Albert Einstein is one of those rare names that transcends science and enters everyday language. To call someone “an Einstein” is to call them a genius. His wild hair and twinkling eyes became a symbol for scientific brilliance itself. But behind the caricature is a story richer and more human: a boy who struggled with school, a patent clerk who daydreamed about light beams, a refugee who fled hatred, a pacifist who feared the weapon born of his own theories, and a man who tried until his last breath to read the mind of God in the fabric of the cosmos. In this episode of Science Giants, we trace the life of Albert Einstein, not as a myth but as a person—full of doubts, joys, contradictions, and an unquenchable hunger to understand.

He was born on March 14, 1879, in Ulm, in the Kingdom of Württemberg, part of the German Empire. His parents,  ...