Letters From Einstein

• random walk Letters From Einstein In the fall of 1923, Albert Einstein was living in Berlin, but after outbursts of anti-Semitic violence in the city and rumored threats to his life, he suddenly fled for the Netherlands, enduring what he called a "cheerful banishment" in the university town of Leyden. Although these experiences contributed to Einstein's social and political engagement at that time, he was also simultaneously engaged in establishing the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and at work on significant scientific challenges-such as attempting to find a unified theory of gravitation and electromagnetism. This important period in Einstein's life is documented in the latest volume put out by the Einstein Papers Project at Caltech. The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 14: The Berlin Years: Writings & Correspondence, April 1923-May 1925, published in February, includes some one hundred writings by Einstein and more than one thousand letters by and to him over those two years. The volume provides a wealth of detailed material on his experimental and theoretical work, including the Bose-Einstein statistics, and many insights into the Nobel Prize winner's academic and personal life during this politically tumultuous time. In addition to its release of the new print collection, the Einstein Papers Project partnered with Princeton University Press to launch The Digital Einstein Papers in December 2014. This makes available online for free the previous 13 volumes of the Collected Papers— meaning that you now need nothing more than an Internet connection to easily access and experience the project's vast scholarship on Einstein. JSC FACULTY FOOTNOTES On September 1, 2014, Professor of English Cindy Weinstein became a vice provost at Caltech. Her research has focused primarily on 19th-century American literature, and she is interested in interpreting books with reference to the culture in which they were written. She has published two books: one on how novelists imagined their writing as a kind of labor, and another on the place of family in 19th-century fiction. Weinstein's forthcoming book, When Is Now? Time in American Literature, analyzes novels ranging from the 18th to the 21st centuries in relation to their representations of time. Here are a few more things you might find interesting about Weinstein: • Her dogs are named Wendell and Scout; Scout is named after the protagonist in To Kill a Mockingbird. > Weinstein's family, including her son and daughter, once drove across the country for a sabbatical year on the East Coast. One of her favorite memories from that trip is stopping in Topeka, Kansas. During a lightning storm there, her son, then five years old, remarked, "Mom, Zeus is hurling his lightning bolts." "This greatly amused my husband, a classicist," she says. • Her love of words comes from her parents. She played Scrabble with her mother, starting at a very young age. "She was extremely competitive, and I had to get better fast," says Weinstein. She also spent many hours doing New York Times Sunday crossword puzzles with her father in her childhood home in in Verona, New Jersey. ENGINEERING & SCIENCE SPRING 2015