Daily Exposure to Science

This has led Dr. Stachel to suspect that Einstein's upbringing in a home where manipulations of electricity and magnetism were a daily preoccupation helped set him on a road that led to his first relativity theory. The effect on the young Einstein, in his view, ''was much more significant than usually appreciated.''

It was the relationship of electricity and magnetism to light waves, as defined a decade earlier by James Clerk Maxwell, that helped put Einstein on the road toward his first relativity theory. As Einstein wrote later, Maxwell's theory was ''the most fascinating subject at the time that I was a student.'' But as Dr. Stachel pointed out recently, the Einstein electrical manufacturing enterprise failed, first in Munich and then in Italy, where the Einsteins moved after a business failure, They were soon followed by their son, who hated the Luitpold Gymnasium - the Munich school in which he was enrolled.

Neglected Math for Physics

His academic records there were destroyed in World War II, but Dr. Stachel and his colleagues at Princeton have in hand a letter sent to a Munich newspaper in 1929 by H. Wieleitner, then principal of the Luitpold Gymnasium. He had examined Einstein's school record to refute a report in a Berlin magazine that Einstein had been a very poor student.

With 1 as the highest grade and 6 the lowest, the principal reported, Einstein's marks in Greek, Latin and mathematics oscillated between 1 and 2 until, toward the end, he invariably scored 1 in math. Nevertheless, as pointed out by Banesh Hoffmann of Queens College in his book on Einstein, the latter confessed that he later neglected mathematics in favor of physics.

Another testament to his childhood precocity comes from Dr. Max Talmey, who, as a medical student in Munich, knew Einstein when he was ten and a half years old. His ''exceptional intelligence,'' Talmey wrote later in a book, enabled him to discuss with a college graduate ''subjects far beyond the comprehension'' of so young a child.

Talmey gave him two books on physics, one of which was entitled ''Force and Matter,'' as though anticipating Einstein's famous definition of the relationship between mass and energy.

A Weakness in French

It was chiefly Einstein's weakness in French that led to his failure to pass the entrance examinations for the Federal Technical Institute in Zurich. According to the documents assembled at Princeton, he had been allowed to take the examinations even though he was two years younger than the normal admission age of 18, thanks in part to intervention by a family friend.