The Boy Who Bested Einstein
young Albert Einstein circa 1895
How do you stack up against the competition? Where do you fall in the rankings of your class, be it grades, income, the car you drive or the neighborhood you live in? Throughout our lives we are persistently being measured for success not by what we do so much as what others are doing. Sometimes that just doesn’t seem right. Well here’s a little footnote from history that might provide some perspective to this tricky issue.
In researching and writing Einstein: His Life and Universe, a comprehensive biography of the man widely celebrated as one of the greatest thinkers of this or any age, author Walter Isaacson uncovered a playful little tidbit concerning the famed physicist’s youth. In 1895, while enrolled in an exclusive college preparatory school in Aargau, Switzerland, the sixteen-year-old Einstein was already being recognized as an exceptional student. No surprise there.
Yet according to Isaacson and what scant school records survived from those days, in that particular year young master Einstein scored the second highest rank in his class.
Then Isaacson throws in this delicious little twist: “Alas, the name of the boy who bested Einstein is lost to history.” 1
So, the man whose name and face is, to this day, synonymous with genius, the man who helped tell us how the universe worked and ushered in the atomic age, was at one point in his young life not the smartest kid in his class. Someone else was.
In time, of course, Einstein would become the world’s first and only science superstar. Even long after his death in 1955 in Princeton, New Jersey, his aura and popularity continue to shine. But things were far simpler back in 1895 when he was a young teenager, albeit a very bright one, going to school in Switzerland. His early life unfolded long before the age of overnight celebrity and information overload. Things were far simpler back in 1895, and in some ways more is the pity.
For if he were alive today, might not the student who once outranked Einstein be the subject of curious, if not critical scrutiny? What journalist or news editor wouldn’t love to expose him to the world, take his picture and ask him a few pointed questions? What did it feel like to be better than Einstein? Did you ever think — what if it would have been me instead of him that went on to great fame? Any regrets? By the way, what did you end up doing with the rest of your life?
Fate can, and does, ask cruel things of us all.
Left alone, this mystery boy probably went on to live a full and unassuming life, working hard to earn a living and raise a family without ever knowing, or maybe not even caring, that he once had a slight brush with immortality. Again, we’ll never know.
History offers that most tantalizing of visions — the unerring view of hindsight. And with it comes the piecing together of what was, and what could have been. Call it the big What If? Looking back in time, the whims of fate and destiny stand out for all to see, if indeed one chooses to look at them at all. Look hard enough, though, and you’re bound to find some good ones.
Which brings up the question of what determines individual greatness? Is it hard work and free will? Little more than random chance? Or is it the placement from a Higher Order, a touch of Divine Grace that somehow taps the shoulder of one life and not the next?
In his later years, as quoted again in Isaacson’s biography, Einstein had this to say about it all:
“Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control…we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible player.” 2
Maybe he was on to something there. Maybe we do all dance to our own unique tune, our own soundtrack to life. Maybe it’s just that some are heard louder and play longer than others.
Therein lies the intrigue of history. Therein lies, for each of us, the great mystery of our lives.
