Albert Einstein papers show physicist as lover, dreamer

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which Albert Einstein helped found, is uploading scans of the physicist's manuscripts, political ideals, and love letters to his mistress, 

|
Hebrew University of Jerusalem/AP
This image distributed by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, shows a page from one of only three existing manuscripts containing Einstein's famous formula describes the relationship between energy, mass, and the speed of light.

At speeds even he could barely imagine, Albert Einstein's private papers and innermost thoughts will soon be available online, from a rare scribble of "E = mc2 " in his own hand, to political pipe-dreams and secret love letters to his mistress.

Fifty-seven years after the Nobel Prize-winning physicist's death, the Israeli university which he helped found opened Internet access on Monday to some of the 80,000 documents Einstein bequeathed to it in his will.

It will go on adding more at alberteinstein.info and in time, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem says, it is committed to digitising its entire Einstein archive.

Among items likely to attract popular attention is a very rare manuscript example of the formula the author of the theory of relativity proposed in 1905, E = mc2 , where energy, E, equals mass times c – the speed of light in a vacuum – squared.

Once published, a cache of two dozen love letters to the woman who would become his second wife - but written while he was still married to his first - may also attract the curious.

So too may an idealistic proposal in 1930 for a "secret council" of Jews and Arabs to bring peace to the Middle East.

At present, only a selection of documents dating from before 1923, when Einstein was 44, are available. As papers are scanned, the bulk of them in Einstein's native German, the university will publish English translations and notes, said Hanoch Gutfreund, whose committee oversees the archive.

"This is going to be not only something to satisfy the curiosity of the curious," he said. "But it also will be a great education and research tool for academics."

Lover, dreamer

Some items, he acknowledged, were so personal that the archivists weighed carefully whether make them public.

Among these are 24 love letters the scientist wrote to his cousin, Elsa Einstein, with whom he conducted an affair for several years before finally divorcing his first wife, Mileva Maric, and remarrying in 1919: "If you let enough time go by," Gutfreund concluded, "Then it's kosher."

Also not yet included online, but now on display at the university, is a letter Einstein wrote in German to the Arab newspaper Falastin in which he proposed a "secret council" to help end Jewish-Arab conflict in then British-rule Palestine.

Einstein envisioned a committee of eight Jews and Arabs -- a physician, a jurist, a trade unionist and a cleric from either side -- that would meet weekly:

"Although this 'Secret Council' has no fixed authority, it will however, ultimately lead to a state in which the differences will gradually be eliminated," Einstein wrote. "This representation will rise above the politics of the day."

The scientist, who quit Nazi Germany for the United States, long supported the Jewish community in Palestine. But he had sometimes mixed feelings about the Israeli state that was established during the war of 1948. In 1952, he turned down an offer to become Israel's largely ceremonial president.

 (Editing by Alastair Macdonald)

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Albert Einstein papers show physicist as lover, dreamer
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2012/0319/Albert-Einstein-papers-show-physicist-as-lover-dreamer
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe