Einstein Revealed

A two-hour NOVA special presents a penetrating profile of Albert Einstein, who contributed more than any other scientist to our modern vision of physical reality. Enlivened by dramatizations based closely on Einstein's writings and the recollections of friends, our programs will trace his extraordinary rise from a student who flunked his engineering exams to the world's most renowned physicist—a transformation that took barely a decade. What was the secret of Einstein's scientific creativity? How did a lowly patent clerk without regular access to academic literature or other scientists come up with three revolutionary theories in the single 'miracle' year of 1905? How did Einstein, the pacifist, later evolve to become a crucial advocate of the Manhattan Project? And does Einstein's popular image of a lovable eccentric match reality? NOVA draws on the latest scholarly studies of Einstein's private life to reveal a complex personality who was sometimes an unscrupulous flirt and at other times icy and remote from the women who supported his genius.