A father offered his son, a five-year-old Albert Einstein, a compass that triggered an irrepressible need to understand the laws of the universe and an iconic scientific career. At first a simple employee of the Swiss Patent Office in Bern, the young Einstein published a series of scientific articles that questioned everything previously understood in the world of physics. His theory, summed up by the formula E = mc2, opened to humanity the doors of the power of the atom. A legendary genius, but also a great humanist, Einstein lived through the first half of the 20th century, with all its horrors and contradictions, in the service of science, but distraught by what man's madness is capable of doing with it.