Ralph Morse, Time–Life Pictures/Getty Images:
Luke Frazza, AFP/Getty Images:
1 His parents, Pauline and Hermann Einstein
2 In a Munich photo studio at age 14
3 Bottom left at the Aarau school, 1896
4 With Mileva Mari, ca. 1905
5 With Mileva and Hans Albert, 1905
6 Eduard, Mileva, and Hans Albert, 1914
7 With Conrad Habicht, left, and Maurice Solovine of the “Olympia Academy,” ca. 1902
8 Anna Winteler Besso and Michele Besso
9 At the patent office in Bern during the miracle year, 1905
10 In Prague, 1912
11 Marcel Grossmann, who helped with math at college and for general relativity
12 Hiking in Switzerland with Madame Curie, 1913
13 With the chemist Fritz Haber, assimilationist and marriage mediator, July 1914
14 Watched over by Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann in New York, April 1921
15 Meeting the press in New York, 1930
16 With Elsa at the Grand Canyon, February 1931
17 The 1911 Solvay Conference
18 The 1927 Solvay Conference
19 Receiving the Max Planck medal from its namesake, 1929
20 In Leiden: Einstein, Ehrenfest, de Sitter in back; Eddington and Lorentz in front; September 1923
21 With Paul Ehrenfest and Ehrenfest’s son in Leiden
22 Niels Bohr and Einstein discussing quantum mechanics at Ehrenfest’s home in Leiden, 1925, in a photo taken by Ehrenfest
23 Werner Heisenberg
24 Erwin Schrodinger
25 Max Born
26 Philipp Lenard
27 Vacationing on the Baltic Sea, 1928
28 Connecting to the cosmos
29 With Elsa and her daughter Margot, Berlin 1929
30 Margot and Ilse Einstein at the house in Caputh, 1929
31 In Caputh with his son Hans Albert and grandson Bernhard, 1932
32 At the Mt. Wilson Observatory near Caltech, discovering that the universe is expanding, January 1931
33 Sailing against the prevailing currents, Long Island Sound, 1936
34 Welcoming Hans Albert to America, 1937
35 Margot, Einstein, and Helen Dukas being sworn in as U.S. citizens, October 1940
36 Receiving a telescope in the backyard of 112 Mercer Street, underneath the picture window built for his study
37 With Kurt Godel in Princeton, 1950
38 Princeton, 1953
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The official name of the institution was the Eidgenossische Polytechnische Schule. In 1911, it gained the right to grant doctoral degrees and changed its name to the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule, or the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, referred to as the ETH. Einstein, then and later, usually called it the Zuricher Polytechnikum, or the Zurich Polytechnic.
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The phrase “valiant Swabian,” used often by Einstein to refer to himself, comes from the poem “Swabian Tale” by Ludwig Uhland.
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The letters were discovered by John Stachel of the Einstein Papers Project among a cache of four hundred family letters that were stored in a California safe deposit box by the second wife of Einstein’s son Hans Albert Einstein, whose first wife had brought them to California after she went to Zurich to clean out Mileva Mari
’s apartment following her death in 1948.
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Once married, she usually used the name Mileva Einstein-Mari
. After they were divorced, she eventually resumed using Mileva Mari
. To avoid confusion, I refer to her as Mari
throughout.
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A person “at rest” on the equator is actually spinning with the earth’s rotation at 1,040 miles per hour and orbiting with the earth around the sun at 67,000 miles per hour. When I refer to these observers being at a constant velocity, I am ignoring the change in velocity that arises from being on a rotating and orbiting planet, which would not affect most common experiments. (See Miller 1999, 25.)
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More precisely, 186,282.4 miles per second or 299,792,458 meters per second, in a vacuum. Unless otherwise specified, the “speed of light” is for light in a vacuum and refers to all electromagnetic waves, visible or not. This is also, as Maxwell discovered, the speed of electricity through a wire.
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