The Einstein the Archives Show

The Einstein the Archives Show

In 1935, a newspaper column told its readers that the greatest living mathematician had once failed mathematics. The clipping reached Einstein through a rabbi in Princeton. He read it, and corrected it. He had mastered calculus, he said, before he was fifteen.

The column was Ripley's Believe It or Not, and the story it told has outlived Ripley's by decades. It is repeated in classrooms to reassure struggling students. It is also false, and the true version is more useful. At sixteen, Einstein sat the entrance exam for the Zurich Polytechnic, two years younger than the other candidates. He did well in mathematics and physics. He failed the general sections, French among them. A reversed grading scale at his Swiss school later made his top marks look like failures to anyone reading them without context. The dunce never existed. The lazy student, who skipped lectures and borrowed his friend Marcel Grossmann's notes, did.

This is the pattern with Einstein. The popular figure is a wild-haired saint who worked alone and was punished for it. The documents, which have been appearing in editions and archives for forty years, describe a man who depended on others, got things wrong in public, and held opinions that were braver and uglier than the poster allows.

The patent clerk had friends

The 1905 papers, on light quanta, Brownian motion and special relativity, are the center of the legend. A patent clerk, working at night, rewrote physics. The first half of that is true.

The second half leaves out the company. Michele Besso, an engineer and old friend, was the only person Einstein thanked in the relativity paper. Henri Poincaré and Hendrik Lorentz had assembled much of the mathematics a year or two earlier. Historians still argue about how much of special relativity was already in the air, and most land in the same place: the equations were largely there, and Einstein's contribution was to say what they meant, as facts about clocks, rods and time, and to dispense with the ether. That is a large contribution. It is not the same as a lightning strike in a vacuum.

The general theory took ten years and several wrong turns. In 1912 he wrote down nearly correct equations and abandoned them. He then spent two years defending a flawed version. A manuscript he wrote with Besso in 1913 and 1914, which sold at Christie's in Paris in 2021 for more than eleven million euros, shows the two men calculating the orbit of Mercury together and getting an answer that was not yet right. Einstein reused the method in November 1915 and got it right.

Two women, two myths

Mileva Marić was the only woman in Einstein's physics section at Zurich, and for a few years she was his closest intellectual companion. A persistent claim holds that she co-wrote the 1905 papers, or did the mathematics for them. The historians who have examined this most closely, Allen Esterson and David Cassidy among them, find nothing in the surviving documents to support it. The letters that mention "our work" date from 1899 to 1901, four years before the papers. Her own letters to a friend never claim a share.

That does not make her story small. She was a capable physicist whose career ended with a failed diploma, a pregnancy and a marriage that gradually ordered itself around his work. In 1914 Einstein handed her a written list of conditions for staying together, and the list is as cold as it sounds. They divorced in 1919. Their first child, a daughter named Lieserl, was born in 1902 before the marriage. Einstein apparently never met her. The last trace of her is a letter from the autumn of 1903, and nobody knows what happened next. The love letters that revealed her existence surfaced in a family safe-deposit box in 1986.

The second myth runs the other way. In November 1915, the mathematician David Hilbert and Einstein both reached the final field equations of general relativity within days of each other, and for decades some have said Einstein took the result from Hilbert. In 1997, Leo Corry, Jürgen Renn and John Stachel found Hilbert's printer's proofs, dated December. Their reading is that his first version did not yet contain the final equations, and that he added them after Einstein's paper appeared. A minority of scholars dispute this, and the dispute is still a live one. The accusation that Einstein plagiarized Hilbert is not supported by what has surfaced.

The bomb, and the file

Einstein did not build the atomic bomb. The 1939 letter to Roosevelt was the idea of Leo Szilard, who drafted it with Eugene Wigner and Edward Teller. Einstein dictated a German version and signed the English one. In 1940 the Army denied him a security clearance, on political grounds, and he took no part in the Manhattan Project. E=mc² explains why fission releases energy. It does not tell anyone how to start it.

The suspicion that kept him out was not new. The FBI opened its file on him in December 1932, partly on the strength of a memorandum from a women's patriotic society that wanted his visa refused. By the time he died, the file ran to 1,427 pages. J. Edgar Hoover wanted proof that he was a communist or a spy, and eventually a case for deportation. Nothing was found. The file is public and free to read on the FBI's own website, and it is worth an afternoon.

The politics the file was watching were real. Einstein co-chaired a campaign against lynching with Paul Robeson in 1946, called segregation a disease of white people in a speech at a historically Black university, and wrote an essay for the first issue of Monthly Review arguing for socialism. He was also, in private, capable of the opposite. His travel diaries from 1922 and 1923, published in English in 2018, contain dehumanizing remarks about Chinese people. The editor, Ze'ev Rosenkranz, does not accept that this is merely the habit of the age. Both things are in the record, and a fair account keeps them together.

What he got wrong

In 1936 he and Nathan Rosen sent a paper to the Physical Review arguing that gravitational waves could not exist. A referee found a mistake. Einstein, who had never been refereed, withdrew the paper in anger and never published in that journal again. Months later, with help from a colleague, he corrected the error, and the revised paper appeared elsewhere. Gravitational waves were detected in 2015.

He argued with Niels Bohr for decades over whether quantum mechanics was complete. In 1935 he, Boris Podolsky and Rosen published the paper known as EPR. Podolsky wrote the text, and Einstein told Schrödinger it had buried the point he cared about. Experiments since have gone against his hope that the universe is local and real in the way he wanted. The question he asked became the foundation of the science of entanglement.

A man between countries

Einstein renounced his German citizenship as a teenager, took Swiss papers, taught in Prague and Berlin, and was abroad when Hitler came to power in January 1933. He never returned. He settled in Princeton that October and became an American citizen in 1940. He spent much of his later life signing affidavits for refugees.

Every detail above changes a little when checked against the documents, and none of it makes him smaller. The saint was invented by people who needed one. The man who corrected a newspaper about his own mathematics, then lost an argument to a referee and took the lesson, is the one who left the letters.

Where to read him

Start with Walter Isaacson's biography, then the short 2025 book by Diana Kormos Buchwald and Michael Gordin, Free Creations of the Human Mind. After that, go to the sources themselves: the FBI Vault file, Einstein's essay "Why Socialism?", and the Einstein Papers Project. The edition is the reason all of this can now be checked.