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