Enter the mind of a genius who changed the world. Physicist, mathematician, astronomer, humanist - Albert Einstein (1879-1955) was so radical a thinker that his brilliance is difficult to grasp. He was not an outstanding student, yet in 1905, at the age of 26, he published groundbreaking studies of the relationships of mass, energy, the speed of light, and the ways in which they are observed and measured. Relativity theory, as these ideas are known, forever altered our understanding of the universe. No longer were the laws of physics absolute, as scientists had once believed. Einstein was both a committed pacificist and a Jew who had fled Hitler's Germany; when World War II came, he helped to apply his theories in researching atomic energy, which led to the atomic bomb. In later years, as a world-renowned figure, he devoted much time to campaigning for world peace. Yet he also pursued research on the atom, the space-time continuum, the photoelectric effect, and quantum theory. His great unachieved ambition was to find a unified field theory, linking the physics of light, matter and gravitation. This thought-provoking volume explains Einstein's work in plain language and examines one of the most remarkable figures of all time.