Einstein’s parents once worried he had a learning disability because he struggled to speak. This deep dive moves past the grandfatherly genius myth to trace a life driven by a deep rejection of arbitrary authority, from a compass that fascinated him at age five to his final years in Princeton.

We cover his clash with rote learning in Munich, the doctor’s note he used to leave school, the entrance exam he partly failed, renouncing German citizenship at 16, his partnership with Mileva Marić, and the patent office job that became an incubator for the miracle year of 1905. Then we follow general relativity, the 1919 eclipse that made him famous, the 1939 letter to Roosevelt, and his long resistance to quantum mechanics.

• The four 1905 papers explained: the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity, and E=mc²
• Why the Nobel committee in 1921 honored the photoelectric effect rather than relativity
• General relativity as a trampoline of spacetime, and why GPS satellites depend on it
• How a lifelong pacifist came to urge US atomic research and later campaign against lynching with Paul Robeson
• His messy personal life and his refusal to accept that God plays dice with the universe