Einstein and E=MC squared:

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica Albert Einstein "showed little scholastic ability" and "left school with no diploma."

In 1895 he failed a simple entrance exam to the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule in Zurich which would have allowed him to study for a diploma as an electrical engineer.

Following his failure of the entrance exam, Einstein attended a secondary school at Aarau and finally in 1900 graduated as a teacher of mathematics and physics. One of his friends, Marcel Grossmann, was appointed as an assistant at ETH in Zurich but though Einstein applied for a post, he was unsuccessful and a year later he was still writing to universities for a job. He did, however, manage to avoid Swiss military service on the grounds of flat feet and varicose veins.

By mid-1901 he had a temporary job as a teacher of mathematics at the Technical High School in Winterthur. Another temporary position in a private school in Schaffhausen followed.

Finally the father of his friend, Marcel Grossmann, recommended him to the director of the patent office in Bern and Einstein was appointed technical expert third class.

He worked there from 1902 to 1909, on a temporary basis until 1904, when the post was made permanent and in 1906 he was promoted to technical expert second class.

In 1905, whilst in the Bern patent office, he submitted his four ground-breaking papers.

None of the ideas of Albert Einstein were completely new. He drew on the works of many predecessors, Max Planck, James Maxwell and Poincare to name a few.

Extraordinarily, the editor/s of "Annalen der Physik" published the completely unreferenced papers of an unknown that gave no acknowledgment of preceding theoretical work by others. The least an editor would have expected was some proof to determine whether Einstein's claim of primacy was correct.

Surely Einstein, as a patent clerk, would have been aware of the need to cite references to his articles?

Charles Nordman wrote it will be shown that " the credit for most of the things which are currently attributed to Einstein are, in reality, due to Poincare".

G. Burniston Brown (1967) commented" It will be seen that contrary to popular belief, Einstein played only a minor part in the derivation of the useful formulae in the restricted or special relativity theory.."

Ronald W. Clark in "Einstein: The Life and Times" states "... it (the paper on Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies) ..is in many ways one of the most remarkable scientific papers that had ever been written. Even in form and style it was unusual, lacking the notes and references which give weight to most serious expositions."

No less an authority than Stephen Hawking in his book "A brief history of time" states:"Einstein is usually given the credit for the new theory, but Poincare is remembered by having his name attached to an important part of it."

Poincare wrote an immense amount on philosophy, mathematics and physics. Einstein later wrote on the same subjects and yet claimed he had never read any of Poincare's contributions on physics, although many of Poincare's ideas wound up in Einstein's papers without being credited.

It is unlikely that someone with Einstein's academic history would suddenly burst forth as "the genius of the century". What he was, was a plagiarist who had no qualms about stealing the work of others and presenting it as his own. But he was a plagiarist with a difference. He had powerful backers who were no doubt aware of the propaganda value of the appearance of a new "Jewish genius" just at the time the Zionists were starting their push for the foundation of Israel.

Einstein was an enthusiastic Zionist supporter, and, in 1952, after the death of the first president of Israel, the Israeli government offered him the post.