Einstein’s Letters Reveal Human Side

Albert Einstein was knocked off his pedestal on Monday, by his own hand. Some 3,500 pages of his letters made it to the media after Hebrew University in Jerusalem released them. Given to the university by his stepdaughter, they were kept secret until 20 years after her death. The picture emerging is not one of genius but rather of a flawed human being who wasn’t a particularly good husband or father. E still equals MC squared, but who knew he cheated on his wife so much?

Diana Buckwald, professor of history at the Einstein Papers Project at the California Institute of Technology, said, “Einstein's private correspondence refutes the simplistic view of him as an isolated, remote man who immersed himself in his work at the expense of human contact.” Indeed, contact with men of science in general suggests that the mad scientist who severs all contact with humanity is a creation of romantic poets, who have enough for which to answer as it is (German romanticism having ended so poorly for all concerned).

Smart as the old boy was, he didn’t manage his funds particularly well. The relativity thing brought him a wad of cash in the form of a Nobel Prize, and he gave most of it to his first wife, Mileva, in their divorce, despite that fact that history doesn’t record her doing any calculations involving the speed of light. Most of the rest, Doc Einstein promptly sunk the money into US real estate. The Great Depression took care of that.

Professor Einstein also had two sons, one of whom, named Eduard, was a schizophrenic. In previously known letters, he suggested that it might have been better had Eduard never been born. The new letters apparently say he like the poems, pictures and notes Eduard would send him. Moreover, according to Professor Hanoch Gutfreund, a former Hebrew University president and physicist, the letters show that Eduard and the other son, Hans Albert, “understood he loved them.” He just wasn’t good at the job of “father.”

Most of the media attention has been on his two wives and a dozen dalliances with women of similar virtue. Precisely why the wild-haired professor was such a stud-muffin is for the ladies to decide. Maybe brains are sexy, or perhaps, they were using him to get close to Niels Bohr.

All the same, that little equation eventually got on his nerves, it seems. “Soon I’ll be fed up with the relativity,” he wrote to Elsa his second wife. “Even such a thing fades away when one is too involved with it.” It is a pity that he passed on in 1955. Today, he could have had a second career in Reality TV.

© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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