When he wasn’t busy scribbling out the theory of relativity, Albert Einstein seems to have spent a fair amount of time writing letters involving topics such as God, his son’s geometry studies, even a little toy steam engine an uncle gave him when he was a boy.
The Einstein Letters, which include more than two dozen missives, went up for sale on Thursday at the California-based auction house Profiles in History. Some were in English and others in German. Some were done in longhand, others on typewriters.
– In one letter, Einstein urged one of his sons to get more serious about geometry.
– In another, he consoled a friend who recently discovered her husband’s infidelity.
– In still another to an uncle on his 70th birthday, Einstein recalled how the toy steam engine the uncle gave him years ago had prompted a lifelong interest in science.
Einstein, the Atheist
“I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one,” he wrote to a man who corresponded with him on the subject twice in the 1940s. “You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist. ... I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.”
The letters give us a peek into the life of Albert Einstein away from the brilliant physicist who gave us the Theory of Relativity.
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