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  • 2015-04-28 (xsd:date)
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  • A Universal Force (en)
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  • A purported missive from renowned physicist Albert Einstein to his daughter about the power of love has reappeared in our inbox multiple times over the years: Lieserl Einstein is one of the great mysteries connected with the life of her father, the famed physicist Albert Einstein. Her very existence was completely unknown to biographers until 1986, when a batch of letters between Einstein and his first wife, Mileva Maríc, were discovered by Einstein's granddaughter Evelyn (ultimately published in the 1992 book The Love Letters). Those letters revealed a child named Lieserl was born to Einstein and Maríc in January 1902, a year before the couple married, in what is now the country of Serbia. Mileva cared for the child for a time while Einstein was away working in Switzerland, then joined him in that country without bringing Lieserl along. After that, aside from a few scattered mentions of her preserved in Einstein's early 20th century letters, there are very few clues about Lieserl's life or her fate. She was never referenced in any of Einstein's preserved correspondence after 19 September 1903, when he expressed concern about her having scarlet fever. Other than those few tantalizing clues, whatever happened to Lieserl remains a matter far more of speculation than of fact. In her 1999 book Einstein's Daughter: The Search for Lieserl, author Michele Zackheim combed through the available evidence and reached the conclusion that Lieserl was born with a severe mental handicap and died of the scarlet fever her father had referenced in a 1903 letter (when Lieserl was but 21 months old). Robert Schulmann of the Einstein Papers Project advanced the theory that Lieserl (who was blind from childhood) was adopted by Helene Savíc, a close friend of Mileva's, and lived into her 90s under the name Zorka Savíc. (Milan Popovíc, Helene's grandson, refuted this claim in his 2003 book In Albert's Shadow: The Life and Letters of Mileva Maríc, Einstein's First Wife, stating that he also believed Lieserl died of scarlet fever in 1903.) In any case, it's simply not possible that Lieserl Einstein donated 1,400 letters written by Albert Einstein to the Hebrew University in 1980s, as nobody knows whether Lieserl even survived her infancy. And there isn't a single preserved letter from Albert Einstein to Lieserl herself, as the physicist didn't so much as mention her in his correspondence after 1903, when she was less than two years old. (Someone seems to have confused Lieserl Einstein, Albert Einstein's little known daughter, with Evelyn Einstein, the adopted daughter of Albert Einstein's oldest son, Hans Albert Einstein.) So the purported letter from Albert Einstein reproduced above in which the scientist described love as a universal force certainly does not stem from the any correspondence with his daughter Lieserl. Is it possible that is a genuine letter from Albert Einstein to someone other than Lieserl? Probably not, given that: This appears to be another case of someone's trying to get readers to pay attention to words by attributing them to a well-known, respected figure whom the public views as knowledgeable in the subject matter at hand. And who could possibly know more about God and love and other universal forces than the most renowned scientific genius of our time? (en)
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