Fact #1 - Answer

Well, technically, “tag you’re it” could have been his final words. But they also could have been “don’t forget to feed my pet goldfish”, or “I hope they serve hot dogs in heaven.”

On 18th April 1955, the German-born intellectual superstar was taken to hospital suffering from an abdominal aortic aneurysm (which means the major artery that carries blood was swelling and could burst). The fuzzy-haired physicist refused surgery, saying “I want to go when I want. It is tasteless to prolong life artificially. I have done my share. It is time to go. I will do it elegantly.”

Those would have been the perfect last words of the man who became an icon of the 20th century, befriended Charlie Chaplin, escaped Nazi Germany, and won the Nobel Peace Prize for pioneering a revolutionary new model of physics. But they weren’t. His actual last words have been lost forever.

Why? Because Albert Einstein said them in German to a nurse who didn’t understand the language.

So, we’ll never truly know what his final words were, but I’d like to think he started a game of tag he knew he would never win.

More Albert Einstein Facts:

At 12, his schoolteacher told him that
he would never amount to anything. Never has a teacher been so wrong in the history of the world.
His good friend, Charlie Chaplin (the famous entertainer), once said this to Einstein: “The people applaud me because everybody understands me, and they applaud you because no one understands you.”
On the day he died, Albert was writing a speech he was going to give at a ceremony commemorating the State of Israel’s seventh anniversary. He never got to give that speech.
Albert and his wife were Jews, and so had to flee from Nazi Germany settling in the USA. Hitler later called his work ‘Jewish Physics’ and had his works banned.
Although he asked for his body not to be studied, a pathologist removed his brain hours after his death without his family's permission, stored it in a jar, and kept it on his shelf until he died in 2007.