E=mc2 by David Bodanis

unified fields that had remained separate, questioning assumptions that everyone until then had simply accepted.
    The few researchers around 1905 who had uncovered a small part of what he later deduced had no chance of matching him. Poincare got closer than almost anyone else, but when it came to breaking our usual assumptions about time's flow or the nature of simultaneity, he backed off, unable to consider the consequences of such a new view.
    Why was Einstein so much more successful? It's tempting to say it was just a matter of being brighter than everyone else. But several of Einstein's Bern friends were highly intelligent, while someone like Poincare would have been off the scale on any IQ test. Thorstein Veblen once wrote a curious little essay that I think gets at a deeper reason. Suppose, Veblen began, a young boy learns that everything in the Bible is true. He then goes to a secular high school, or university, and is told that's wrong. "What you learned at your mother's knee is entirely false. What we teach you here, however, will be entirely true." Some students would say, Oh, fine, I'll accept that. But others will be more suspicious. They'd been fooled once before, taking on faith an entire traditional world. They're not going to be fooled again. They would learn what was on offer, but always hold it critically, as just one possibility among others. Einstein was Jewish, and even though his immediate family wasn't observant, this meant he was immersed in a culture with different views about personal responsibility, justice, and belief in authority than the standard German and Swiss consensus.
    There's more, though. When Einstein was a little boy, he was fascinated with how magnets worked. But instead of being teased about it by his parents, they accepted his interest. How did magnets work? There had to be a reason, and that reason had to be based on another reason, and maybe if you traced it all the way, you'd reach . . . what would you reach?
    At one time, in the Einstein household, there had been a very clear answer to what would ultimately be reached. When his grandparents had been growing up, most Jews in Germany were still close to traditional Orthodoxy. It was a world suffused by the Bible, as well as by the crisply rational accumulated analysis of the Talmud. What counted was to push through to the very edge of what was knowable, and comprehend the deepest patterns God had decreed for our world. Einstein had gone through an intense religious period when he was approaching his teens, though by the time he was at the Aarau high school that literal belief was gone. Yet the desire to see the deepest underpinnings was still there, as was the trust that you would find something magnificent waiting if you made it that far. There was a waiting "slot": things could be clarified, and in a comprehensible, rational way. At one time the slot had been filled in by religion. It could easily enough be extended now to science. Einstein had great confidence that the answers were waiting to be found.
    It also helped that Einstein had the space to explore his ideas. The patent job meant that he didn't have to churn out academic papers ("a temptation to superficiality," Einstein wrote, "which only strong characters can resist"), but rather he could work on his ideas for as long as it took. Most of all, his family trusted him, which is a great boost to confidence, and they also encouraged a playful, distancing tone. It's just what's needed for "stepping back" from ordinary assumptions, and imagining such oddities as a space shuttle pushed up against a barrier at the speed of light, or someone chasing toward a skedaddling beam of light.
    His sister, Maja, later gave a hint of this gently self-teasing tone. When Einstein got in a temper as a little child, she recounted, he sometimes threw things at her. Once it was a large bowling ball; another time he used a child's hoe "to try to knock a hole" in her head. "This should suffice,"