WHEN Einstein was just 12 years old, the Jewish boy and future discoverer of the theory of relativity no longer believed in the Bible. He read a small book about Euclidean geometry, and was astounded. In his 45-page autobiography, composed when he was 67, Einstein said that what he read back then was a ‘wonder’.

The world of science revealed itself to his young self as a ‘great eternal riddle’. So at the age of 16 he conv