Life isn’t always easy, even when you’re a genius. But
what else do you have in common with Albert Einstein?
A free archive of the famed physicist’s writings released
on Friday might help you find out. Transcribed,
translated, and annotated with historical insight, the
“Digital Einstein” project at the Princeton University
Press dives deep into Einstein’s early years.
“This is Einstein before he was famous,” says California
Institute of Technology historian Diana Kormos-Buchwald ,
director of the Einstein Papers Project that created the
new archive, a collaboration of Princeton, Caltech, and
Hebrew University. “This material has been carefully
selected and annotated over the last 25 years.”
The archived letters, lectures, and other papers take
readers from Einstein’s 1879 birth certificate to letters
he wrote on his 44th birthday in 1923, fresh off the
triumph of the 1921 Nobel Prize in physics . Perusing the
documents reveals that the 20th century’s greatest
genius was, at least in some ways, a lot like the rest of
us:
1. He was passed over for his dream job..
In 1902, Einstein was appointed to the Swiss Patent Office
as an examiner with some help from a friend, after he was
disappointed in his hopes for a gig as a university
professor. “Largely that was his own fault-he wasn’t a
great student,” says historian Matt Stanley of New York
University. “He was disrespectful to his professors and
skipped classes because he knew he could pass anyway. So,
when he asked for recommendations, he didn’t get them.”
Sound familiar? Take heart from this: A backwater job
didn’t stop Einstein from pursuing his dreams. “Einstein’s
family was involved in electronics, and the patent office
was a world very familiar to him,” says Massachusetts
Institute of Technology historian David Kaiser, author of
How the Hippies Saved Physics. Tasked with determining
the soundness of principles behind new inventions, Einstein
played to his talents and translated those skills to the
scientific work that culminated in his 1905 “Miracle Year”
that led to his Nobel Prize, alongside papers on light’s
speed, atomic behavior and the famous E = mc² equation
2. He liked to kick back..
“Both of us, alas, dead drunk under the table,” Einstein
wrote, referring to himself and his wife Mileva Maric, in a
1915 postcard sent to his pal Conrad Habicht .
Habicht was a co-founder of the Olympia Academy in Bern,
Switzerland, a drinking club where friends debated
philosophy and science.
“The young Einstein was a Bohemian, not the sage we
think of now,” Stanley says. Much like a dorm-room bull
session, “that’s what young people did then; they hung
out in beer halls and argued about the nature of space and
time.”
Einstein later said the club had a great effect on his
career.
3. He had romantic troubles and a messy divorce..
Einstein married Maric, a fellow physicist, in 1903. She had
already borne him a daughter named Lieserl the year
before. Historians are unclear whether the couple gave up
the child for adoption or if she died in infancy.
The couple was estranged starting around 1912 and
divorced, finally, in 1919. As part of the divorce decree ,
which you can read in the archive, Einstein agreed that he
would give his ex-wife most of the proceeds from a still
un-awarded Nobel Prize, to care for the children and live
off the interest.
“In the letters we see the young Einstein was a lot like
the later one, uninterested in convention and set on
having his own way, a bit of a rebel, irresistible to
women,” Stanley says. “He dove into a few relationships
that turned sour, although I think he learned some lessons
later in life.”
Don’t we all.
Einstein married his cousin, Elsa, in 1919, the same year
as his divorce
4. His kids were rascals.
That’s what he calls them in a 1922 letter to his two sons,
Hans Albert and Eduard, asking them to write him in Spain
when he was on the way back from a trip to Japan.
Einstein was obviously fond of his sons, writing to them
from his travels and throughout their lives, inquiring
about their schoolwork. Eduard’s life famously took a
tragic turn when he was diagnosed with schizophrenia at
age 20.
The scientist also enlisted his older son, Hans Albert, in
looking after his finances, asking him in 1922 to inquire at
a Zurich bank about an unexpected sum of money in his
account there.
Kids and money-some problems never change.
Einstein wrote in German his entire life, as seen in this
letter to his son, Hans Albert Einstein. Photograph by
Profiles in History, Corbis
5. Road trip!...
Einstein skipped the Nobel Prize ceremonies to take a trip
to the Far East.
“I have decided definitely not to ride around the world so
much anymore; but am I going to be able to pull that off,
too?” he wrote his sons after his 1922 trip to Japan.
Unlike most of us, for Einstein travel was more than an
escape from the mundane: In other notes in the archive,
the physicist acknowledges that the assassination that
year of Germany’s foreign minister Walther Rathenau by
right-wing extremists helped persuade him to leave
Germany for a while.
Those same dark forces led to his eventual emigration to
the United States from Europe, to escape Hitler’s
spreading destruction of Germany’s Jews.
Those adventures are covered in more volumes of archives
that Kormos-Buchwald and her colleagues hope to release
next year, ones which will mark the centennial of
Einstein’s seminal 1915 theory of gravity.
So just as for you, there are more adventures ahead for
Einstein, ones waiting to be revealed. Even six decades
after his death, more discoveries await for historians
tracing the marks he left on our times.
“You might think scholars have already picked over all
these volumes, but there is so much more,” says Kormos-
Buchwald.
The Digital Einstein team hopes to see more historians
explore Einstein’s world as the archives roll out, and for
more everyday folks to see the human side of a man who
forever wrestled with his world, despite genius, fortune,
and fame
This article first appeared on
National Geographic ©2014
