EinsteinEverything you need to know about Albert Einstein.

Einstein in Princeton

Twenty-two years at the Institute for Advanced Study: the unified field quest, the quantum arguments, the walks to Fuld Hall — and the documented texture of his daily life.

Arrival

Einstein was at Caltech when the Nazis took power in January 1933. He did not go back. In March he resigned from the Prussian Academy of Sciences, and in October 1933 he arrived in Princeton, New Jersey, to join the newly founded Institute for Advanced Study — a research institute with no students, no classes, and no duties except thinking. It was the ideal appointment for a man who had always done his best work alone, and in some ways it was the beginning of his isolation from the mainstream of physics.

112 Mercer Street

In August 1935 Einstein bought the house at 112 Mercer Street, a modest frame house a mile from the Institute, where he lived for the remaining twenty years of his life. Colleagues recalled the daily ritual: the walk to his office in Fuld Hall and back, often in the company of whoever fell into step — Gödel, von Neumann, the young assistants. He worked at home as much as at the Institute, in a study that visitors described as buried in papers and pipe smoke.

His secretary Helen Dukas, who had worked for him since 1928 in Berlin, ran the household’s paperwork with formidable efficiency and guarded his time; after his death she became, with Otto Nathan, the executor of his papers — the reason the archives are as complete as they are.

Elsa, his second wife, died in 1936. He became a naturalized US citizen on 1 October 1940 (see Timeline).

The work

Princeton was the era of the two long arguments documented elsewhere on this site:

Neither program produced results the physics community adopted. What Princeton did produce was the archive: the letters, the drafts, the marginal notes — including the 1954 Besso letter doubting the field concept itself — that let historians reconstruct exactly what he tried and why it failed.

The public man

Princeton made Einstein a different kind of celebrity: not the 1920s whirlwind of world tours but a fixed landmark, the wild-haired sage of Mercer Street. The famous images date from these years: the 1947 Oren Jack Turner portrait (the hero of this site’s Sayings page) and the tongue photograph — Arthur Sasse, 14 March 1951, his 72nd birthday — prints of which Einstein signed and sent to friends (see Reception).

He was accessible in ways the legend sometimes obscures: he answered letters from schoolchildren, met with students at Lincoln University (see The Political Einstein), and kept office hours of a sort for anyone with a serious question. He was also, by the 1950s, increasingly a monument — the physics world had moved to quantum field theory and particle accelerators, fields he watched with detachment.

The death

On 18 April 1955, Einstein died of a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm at Princeton Hospital, aged 76. He had refused surgery that might have prolonged his life. During the autopsy, pathologist Thomas Harvey removed his brain without the family’s prior authorization — Hans Albert Einstein later permitted scientific study of the preserved tissue (see Reception for the documented sequence and its limits).

His papers — the letters, manuscripts, and drafts of a lifetime — went to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, as his will directed. They are the foundation of every documented claim on this site.

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