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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
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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.
