Today we push open the door of a quiet house in Kent and step into a study where the drawers have labels and the labels are promises: barnacles, bees, seed dispersal, pigeon skulls, earthworms, questionnaires from far‑flung correspondents bound with red tape. The room smells of paper, camphor, and the faint sourness of spirits used to preserve delicate things. On a table lies a sheaf of pages tied with string and weighted with a stone; on the wall hangs a map with a penciled track looping from Plymouth to Brazil to Tierra del Fuego, up the spine of the Andes and out among islands whose names schoolchildren will learn because a man stood there with a notebook and noticed differences.

By Selenius Media

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, Hermann and Pauline, were secular Jews. Hermann ran an electrical equipment company with his brother; Pauline nurtured Albert’s curiosity and introduced him to music. Family lore has it that when Albert was very young, perhaps four or five, he was struck with wonder by a simple gift: a compass. Watching the needle swing as if guided by an invisible hand, he felt awe at unseen forces shaping the world. That sense of mystery—how invisible rules govern visible things—would never leave him.

By Selenius Media

Today we descend into a basement where iron filings glitter like frost on black paper, where the air smells faintly of oil, hot shellac, and singed cotton, where a man in a plain coat is bending a piece of soft iron and listening—yes, listening—to what happens when a wire is wound and a current persuaded to run. The room is part workshop, part chapel, part classroom of the Royal Institution in London. The man is Michael Faraday, bookbinder’s son, apprentice turned experimenter, a servant who became the steward of a new language for nature. He will show that motion can be drawn from magnetism, that electricity can be summoned from change, that light and magnetism converse in the fabric of glass, that “lines of force” are not metaphors we draw on paper but structures out there in the world, and that a civilization can be electrified without first learning to boast about it.

By Selenius Media