einstein

sold the house but not the right to her apartment. The money from that sale was eventually found under Mari ’s mattress. Some critics
have accused Einstein of allowing Mari to die impoverished. Although Mari at times certainly felt impoverished, Einstein did try to
protect her and Eduard from financial worries, not only by paying what he was obliged to pay, but also by subsidizing their living expenses.
I am grateful to Barbara Wolff of the Hebrew University Einstein archives for help researching this topic. See also Alexis Schwarzenbach,
Das verschmähte Genie: Albert Einstein und die Schweiz (Berlin: DVA, 2003).
16. Einstein to Heinrich Zangger, Dec. 6, 1917.
17. “All the really great discoveries in theoretical physics—with a few exceptions that stand out because of their oddity—have been made by
men under thirty.” Bernstein 1973, 89, emphasis in the original. Einstein finished his work on general relativity when he was 36, but his
initial step, what he called his “happiest thought” about the equivalence of gravity and acceleration, came when he was 28. Max Planck
was 42 when, in Dec. 1900, he gave his lecture on the quantum.
18. Einstein to Heinrich Zangger, Aug. 11, 1918; Clive Thompson, “Do Scientists Age Badly?,” Boston Globe , Aug. 17, 2003. John von
Neumann, a founder of modern computer science, once claimed that the intellectual powers of mathematicians peaked at the age of 26.
One study of a random group of scientists showed that 80 percent did their best work before their early forties.
19. Einstein to Maurice Solovine, Apr. 27, 1906.
20. Aphorism for a friend, Sept. 1, 1930, AEA 36-598.
21. Einstein to Hendrik Lorentz, June 17, 1916; Miller 1984, 55–56.
22. Einstein, “Ether and the Theory of Relativity,” speech at University of Leiden, May 5, 1920, CPAE 7: 38.
23. Einstein to Karl Schwarzschild, Jan. 9, 1916.
24. Einstein, “Ether and the Theory of Relativity,” speech at University of Leiden, May 5, 1920, CPAE 7: 38.
25. Greene 2004, 74.
26. Janssen 2004, 22. Einstein made this clearer in his 1921 Princeton lectures, but also continued to say, “It appears probable that Mach was
on the right road in his thought that inertia depends on a mutual action of matter.” Einstein 1922a, chapter 4.
27. Einstein, “Ether and the Theory of Relativity,” speech at University of Leiden, May 5, 1920, CPAE 7: 38.
28. Einstein, “On the Present State of the Problem of Specific Heats,” Nov. 3, 1911, CPAE 3: 26; the quote about “really exist in nature”
appears on p. 421 of the English translation of vol. 3.
29. Robinson, 84–85.
30. Holton and Brush, 435.
31. Lightman 2005, 151.
32. Clark 202; George de Hevesy to Ernest Rutherford, Oct. 14, 1913; Einstein 1949b, 47.
33. Einstein, “Emission and Absorption of Radiation in Quantum Theory,” July 17, 1916, CPAE 6: 34; Einstein, “On the Quantum Theory of
Radiation,” after Aug. 24, 1916, CPAE 6: 38, and also in Physikalische Zeitschrift 18 (1917). See Overbye, 304–306; Rigden, 141; Pais
1982, 404–412; Fölsing, 391; Clark, 265; Daniel Kleppner, “Rereading Einstein on Radiation,”Physics Today (Feb. 2005): 30. In
addition, in 1917 Einstein wrote a paper on the quantization of energy in mechanical theories called “On the Quantum Theorem of
Sommerfeld and Epstein.” It shows the problems that the classical quantum theory encountered when applied to mechanical systems we
would now call chaotic. It was cited by earlier pioneers of quantum mechanics, but has since been largely forgotten. A good description of
it and its importance in the development of quantum mechanics is Douglas Stone, “Einstein’s Unknown Insight and the Problem of
Quantizing Chaos,”Physics Today (Aug. 2005).
34. Einstein to Michele Besso, Aug. 11, 1916.
35. I am grateful to Professor Douglas Stone of Yale for help with the wording of this.
36. Einstein to Michele Besso, Aug. 24, 1916.
37. Einstein, “On the Quantum Theory of Radiation,” after Aug. 24, 1916, CPAE 6: 38.
38. Einstein to Max Born, Jan. 27, 1920.
39. Einstein to Max Born, Apr. 29, 1924, AEA 8-176.
40. Niels Bohr, “Discussion with Einstein,” in Schilpp, 205–206; Clark, 202.
41. Einstein to Niels Bohr, May 2, 1920; Einstein to Paul Ehrenfest, May 4, 1920.
42. Niels Bohr to Einstein, Nov. 11, 1922, AEA 8-73.
43. Fölsing, 441.
44. John Wheeler, “Memoir,” in French, 21; C. P. Snow, “Albert Einstein,” in French, 3.
45. Bohr’s quip is often quoted. One source I can find for it, in a less pithy fashion, is from Bohr’s own descriptions of being with Einstein at the
1927 Solvay Conference: “Einstein mockingly asked us whether we could really believe that the providential authorities took recourse to
dice-playing (‘. . . ob der liebe Gott würfelt’), to which I replied by pointing at the great caution, already called for by ancient thinkers, in
ascribing attributes to Providence in everyday language.” Niels Bohr, “Discussion with Einstein,” in Schilpp, 211. Werner Heisenberg, who
was at these discussions, also recounts the quip: “To which Bohr could only answer: ‘But still, it cannot be for us to tell God how he is to
run the world.’ ” Heisenberg 1989, 117.
46. Holton and Brush, 447; Pais 1982, 436.
47. Pais 1982, 438. Wolfgang Pauli recalled, “In a discussion at the physics meeting in Innsbruck in the autumn of 1924, Einstein proposed to
search for interference and diffraction phenomena with molecular beams.” Pauli, 91.
48. Einstein, “Quantum Theory of Single-Atom Gases,” part 1, 1924, part 2, 1925. This quote occurs in part 2, section 7. The manuscript of this
paper was found in Leiden in 2005.
49. I am grateful to Professor Douglas Stone of Yale for helping to craft this section and explaining the fundamental importance of what
Einstein did. A theoretical condensed matter physicist, he is writing a book on Einstein’s contributions to quantum mechanics and how
far-reaching they really were, despite Einstein’s later rejection of the theory. According to Stone, “99% of the credit for this fundamental
discovery called Bose-Einstein condensation is really owed to Einstein. Bose did not even realize that he had counted in a different way.”
Regarding the Nobel Prize for achieving Bose-Einstein condensation, see www.nobelprize.org/physics/laureates/2001/public.html.
50. Bernstein 1973, 217; Martin J. Klein, “Einstein and the Wave-Particle Duality,”Natural Philosopher (1963): 26.
51. Max Born, “Einstein’s Statistical Theories,” in Schilpp, 174.
52. Einstein to Erwin Schrödinger, Feb. 28, 1925, AEA 22-2.
53. Don Howard, “Spacetime and Separability,” 1996, AEA Cedex H; Howard 1985; Howard 1990b, 61–64; Howard 1997. The 1997 essay
identifies the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer as an influence on Einstein’s theories of spatial separability.