep Breath and Keeps Thinking

Chapter 3 Albert Takes a Very Deep Breath … and Keeps Thinking "One is born into a herd of buffaloes and must be glad if one is not trampled underfoot before one's time." —Albert Einstein Getting expelled from school—even a school he hated—was very painful for Albert. He was embarrassed to have failed so openly. He was angry with his teachers. He was disappointed in himself. Yet he was also excited that he would soon see his family. Albert joined his parents and sister in northern Italy. Italy was so different from Germany. Albert quickly fell in love with the country. Italians were so friendly, civilized, and open-minded. For the

next two years, Albert went to concerts and visited art museums. Best of all, he had time to read and to think. He studied the lives of scientists, including those who had suffered because their thinking had gone against widely held ideas of the time. For example, there was Nicholas Copernicus (1473–1543), the Polish astronomer. He was severely criticized for stating that the earth orbited around the sun and not vice versa. A hundred years later, in 1633, Galileo Galilei, an Italian scientist, was arrested for agreeing with Copernicus. Yet in Albert's time, no sane person believed that the sun circles the earth.

The study of other scientists' theories pushed Albert's thinking even further. In Italy, he had the time to write down those thoughts and answer many of the questions he had been asking himself for years. Now he was a real scientist. He even

had his first scientific paper published in a magazine, while he was still a teenager! When scientists have new ideas to share, they write about them in scientific journals. (That's what it means to "get a paper published.") For Albert, as for all scientists, getting papers published was very important; it was the only way other scientists could learn about his ideas and thoughts.

Albert's first published paper was about electricity and magnetism. That was no surprise. After all, he'd been thinking about both subjects for years. But to everybody's surprise, Albert began his paper by disagreeing with something that all scientists assumed was true. Scientists

claimed that the "empty" part of outer space—the part without planets and moons—was filled with something called "ether." Scientists had no idea what ether was made of, or what it looked like, felt like, or smelled like. But they all agreed it was there. Albert disagreed. He claimed that the empty part of space was, well, empty. Albert's first paper did not get a lot of attention. Although Albert was disappointed about that, he should not have been surprised. After all, Albert was a teenager who had been expelled from high school and who was still living with his parents. Who was he to challenge the theories of the world's most respected scientists? However, years later, many of those same scientists would seek out Einstein's first published paper and marvel at the genius of the young scientist. Because Albert was right. While living in Italy, Albert took long walks by himself. Day after day he hiked in the mountains. His family's business was failing, and Albert worried that he was a drain on his parents —a sponge that took but never gave back. He had lots to think about, and a daily walk and time alone cleared his mind. "I lived in solitude in the