KNOW EINSTEIN.(Albert Einstein exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History, New York, New York)(Biography)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 25-NOV-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

"My dear kitten,'' Albert Einstein wrote, in 1901, to his first wife, the physicist Mileva Maric. "I just read a wonderful paper by Lenard on the generation of cathode rays by ultraviolet light." The romance didn't last. By 1914, Einstein had presented a list of "conditions" under which he could consent to remain in his sour marriage. Among them was a demand to have three meals a day delivered to his room. There was also this: "You are neither to expect intimacy nor to reproach me in any way.''

By then, Einstein was having an affair with his cousin Elsa Lowenthal, who soon became his second wife (and who, it is often said, remained his second wife by permitting him...

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