[In the following essay, Bell compares Gitlin's The Murder of Albert Einstein with Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams.]

Perhaps one of the truest gauges of a person's impact on culture is the limerick. With that in mind, we should check on the state of Einstein's:

There was a young lady named Bright,
Who traveled much faster than light.
She started one day
In the relative way,
And returned on the previous night.

Clifton Fadiman attributed that to Arthur Buller in his 1962 The Mathematical Magpie (Friedman & Donley 11). But certainly, well before the 1960s Einstein's Theory of Relativity had already made enormous changes in our culture, even though as most experts on both culture and science agree, it is virtually always grossly misunderstood and distorted except in the halls of science. When one speaks of what a culture adopts as its icons, however, accuracy hardly matters. Icons serve a completely different purpose altogether.

Having established this disclaimer, we can turn to more recent events. Within a matter of months in 1992 and 1993, two very different types of novels were released with Albert Einstein as a central character: Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams purports to take place in Einstein's mind in 1905 as he developed his Special Theory of Relativity. The other, Todd Gitlin's The Murder of Albert Einstein takes place in 1992 with plot involvements that hark back to the 1950s and Einstein's last year as he worked—ultimately unsuccessfully—to develop a Unified Field Theory. Theoretical physics does not seem the stuff of rousing novels; nevertheless, Lightman's novel became a best seller, and Gitlin's collected a smaller but enthusiastic audience. Both authors rely on documented, factual events, as well as accurate science, for their clearly fictional stories, but they use both those events and science in what appears at first glance very different ways.

Lightman, a distinguished physicist himself, wants more than to tell a good story about an important scientist; he wants to illuminate the scientific process itself. His definition of scientific thinking, the kind involved in the “first-rate science” that leads to redefinitions of reality, depends on more than analytical thinking or the scientific process. He points to a very necessary intuitive component, the epiphany perhaps, or in his words, “planing”: “that lifting feeling when everything suddenly falls into place” (“Science on the Right Side of the Brain” 43). While by his own admission Lightman has planed briefly and sporadically for no more than seconds at a time, he speculates that Einstein could probably plane for minutes at a time—minutes in which he came to know what no one else had even imagined before.

Independent evidence indicates that even Einstein himself valued this kind of thinking and, according to Einstein scholar Gerald Holton, he “was on record, more than once, that a means of writing must be found that conveys the thought processes that lead to discoveries—showing how scientists thought and wrestled with their problems” (“Einstein's Scientific Program …” 49). Holton also discusses the unconventional way Einstein structured his own scientific papers, noting their “heuristic character” (55), a quality more often associated with humanities scholarship than with scientific thinking. According to William Eamon, “Above all, for Einstein the mind must be free to think any thought: only in this way can scientific progress be guaranteed. … The creative process is not only the most difficult part of science, it is also indescribable, for the creation of scientific concepts is fundamentally an intuitive, almost poetic experience” (349). And so, as the first-rate scientist whose work embodies the qualities Lightman values, Einstein becomes his ideal protagonist.

But Lightman's task gets more complicated. If, as Aristotle proclaimed in his Poetics, plot requires action, the contemplative life of a remote scientist poses particular problems for the would-be novelist in search of a story. Abraham Pais, Einstein's biographer and personal friend, tells us that for Einstein as a scientist at work, “every scientific triumph was preceded by a long period of quiet gestation” (38).¹ Indeed, to be faithful to the well-known particulars of Einstein's personality and work habits, Lightman must give life to the solitary, contemplative process of Einstein's thinking without betraying the substance of this very real, very publicly-known, private man, a man Felix Gilbert called “willingly remote” (17). The action, then, and there is a great deal of it, takes place inside Einstein's mind. Thus, the first element of Lightman's portrayal of Einstein takes form: the internal field of action, for both Pais and Lightman show a man more alive in his mind and more engaged with his work than with the outside world.

Pais, who knew Einstein well, paints a quiet man, unassuming to be sure, if also aware of his celebrity: “Einstein's company was comfortable and comforting to those who knew him. … There was nothing in his personality to promote his mythical stature; nor did he relish it. … To the physicists who could follow his scientific thought and who knew him personally, the legendary aspect was never in the foreground—yet it was never wholly absent” (7). But this image does not capture the entire man.

Indeed, evidence suggests that Einstein found his own legend amusing, as long as he didn't take it too seriously, and he didn't take himself too seriously a great deal of the time. Again, a limerick demonstrates the point:

In a notable family called Stein,
There were Gertrude, and Ep, and then Ein.
Gert's writing was hazy,
Ep's statues were crazy,
And nobody understood Ein.

Bennett Cerf, in Out on a Limerick (1960) attributes this display of whimsy to Einstein himself (Friedman & Donley 3). As a matter of fact, this poetic playfulness seems to have been a trait of Einstein's. A family friend, Peter A. Bucky, devotes an entire chapter of his memoir, The Private Albert Einstein (1992), to examples of the doggerel and light poetry Einstein frequently sent to friends to mark special occasions. One such poem, addressed to a friend in 1927, accompanied a photograph of himself and provides insight into his own opinion of his growing celebrity:

Wherever I go and wherever I stay,
There's always a picture of me on display.
On top of the desk, or out in the hall,
Tied round a neck, or hung on the wall.
Women and men, they play a strange game,
Asking, beseeching: “Please sign your name.”
For the erudite fellow they brook not a quibble,
But firmly insist on a piece of his scribble.
Sometimes, surrounded by all this good cheer,
I'm puzzled by some of the things that I hear,
And wonder, my mind for a moment not hazy,
If I and not they could really be crazy.

(Bucky 143)

But Pais also shows a more serious facet to the playful side of Einstein. He records a conversation they had sometime in the early 1950s on a walk when they were being “not particularly metaphysical.” Einstein asked him, “if I really believed the moon exists only if I look at it. … We were discussing the quantum theory, in particular what is doable and knowable in the sense of physical observation” (5). This discussion, as others, was both enjoyable and inconclusive, he says. The thrill, we may suppose, was in the scientific speculation, independent of any form of solution or conclusion; this slice of conversation shows the fondness for “what ifs” that marked Einstein's mind at play.

This pattern of thought finds a complement in Lightman's way of working. His essay “On the Dizzy Edge” (1984) discusses the conjunction of science and philosophy—“the dizzying edge” itself—specifically the idea that “life could not have arisen anywhere in the universe if the values of certain physical parameters were somewhat different than they are” (46). He sets up a series of “what ifs”—alternative universes—that are in rudimentary form very much what he creates in Einstein's Dreams almost a decade later. He toys with universes quite strange, inhabited by “life forms very different from our own, including some definitely out-of-town types like the galgols,” perhaps “intelligent clouds of electrostatic energy” (48). The idea intrigues him; in fact, he relishes the thought that “Many other universes, with vastly different parameters, could easily have been in this one's place, and got along nicely without life forms evolving to ask embarrassing questions. Inconveniently, we have no other universes to compare” (48). His major point in this essay is that science cannot answer all questions; indeed, if it is good science, it raises more than it answers. There will always be more questions to explore; that is the thrill of it all. And this willingness to ponder—from “our Dalis and Sartres as well as our Madame Curies”—he calls “surely another miracle, like the fragile balance of nuclear forces and the just-right release of the cosmic pendulum” (50). Lightman's intrigue with hypothetical situations finds a match in Einstein's own way of thinking.

And so, Lightman finds the perfect marriage of protagonist, theme, setting, and narrative technique. As fits his purpose, ideas take center stage, and so within the novel Einstein the man recedes into the background becoming visible, but nameless, in Prologue, Epilogue, and a few scattered Interludes as he works on a paper outlining his “new theory of time” (4). Lightman, too, presents a narrative of time, providing the primary time—6:00 AM in Prologue until 8:06 AM in Epilogue on the same late June morning, 1905—in which the young man waits for a typist to arrive at the patent office so he can “mail today [his twenty crumpled pages of new theory] to the German journal of physics” (4). Between these bookends of time, Lightman takes the reader on a journey spanning several months (April 14 until June 28, 1905) and many worlds imagined from “many dreams about time” (6). Einstein appears only in the four or five Interludes (and briefly in the hypothetical world in which time moves backward [105], for he would not have been possible in worlds with more exotic forms of time). In the Interludes, he dines or fishes with his friend, Michele Besso, in wordless companionship, pulled almost grudgingly from his contemplations only by the concern of a fellow scientist. Glimpses of the difficult life of isolation and lack of communication he created for his first wife Mileva and their child, portrayed as more social than he, suggest the price of his genius.²

But the real drama of the novel resides in the hypothetical worlds Einstein creates as he imagines different natures of time. “Suppose,” he dreams, “time is a circle, bending back on itself,” (8) or “Suppose that people live forever” (117). In others of these worlds, time gets stuck or is fragmentary or is fixed and immutable. And for each of the supposes, Lightman creates a scenario in which we trace the implications of that nature of time on the lives of everyday people caught in it. In some worlds, much happens; in others very little. In most, the concept of continuity which defines our sense of time, our linear sense of history, does not exist. In all the worlds, however, the lives of the characters are proscribed by parameters the nature of time places on what is possible. In fragmented time, for example, relationships cannot develop. In backwards time, life mandates a loss of accomplishment and accumulated knowledge; at the same time one's understanding of the world becomes more simplistic and childlike. What is possible as action—movement in time—in any one of the worlds remains impossible in any of the others, for the nature of time dictates possible kinds of actions. In narrative terms, then, for each of these worlds, Lightman redefines the nature of plot and the possibilities of action, either internal or external. In very real terms, he has taken us on the process by which scientific thought becomes, on one hand, theory and on the other, art. In so doing, he has wedded the heuristic and the algorithmic.

Lightman ends the novel, not with an elated or contented Einstein, but with a drained one: “He feels empty. He has no interest in reviewing patents or talking to Besso or thinking of physics. He feels empty, and he stares without interest at the tiny black speck [a bird in flight] and the Alps” (179). Independent evidence shows the accuracy of Lightman's portrayal. Gerald Holton sheds some light on why an Einstein who had just completed what is probably the most important paper ever written in theoretical physics would react in this manner. For although the paper was complete, the concept was not: Its central issue “was a problem of particle/field duality that Einstein did not solve in this paper or, for that matter, to the end of his life” (55). Furthermore, “As is well known, Einstein was always far more interested in what remained to be done than in what he had accomplished” (59).

Alan Lightman used the realities of Albert Einstein's personality and work, along with his own, to project some of the creativity of “first-rate science” for a lay audience. The science he reveals demands much of its practitioners, intellectually, creatively, and personally. But he also anchors the myth of the omniscient scientist to more human foundations—from “all knowing” to “always curious, willing to explore and ask questions,” and thus to help define who we are. Ironically, the Einstein that serves so well to embody this positive and productive definition also became the image of a very different kind of scientist, and Todd Gitlin draws on that darker image in his novel The Murder of Albert Einstein.

As Alan J. Friedman and Carol Donley point out in their Einstein as Myth and Muse, the public concept of science underwent a rapid and seminal change after World War II, and Einstein was caught in the center of it. “In a new version of the myth of Prometheus, Einstein brought the atomic fire to mortal men” (156). Unlike the world of Lightman's Einstein, a world innocent of nuclear weapons, the world Gitlin portrays has already experienced Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His primary time, the early 1990s, survived the Cold War; his flashbacks to the 1950s are just beginning it. Gitlin's purpose—so obviously different from Lightman's in most ways—in some ways shares a focus. Gitlin, too, wants to show accurate science; indeed, his plot revolves on it. But he wants more than accurate physical or cosmological science; the human sciences, the vagaries of the human mind, hold more interest for him. He, too, then, explores the relationship between analytical science and the more irrational, indescribable thought processes that affect it.

Primary action in the novel takes place in 1992, well after Einstein's death, with tabloid broadcaster Margo Ross as protagonist. Gitlin, too, is fond of “what ifs,” for he centers the action of the novel on an intriguing one: What if Albert Einstein were really murdered in 1955 in Princeton? To stifle the scoffers, he bases his premise on science: Harry Kramer, former journalist and mentor of Margo Ross, assures her that his confidential source will swear a recent analysis of preserved slices of Einstein's brain shows massive, hence lethal, amount of methamphetamine. Too massive for an accidental overdose, and too far removed from what was known of Einstein's habits, the amount of methamphetamine surely indicates murder. With this premise, Gitlin sets the context for an exploration of human motivation.

He, as did Lightman, draws on the verifiable historical record as the catalyst for his hypothetical central premise. Einstein's brain really was preserved after his death in 1955. Slices of it really were available to scientists for further study on its make up. Forensic science in 1992 really could produce unexpected findings. The well-reported analysis conducted by Drs. Marian C. Diamond and Arnold B. Scheibel in 1985 revealed that the one significant feature of Einstein's brain was a higher concentration than normal of glial cells. The discovery sparked extended discussion in the popular press of the exact function of glial cells—which remains in scientific communities as well as the general population somewhat of a mystery. Nevertheless, the scenario Gitlin proposes for his readers approaches—more closely than it would seem at first glance—developments in the real world.

Having posed his premise that Einstein was murdered, Gitlin goes about the mystery novelist's next job: suggesting several possible motives—several false and one that leads unmistakably but not too obviously to the killer. In this case, given the contemplative nature of a well-beloved cultural icon who spent the last 20 years of his life at Princeton University's Institute for Advanced Study, his task was far from simple. Two elements of Einstein's life hold possibilities: his support of Zionist causes and his—publicly misunderstood—role as initiator of this country's commitment to nuclear weapons. Less immediately compelling, perhaps, Einstein's continuing work in theoretical physics searching for the Unified Field Theory, and by extension his reluctance to embrace quantum theory, provides a backdrop for professional conflicts, perhaps escalating to intense personal rivalries. Again, Gitlin turns to the historically verifiable.

Although not a religious Jew, Einstein's involvement in Zionist causes during the 1930s and for the remainder of his life garnered international attention. So well known was he that in 1952 when the first president of the state of Israel died, Einstein was offered the position. He declined, citing poor health and lack of experience for the job. Largely a ceremonial job at the time, with real authority resting in the hands of the prime minister David Ben-Gurion, the presidency was a visible and highly symbolic role, especially in 1952, only four years after the birth of modern Israel. The offer to Einstein was a mark of his visibility and his public connection to a highly political and controversial movement.³

More to the point, however, and a more fruitful path for Gitlin's purposes, Einstein held a central position in the public's perception as the “father of the atomic bomb.” Without his E=MC², atomic fission could not have been conceived, much less produced. However, in reality Einstein's involvement with the A-bomb began with that theory, and ended with the famous 1939 letter he wrote at physicist Leo Szilard's request pointing out to Franklin Roosevelt possible military uses of atomic fission, of which the Germans might be well aware, and urging some form of official attention to the matter. He was not a member of the Manhattan Project, nor did he ever witness any atomic tests. In fact, when Szilard first approached him in 1939, he “was staggered by the idea of utilizing nuclear fission in an atomic bomb. … Einstein was more isolated from the world than many realized” (White and Gribbin 235). Indeed, Einstein dealt in pure science, in mathematical theories divorced from the empirical world around him. The implications of his theories, played out in the flesh and blood world of humans, never entered the picture for him, for the human stage was far too small, too brief, too limited to matter in his cosmic theories.

Needless to say, as Michael White and John Gribbin point out in their 1994 biography of him, by the end of the 1930s, Einstein had been labeled a security risk by the FBI because of his political naiveté and “extreme pacifist” leanings. “He was just not worldy enough to understand the concept of censorship or secrecy” (241). Until his death in 1955, he worked publicly and with other scientists to end the idiocy of nuclear weaponry, especially during the iciest days of the Cold War in the early 1950s.

Gitlin draws heavily also on the documented record of Einstein's last days. He suffered from recurring gastric attacks that had been diagnosed in the late 1940s as an aneurism of the abdominal aorta, for which he refused surgery. On April 12, 1955, he suffered a severe attack at home in Princeton, becoming critically ill and in severe pain. Hospitalized on the 16th, he improved some on the 17th, but in a sudden setback, died on April 18th of a burst aneurism. Despite the extreme pain he suffered, he had been lucid until the end of his life, working on the unified field theory and making notes even while in the hospital. Thus, history created the stage Gitlin needed to produce in his murder mystery three viable suspects with opportunity and three plausible motives: Franz Rosenthal, an old friend who could have committed euthanasia to end Einstein's suffering; Gustav Janousek, a right-wing militaristic physicist at the Institute who abhorred Einstein's pacifism and saw him as a threat to the nuclear superiority necessary to stop the Communist threat to world peace; and Norman Gottehrer, a strange disciple who idolized Einstein and shared his ideas for the unity of all beings, albeit his path was through Eastern philosophy and meditation rather than science, which he really didn't trust. All three had visited Einstein on the day of his death; any of them could have administered the fatal dose of methamphetamine. As Margo Ross investigates, and as one of the suspects is murdered, she and Harry Kramer find themselves deep in the implications of theoretical physics, soon providing the most compelling argument of them all for murder.

Before we examine it in the context of Gitlin's novel, a simplistic definition of the Unified Field Theory might well be in order. As White and Gribbon explain, quite simply, it is the logical connection of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, published in 1916, and his work on Quantum Theory. He spent his lifetime trying to show the mathematical relationship between the forces of the universe: “Gradually I despaired of the possibility of discovering the true laws by means of constructive efforts based on known facts. The longer and the more desperately I tried, the more I came to the conviction that only the discovery of a universal formal principle could lead us to assured results” (Einstein 49). He succeeded in uniting the magnetic and the electric, but gravity eluded him because it was so significantly weaker than the other two.⁴ He came to the realization that its link can only be ascertained if a quantum theory of gravity can be demonstrated. The problem is that can't be done on earth. “Just about the only place where quantum gravity was important was in the big bang itself, the superdense fireball of energy in which the universe was born” (White and Gribbon 250).

In his own time, Einstein seemed to be making no progress toward this theory and, indeed, was virtually alone in the scientific world in even working on it. Most physicists felt he was deluding himself with a theory that would ultimately lead nowhere. “Although he continued to pursue the Holy Grail of the unified theory, the work was really leading him into more and more isolated backwaters on the extreme edge of physics and into a realm where very few could follow” (243). Ironically, the discovery in 1992 of unevenness in the background radiation left over from the beginning of the universe—the big bang—matched Einstein's predictions in his 1916 General Theory paper and “persuaded remaining doubters that Einstein's equations really had been telling the truth” (251).

Gitlin plays on the disparity between the state of today's knowledge and that of the 1950s by using the Unified Field Theory as a motive not apparent to the world in 1955, but of astounding impact in 1992. He puts the key in Margo Ross's hand: She asks herself who might benefit from killing Einstein, who would possibly have a motive. She answers her own question: “Cold Warriors, bomb-makers, right-wingers, anti-Semites. If we are not going to eliminate anyone, add quantum theorists, Professor X, the dice-thrower out on a limb with a lot of useless theory” (125).

She discovers that Einstein kept notes in the hospital and is informed that he admitted to one of the suspects that he had found his unified theory; it was all there in the notes, which have mysteriously—and conveniently—disappeared.

But, the idea becomes more pointed. She comes to realize that the Unified Field Theory describes “how the universe is wired together” … and what is wired “can be unwired” (189). Using the example of how E=MC² turned into the horrors of the A-bomb and the H-bomb, she envisions the plausibility of a Unified Field bomb capable of destroying the entire universe. Two of the suspects are clearly unhinged, one with the motive of killing Einstein to save the universe, the other with killing him in order to maintain the balance of military power in the hands of the good guys. Both are extreme motives, both suspects, now aging and close to death, are extreme personalities. Without revealing the solution Margo Ross uncovers, suffice it to say that just as science provided the opportunity to analyze Einstein's preserved brain almost forty years after his death, when the state of the world and the state of science itself had changed so radically, science provides the route to the killer, the mastermind of the crime, and a surprising one at that with a motive born in the 1990s.

Gitlin's Einstein bears remarkable similarity to Lightman's. He is the contemplative, serious physicist alone with his theories even at the end: A private man, an isolated man, driven by his work, the work that had engaged him for the better part of the century. Only the circumstances around him differ. Lightman's Einstein lives in obscurity and theorizes in the months that precede his fame; Gitlin's lives in the stunned aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, working on his theories in the obscurity of a once-leading physicist now virtually ignored by the scientific mainstream. Gitlin resurrects him once more in the tabloid world's 15 minutes of fame, the sound bite entrance into a world of cosmic plotting and unbelievably sensational high stakes. In Lightman's world, science is orderly, its intent what Einstein called “the holy curiosity of inquiry” (Einstein 17). Science is noble and benevolent. In Gitlin's world, science is suspect, open to manipulation and vulnerable to political agenda. Science is dangerous, its potential ambivalent, just as the tabloid press's relationship to truth is distorted. Gitlin's world holds more threats.

So, what is the meaning of the comparison? After all, the two works are far different, bound together only by the central figure and the time of publication. Yet both, by implication and by definition, provide a paradigm of how we view science. Lightman's reveals science from the inside, the scientist's view of science, where parameters are clearly drawn and the intent is discovery of truth. Gitlin's shows science from the outside, from a world hungry for sensation, where the search for truth sometimes gets sidetracked in favor of high ratings. Scientific parameters take on alarming dimensions when mixed with the record history hands us. Einstein himself understood this, way back in 1923 when he wrote the following poem:

Children do not profit from their parents'
experiences; nations do not heed history.
The unfortunate experiences must be repeated
Over and over again.

(Bucky 145)

Both paradigms exist side by side and, as we struggle with the implications of them, we are pulled in different directions—the two cultures C. P. Snow described, or maybe just the uneasiness that results when paradigms brush against each other. The two novels taken together, however, urge us toward the same destination. In both novels, resolution comes from the combination of analytical science and human intuition and creativity. In both novels, the author engages his reader along with the protagonist in a fascinating and provocative process, the search for truth: Einstein's “holy curiosity of inquiry.”

Notes

1. Pais's biography of Einstein is more a discussion of his science than of the particulars of his life. Family relationships are rarely mentioned and then only in passing. For example, of the year in which his Special Theory of Relativity was published (1905), Pais records in the same paragraph that the two events which helped Einstein's “genius” to “emerge” were that his job at the patent office became more stable and “his first son was born.” Before moving to the real focus of the chapter, Einstein's three scientific papers of that year, he follows his statement with a mere and stark, “I believe that the arrival of his son may have been a profound experience” (18). Of Mileva Maric, his first wife, Pais mentions nothing at this point. Indeed, she is virtually absent from this biography, appearing briefly and in contrast to Einstein's later, more conventional, and to Pais more suitable second wife. Pais's audience is clearly the science community more interested in the content of Einstein's writings than the movements of his personal life. In contrast, Jurgen Renn and Robert Schulmann, who edited Einstein's love letters to Mileva Maric in the years immediately preceding 1905, show that Einstein and Maric felt a deep bond with each other and that their lives were inextricably woven together both personally and professionally. The letters themselves belie Pais's dismissive account of the impact of Maric on Einstein, and vice versa.

2. In Subtle Is the Lord …, Abraham Pais refers to a letter Einstein wrote to Hermann Broch, 2 September 1945, in which, “In his sixties, he once commented that he had sold himself body and soul to science, being in flight from the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ to the ‘it’” (39). Throughout his life, he displayed extreme reticence in discussing his personal life, preferring that to the public—and perhaps himself—it did not exist. Even the Autobiographical Notes he wrote in 1949 consist more of an explanation of his theories than of his life. Indeed, calling the autobiography an “obituary,” he explains the discrepancy between what he has written and what one usually expects to find in autobiography: “For the essential in a being of a man of my type lies precisely in what he thinks and how he thinks, not in what he does or suffers. Consequently, the obituary can limit itself in the main to the communicating of thoughts that have played a considerable role in my endeavors” (31).

3. In his biography, Abraham Pais cites an amusing anecdotal conclusion to this offer. He quotes Ben Gurion, in a private conversation with his secretary, as asking, “What are we going to do if he accepts?” (11).

4. As White and Gribbon explain, since Einstein's time, science has discovered the strong force and the weak force within the nucleus of the atom: The strong force holds the nucleus together, surprising since the nucleus contains positively charged protons that should repel each other; the weak force is responsible for nuclear decay. These two forces unexpectedly fit well with the unity of electromagnetism, thus supporting the concept that all forces of the universe can be united under one theory. Einstein was not aware of their existence; discoveries since his death tend to reinforce what he was trying to do, although a unified field theory—today known as the Theory of Everything—does not yet exist.

Works Cited

Bucky, Peter A. in collaboration with Allen Weakland. The Private Albert Einstein. Kansas City: Andrews and McMeel, 1992.

Eamon, William. “Inventing the World: Einstein and the Generation of 1905.” Antioch Review 43 (Summer 85): 340-51.

Einstein, Albert. Autobiographical Notes. Ed. and Trans. Paul Arthur Schilpp. LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1979.

Friedman, Alan J. & Carol C. Donley. Einstein as Myth and Muse. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985.

Gilbert, Felix. “Einstein's Europe.” Some Strangeness in the Proportion: A Centennial Symposium to Celebrate the Achievements of Albert Einstein. Ed. Harry Woolf. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., Inc., 1980, 13-27.

Gitlin, Todd. The Murder of Albert Einstein. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992.

Holton, Gerald. “Einstein's Scientific Program: The Formative Years.” Some Strangeness in the Proportion: A Centennial Symposium to Celebrate the Achievements of Albert Einstein. Ed. Harry Woolf. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., Inc., 1980, 49-65.

Lightman, Alan. Einstein's Dreams. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993.

———. “On the Dizzy Edge.” Time Travel and Papa Joe's Pipe: Essays on the Human Side of Science. New York: Penguin Books, 1984, 45-50.

———. “Science on the Right Side of the Brain.” Time Travel and Papa Joe's Pipe: Essays on the Human Side of Science. New York: Penguin Books, 1984.

Pais, Abraham. “Subtle Is the Lord …”: The Science and Life of Albert Einstein. New York: Oxford UP, 1982.

Renn, Jurgen and Robert Schulmann, eds. Albert Einstein/Mileva Maric: The Love Letters. Trans. Shawn Smith. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992.

White, Michael and John Gribbin. Einstein: A Life in Science. New York: Dutton, 1994.