Albert Einstein
Later Years
1930 - 1955
ˇ By 1930, Albert Einstein was making international visits again, back to the United States. A third visit to the United States in 1932 was followed by the offer of a post at Princeton. The idea was that Einstein would spend seven months a year in Berlin, five months at Princeton. Einstein accepted and left Germany in December 1932 for the United States. The following month the Nazis came to power in Germany and Einstein was never to return there.
LEFT to RIGHT: Giving a radio talk, 1930 (Age 51); 1931 (Age 52); with Elsa, 1931 (Age 52)
ˇ After Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, Einstein was accused by the National Socialist regime of creating a "Jewish physics" and Nazi physicists attempted to discredit his theories. In 1935, Einstein was given permanent residency in the United States.
Riding a bicycle in Santa Barbara, 1933 (Age 54)
ˇ In 1934, Albert Einstein's adopted daughter, Ilse, died of a prolonged illness. Two years later, in 1936, Albert's wife Elsa died.
LEFT: Albert, Elsa, and Margot; RIGHT: Hans Albert, Margot, and Albert in 1937.
ˇ Alarmed by the news that Germany had successfuly split a uranium atom, Einstein initially favored the U.S. construction of the atomic bomb, in order to ensure that Hitler did not do so first. He even sent a letter to President Roosevelt (dated August 2, 1939, before World War II broke out) encouraging him to initiate a program to create a nuclear weapon. But after the war he lobbied for nuclear disarmament and a world government.
Albert Einstein's first letter to President Roosevelt, August 2nd, 1939. Full text of all of Einstein's correspondences with F.D.R. can be seen here.
ˇ Einstein, in a ceremony in Trenton, N. J., became a U.S. citizen on October 1, 1940. Einstein would actively support the Allies' war against fascism by working as a weapons consultant for the U.S. Navy.
Left to Right: Helen Dukes (Einstein's secretary), Albert Einstein, and Margot Einstein, all being sworn in as U. S. Citizens; 1940 (Age 61); plays the violin, 1941 (Age 62)
ˇ In 1944 he made a contribution to the war effort by hand writing his 1905 paper on special relativity and putting it up for auction. It raised six million dollars, the manuscript today being in the Library of Congress. In 1948, Einstein served on the original committee which resulted in the founding of Brandeis University. Einstein's first wife, Mileva, died in 1949. Also by 1949 Einstein himself was unwell. He had begun suffering from health problems due to a heart aneurysm the year before. He spent time in the hospital which helped him recover but the began to prepare for death by drawing up his will in 1950 and donating his scientific papers to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
LEFT: 1945 (Age 66); RIGHT: 1947 (Age 68)
ˇ Never comfortable with the title "father of atomic energy," Einstein was haunted by the fear that the atomic bomb would be used again. In 1950, with the development of the hydrogen bomb, Einstein televised via NBC his idea for peace in a nuclear world: a single world government drawn up by the U.S., the U.S.S.R. and Great Britain, that would control knowledge of atomic bomb construction.
Einstein's televised appearance on NBC in 1950 (Age 71)
ˇ Following World War II, Einstein became even more outspoken. Besides campaigning for a ban on nuclear weaponry, he denounced McCarthyism and pleaded for an end to bigotry and racism. Coming as they did at the height of the cold war, his comments were not well received. The FBI kept a 1,427 page file on his activities throughout his time visiting and living in the U.S.
Left: 1950 (Age 71); in front of his Princeton home c. 1950
ˇ In 1952, the Israeli government proposed to Einstein that he take the post of second president. He declined the offer. Einstein's religious views were close to pantheism: he believed that God revealed himself in the holy harmony of the laws of nature and he rejected a personal God able to interact with humans. He once said that of the major religions, he preferred Buddhism.
Einstein with Israeli Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, at Princeton in 1951
ˇ Einstein spent the last forty years of his life trying to unify gravity and electromagnetism, giving a new subtle understanding of quantum mechanics. He was looking for a classical unification of gravity and electromagnetism. Einstein became increasingly isolated in his research over a Generalized Theory of Gravitation (being characterized as a "mad scientist" in these endeavors) and was ultimately unsuccessful in his attempts at constructing a theory that would unify General Relativity and quantum mechanics.
ˇ Einstein's two sons were never close to their father. He maintained a much closer relationship with his adopted daughter, Margot (who became an artist and a sculptor), and shared a love of nature with her. Margot died in 1986. His elder son, Hans Albert, moved to California and became a distinguished professor of hydraulics at the University of California, Berkeley (and, like his father, a passionate sailor). He died in 1973. Einstein's younger son, Eduard, gifted in music and literature, was institutionalized in a Swiss psychiatric hospital for schizophrenia and died there in 1965.
LEFT to RIGHT: Margot Einstein; Hans Albert Einstein, Albert Einstein, Eduard Einstein; Albert's son Eduard
ˇ One week before his death Einstein signed his last letter. It was a letter to Bertrand Russell in which he agreed that his name should go on a manifesto urging all nations to give up nuclear weapons. It is fitting that one of his last acts was to argue, as he had done all his life, for international peace. Due in part to failing health over the last couple of years, and his refusal to have surgery on his weakened heart artery, Albert Einstein died from a heart attack on April 18, 1955. At his request, his brain was donated to science and his body was cremated and the ashes spread over a near by river. By the end of his life in 1955, Einstein had faded from the public scene, but his insights into the workings of the universe were continuing to transform the world. An unfinished statement for Israeli Independence Day found at the time of his death read, "What I seek to accomplish is simply to serve with my feeble capacity truth and justice at the risk of pleasing no one."
With Kurt Gödel, Princeton, 1954 (Age 75)
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