Albert Einstein Trivia

Lucas Reilly and Mental Floss present 19 Things You Might Not Have Known About Albert Einstein.  Here are three of my favorites…

4. NOBODY KNOWS EINSTEIN’S IQ.
Einstein’s IQ was never tested, though that hasn’t stopped people from guessing. Lots of websites claim the physicist’s IQ was 160, but there’s simply no way of verifying that claim. “One fundamental problem with the estimates I’ve seen is that they tend to conflate intellectual ability with domain-specific achievement,” Dean Keith Simonton, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California, Davis told Biography. For all we know, Einstein’s aptitude in arenas outside of physics might have rivaled that of an average Joe.

6. FASHION WAS NOT EINSTEIN’S STRONG SUIT.
Einstein hated wearing socks and was immensely proud of the fact that he didn’t have to wear them while giving lectures at Oxford in the 1930s. His antipathy apparently stemmed from a childhood realization: “When I was young I found out that the big toe always ends up making a hole in a sock,” Einstein reportedly said. “So I stopped wearing socks.” As an adult, he typically wore an undershirt, baggy trousers held by rope, and a pair of (occasionally women’s) sandals.

18. EINSTEIN WAS THE INSPIRATION FOR YODA.
Yoda’s face was partly modeled after Einstein’s. According to Star Wars special-effects artist Nick Maley, “A picture of Einstein ended up on the wall behind the Yoda sculptures and the wrinkles around Einstein’s eyes somehow got worked into the Yoda design. Over the course of this evolutionary process Yoda slowly changed from a comparatively spritely [sic], tall, skinny, grasshopper kind of character into the old wise spirited gnome that we all know today.”