爱因斯坦4岁开始说话,到9岁才可以流利表达。
As a young boy, Albert was a slow learner and his parents worried about their son’s intellectual development. Some have pondered whether he may have had dyslexia or Asperger’s syndrome. Albert didn’t start speaking until he was 4 years old and he wasn’t fluent until age 9. Einstein later credited his theory of relativity to this slowness: “The ordinary adult never bothers his head about the problems of space and time. These are things he has thought of as a child. But I developed so slowly that I began to wonder about space and time only when I was already grown up. Consequently, I probed more deeply into the problem than an ordinary child would have.”
From an early age, Albert had a brilliant curiosity and was fascinated by the laws of nature. He recalled experiencing a deep feeling of wonder when puzzling over a pocket compass that his father showed him. The needle’s invariable northward swing, guided by an invisible force, profoundly impressed young Einstein. Albert was only 5 at the time, but realizing that something in “empty” space acted upon the needle, he later described the experience as one of the most revelatory of his life. The compass convinced him that there had to be “something behind things, something deeply hidden,” inspiring a lifelong quest to investigate the mysteries of the natural world.
Despite his natural inquisitiveness, Albert was unhappy in school. According to a story that he later told his son Hans Albert, “his teachers reported that . . . he was mentally slow, unsociable, and adrift forever in his foolish dreams.” Einstein attributed his school problems to a disdain for compulsion, a tendency to do things his own way, and an unwillingness to do the work required by his teachers. He wrote that the spirit of discovery and creative thought were lost in strict rote learning. Biographer Albrecht Fölsing, author of
Albert Einstein: A Biography (New York: Viking, 1997), described him as an exceptionally bright, self-motivated learner who could get good scores when he wanted to, but refused to waste his time with school activities in which he saw little value.