Princeton, 1955, just past midnight on the eighteenth of April. An old man in a hospital bed murmurs a few sentences in German, and the night nurse doesn't speak German. He asked for one thing at the end: burn me, keep nothing, build no shrine. Within hours, a pathologist he never authorised opened his skull. How does a boy who couldn't pass a French exam become the one brain on Earth nobody could bear to bury?

We start where he started it himself, in a memoir written in his sixties: a compass shown to him at "four or five," and a holy little geometry book at twelve. Then we correct the legend out loud. The teacher line "you will never amount to anything" can't be found anywhere, and the smaller one that probably was said is better. The entrance-exam failure at sixteen is true and lopsided. Then the patent office in Bern, the "worldly cloister," and the Olympia Academy: sausage, cheese, and a reading list of Mach, Pearson and Poincaré, whose question about what it means for two distant clocks to tick at the same moment pulls absolute time apart.

Then 1905, and it is not four papers but four papers plus a doctorate, with the atoms paper being the Brownian one, not the photoelectric one. The 1919 eclipse expedition and a Nobel citation with relativity missing from it, on purpose. The private life: Mileva Marić and what the record does and doesn't show, Lieserl left as genuinely unknown, the 1914 list of conditions read as written, the Nobel money and their son Eduard. The bread knife at Caputh in 1933, the boat that wasn't Tinef, the heath that wasn't a beach. The eight-sentence letter to Roosevelt, the two real regret quotes and which one is only a friend's memory, and the refrigerator he designed with Szilard.

Then the 1,427-page FBI file and what actually filled it, the Lincoln University speech, the Du Bois trial, the presidency he declined, and the "celestial bodies" paper named flatly as a forgery. The Old One, Bohr, the photon box, the EPR paper, thirty years of unfinished equations, and the pages by the bed. Then Ellie Unfiltered: Driving Mr. Albert. A brain cut into about 240 blocks, a cider box under a beer cooler in Wichita, a rented Buick and a Tupperware container, three papers that each have the same flaw, and a pair of eyes in a New York safe-deposit box, one source, on the record. Rails off, rails back on, out loud. Then Lucy's verdict on the man, not the brain, and the three ways she might be wrong.

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