Albert Einstein Imposes on His First Wife a Cruel List of Marital Demands

in Letters, Physics, Science | July 9th, 2026

Albert Ein­stein pas­sion­ate­ly wooed his first wife Mil­e­va Mar­ic, against his family’s wish­es, and the two had a tur­bu­lent but intel­lec­tu­al­ly rich rela­tion­ship that they record­ed for pos­ter­i­ty in their let­ters. Ein­stein and Maric’s love let­ters have inspired the short film above, My Lit­tle Witch (in Ser­bian, I believe, with Eng­lish sub­ti­tles) and sev­er­al crit­i­cal re-eval­u­a­tions of Einstein’s life and Mar­ic’s influ­ence on his ear­ly thought. Some his­to­ri­ans have even sug­gest­ed that Maric—who was also trained in physics—made con­tri­bu­tions to Einstein’s ear­ly work, a claim hot­ly dis­put­ed and, it seems, poor­ly sub­stan­ti­at­ed.

The letters—written between 1897 and 1903 and only dis­cov­ered in 1987—reveal a wealth of pre­vi­ous­ly unknown detail about Mar­ic and the mar­riage. While the con­tro­ver­sy over Mar­ic’s influ­ence on Ein­stein’s the­o­ries raged among aca­d­e­mics and view­ers of PBS’s con­tro­ver­sial doc­u­men­tary, Einstein’s Wife, a scan­dalous per­son­al item in the let­ters got much bet­ter press. As Ein­stein and Maric’s rela­tion­ship dete­ri­o­rat­ed, and they attempt­ed to scotch tape it togeth­er for the sake of their chil­dren, the avun­cu­lar paci­fist wrote a chill­ing list of “con­di­tions,” in out­line form, that his wife must accept upon his return. Lists of Note tran­scribes them from Wal­ter Isaacson’s biog­ra­phy Ein­stein: His Life and Uni­verse:

CONDITIONS

A. You will make sure:

1. that my clothes and laun­dry are kept in good order;
2. that I will receive my three meals reg­u­lar­ly in my room;
3. that my bed­room and study are kept neat, and espe­cial­ly that my desk is left for my use only.

B. You will renounce all per­son­al rela­tions with me inso­far as they are not com­plete­ly nec­es­sary for social rea­sons. Specif­i­cal­ly, You will forego:

1. my sit­ting at home with you;
2. my going out or trav­el­ling with you.

C. You will obey the fol­low­ing points in your rela­tions with me:

1. you will not expect any inti­ma­cy from me, nor will you reproach me in any way;
2. you will stop talk­ing to me if I request it;
3. you will leave my bed­room or study imme­di­ate­ly with­out protest if I request it.

D. You will under­take not to belit­tle me in front of our chil­dren, either through words or behav­ior.

While it may be unfair to judge anyone’s total char­ac­ter by its most glar­ing defects, there’s no way to read this with­out shud­der­ing. Although Ein­stein tried to pre­serve the mar­riage, once they sep­a­rat­ed for good, he did not lament Mil­e­va’s loss for long. Man­jit Kumar tells us in Quan­tum: Ein­stein Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Real­i­ty that although “Mil­e­va agreed to his demands and Ein­stein returned”

[I]t could not last. At the end of July, after just three months in Berlin, Mil­e­va and the boys went back to Zurich. As he stood on the plat­form wav­ing good­bye, Ein­stein wept, if not for Mil­e­va and the mem­o­ries of what had been, then for his two depart­ing sons. But with­in a mat­ter of weeks he was hap­pi­ly enjoy­ing liv­ing alone “in my large apart­ment in undi­min­ished tran­quil­i­ty.”

Ein­stein prized his soli­tude great­ly. Anoth­er remark shows his dif­fi­cul­ty with per­son­al rela­tion­ships. While he even­tu­al­ly fell in love with his cousin Elsa and final­ly divorced Mar­ic to mar­ry her in 1919, that mar­riage too was trou­bled. Elsa died in 1936 soon after the cou­ple moved to the U.S. Not long after her death, Ein­stein would write, “I have got­ten used extreme­ly well to life here. I live like a bear in my den… This bear­ish­ness has been fur­ther enhanced by the death of my woman com­rade, who was bet­ter with oth­er peo­ple than I am.”

Einstein’s per­son­al fail­ings might pass by with­out much com­ment if he had not, like his hero Gand­hi, been ele­vat­ed to the sta­tus of a “sec­u­lar saint.” Yet, it is also the per­son­al incon­sis­ten­cies, the weak­ness­es and pet­ty, even incred­i­bly cal­lous moments, that make so many famous fig­ures’ lives com­pelling, if also con­fus­ing. As Ein­stein schol­ar John Stachel says, “Too much of an idol was made of Ein­stein. He’s not an idol—he’s a human, and that’s much more inter­est­ing.”

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2013.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lis­ten as Albert Ein­stein Reads ‘The Com­mon Lan­guage of Sci­ence’ (1941)

The Musi­cal Mind of Albert Ein­stein: Great Physi­cist, Ama­teur Vio­lin­ist and Devo­tee of Mozart

Ein­stein Doc­u­men­tary Offers A Reveal­ing Por­trait of the Great 20th Cen­tu­ry Sci­en­tist

Albert Ein­stein Express­es His Admi­ra­tion for Mahat­ma Gand­hi, in Let­ter and Audio

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC.

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When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

in Film, History, Science | July 6th, 2026

Pho­to via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

“You do not real­ly under­stand some­thing unless you can explain it to your grand­moth­er,” goes a well-known quote attrib­uted var­i­ous­ly to Albert Ein­stein, Richard Feyn­man, and Ernest Ruther­ford. No mat­ter who said it, “the sen­ti­ment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lav­ery, “for researchers in all dis­ci­plines from par­ti­cle physics to ecopsy­chol­o­gy.” As Feyn­man dis­cov­ered dur­ing his many years of teach­ing, it could be “the mot­to of all pro­fes­sion­al com­mu­ni­ca­tors,” The Guardian’s Rus­sell Gross­man writes, “and espe­cial­ly those who earn a liv­ing com­mu­ni­cat­ing the tricky busi­ness of sci­ence.”

Ein­stein became one of the world’s great sci­ence com­mu­ni­ca­tors by choice, not neces­si­ty, and found ways to explain his com­plex the­o­ries to chil­dren and the elder­ly alike. But per­haps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoid­ed words alto­geth­er, and pre­ferred acro­bat­ic feats of silent dar­ing to get his mes­sage across. We might at least con­clude so from his rev­er­ence for the work of Char­lie Chap­lin. Chap­lin was the only per­son Ein­stein want­ed to meet in Cal­i­for­nia dur­ing his sec­ond, 1930–31 vis­it to the U.S., when he was “at the height of his fame,” notes Claire Cock-Starkey at Men­tal Floss, “with news­pa­pers track­ing his every move and aca­d­e­mics clam­or­ing for expla­na­tions of his the­o­ries.”

The admi­ra­tion, of course, was mutu­al. Their first meet­ings hap­pened out­side the press’s scruti­ny, at Uni­ver­sal Stu­dios, “where the pair took a tour and had lunch togeth­er. They hit it off straight away, shar­ing quick wits and curi­ous minds.” In his auto­bi­og­ra­phy, Chap­lin writes that Einstein’s wife Elsa fina­gled an invi­ta­tion to din­ner at Chaplin’s house. And he “was only too hap­py to oblige,” Cock-Starkey writes, arrang­ing an “inti­mate din­ner, at which Elsa regaled him with the sto­ry of when Ein­stein came up with his world-chang­ing the­o­ry, some­time around 1915.”

The two con­tin­ued to cor­re­spond, and the big pub­lic unveil­ing of their friend­ship came when Chap­lin invit­ed Ein­stein to the pre­miere of City Lights in 1931 (see pho­to up top) where the mega-celebri­ties from very dif­fer­ent worlds were greet­ed by reporters, pho­tog­ra­phers, and ador­ing crowds. There are sev­er­al record­ed ver­sions of their con­ver­sa­tion. In one account, Ein­stein expressed bemuse­ment at the cheer­ing, and Chap­lin remarked, “the peo­ple applaud me because every­one under­stands me, and they applaud you because no one under­stands you.”

Chap­lin him­self wrote in his 1933–34 trav­el­ogue, A Come­di­an Sees the World, that one of Einstein’s sons uttered the line, weeks after­ward: “You are pop­u­lar [because] you are under­stood by the mass­es. On the oth­er hand, the professor’s pop­u­lar­i­ty with the mass­es is because he is not under­stood.” Yet anoth­er ver­sion, cir­cu­lat­ing on the Nobel Prize’s Insta­gram and col­lect­ing tens of thou­sands of likes, has the exchange take place in a dia­logue.

Ein­stein: “What I most admire about your art, is your uni­ver­sal­i­ty. You don’t say a word, yet the world under­stands you!”

Chap­lin: “True. But your glo­ry is even greater! The whole world admires you, even though they don’t under­stand a word of what you say.”

What­ev­er they real­ly said to each oth­er, it’s clear Ein­stein saw some­thing in Char­lie Chap­lin worth emu­lat­ing. Chap­lin left his mark on Exis­ten­tial­ist phi­los­o­phy, lend­ing the name of his film Mod­ern Times to Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir’s influ­en­tial jour­nal, Les Temps Mod­ernes. He left a lega­cy on Beat poet­ry, lend­ing the name City Lights to Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s infa­mous San Fran­cis­co book­store and pub­lish­er. And it seems he also maybe had some small effect on physics, or on the most famous of physi­cists, who might have har­bored a secret ambi­tion to be a silent film comedian—or to com­mu­ni­cate, at least, with the uni­ver­sal effec­tive­ness of one as skilled as Char­lie Chap­lin, favorite of genius­es and grand­moth­ers (and genius grand­moth­ers) every­where.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2020.

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

60+ Free Char­lie Chap­lin Films Online

Einstein’s The­o­ry of Rel­a­tiv­i­ty Explained in One of the Ear­li­est Sci­ence Films Ever Made (1923)

Hear Albert Ein­stein Read “The Com­mon Lan­guage of Sci­ence” (1941)

The Char­lie Chap­lin Archive Opens, Putting Online 30,000 Pho­tos & Doc­u­ments from the Life of the Icon­ic Film Star

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC.

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Leonardo da Vinci’s Notebooks, Separated for 400 Years, Have Been Reunited and Put Online

in Art, History, Science | June 24th, 2026

Leonar­do da Vin­ci was a painter, draughts­man, engi­neer, sci­en­tist, the­o­rist, sculp­tor, and archi­tect, to pro­vide only his most wide­ly agreed-upon list of occu­pa­tions. It is he, more than any oth­er sin­gle fig­ure, who comes to mind when we think of the ide­al of the “Renais­sance man.” Though con­sid­ered rather less prac­ti­cal today than it was in fif­teenth-cen­tu­ry Italy, the relent­less quest­ing for both sci­en­tif­ic knowl­edge and artis­tic per­fec­tion implied by that title has nev­er entire­ly ceased to appeal. For aspir­ing mod­ern Renais­sance men, one of the most endur­ing sources of inspi­ra­tion remains Leonar­do’s own note­books, full of back­wards-writ­ten explo­rations of ideas both real­ized and unre­al­ized that move unpre­dictably from one intel­lec­tu­al domain to anoth­er.

That last qual­i­ty seems to have dis­pleased the sculp­tor Pom­peo Leoni, who even­tu­al­ly came into pos­ses­sion of Leonar­do’s note­books after they were inher­it­ed by his last stu­dent Francesco Melzi. Leoni “dis­mount­ed and cut the folios, sep­a­rat­ing the mate­ri­als into two albums accord­ing
to his own judge­ment,” notes the Ital­ian Embassy in Lon­don, “the larg­er por­tion for tech­ni­cal and sci­en­tif­ic top­ics,” and the small­er for “Leonardo’s artis­tic and fig­u­ra­tive work­ings.”

In the ear­ly sev­en­teenth cen­tu­ry, Leoni’s son-in-law sold the for­mer album, now known as the Codex Atlanti­cus, to a count who in turn donat­ed it to the Veneran­da Bib­liote­ca Ambrosiana; the lat­ter end­ed up in Eng­land’s Roy­al Col­lec­tion by 1670 or so. Only now have they been reunit­ed, thanks to a project called Leonar­dothe­ka.

The cul­mi­na­tion of a decade’s work involv­ing the Veneran­da Bib­liote­ca Ambrosiana as well as the Bib­liote­ca Leonar­diana and the Roy­al Col­lec­tion Trust, Leonar­dothe­ka dig­i­tal­ly reunites those albums after four cen­turies apart. Such a task also entailed the recon­struc­tion of 50 long-sun­dered indi­vid­ual pages and their replace­ment into their orig­i­nal con­text. The note­books com­bined “decades of anatom­i­cal stud­ies, fly­ing machines, land­scapes, and gro­cery-list-adja­cent mus­ings, all tan­gled togeth­er the way Leonar­do’s mind may have worked,” writes Anas­ta­sia Scott at Dis­cov­er. Yet he’d “like­ly nev­er intend­ed to sep­a­rate art from sci­ence in the first place. A sin­gle page might hold a machine, a horse, and a poem, and Leoni sev­ered con­nec­tions the artist had made on pur­pose.” With those con­nec­tions restored, we here in the twen­ty-twen­ties — a time plagued by its own doubts about the rela­tion­ship between what we now call “human­i­ties” and “STEM” — can see once again how a real Renais­sance mind worked. Enter the Leonar­dothe­ka here.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Com­plete Dig­i­ti­za­tion of Leonar­do Da Vinci’s Codex Atlanti­cus, the Largest Col­lec­tion of His Draw­ings & Writ­ings

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Vision­ary Inven­tions Ren­dered in 3D Ani­ma­tion: Heli­copters, Robot­ic Knights, The First Ever Div­ing Suit & More

Why Did Leonar­do da Vin­ci Write Back­wards? A Look Into the Ulti­mate Renais­sance Man’s “Mir­ror Writ­ing”

The Doo­dles in Leonar­do da Vinci’s Man­u­scripts Con­tain His Ground­break­ing The­o­ries on the Laws of Fric­tion, Sci­en­tists Dis­cov­er

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Hand­writ­ten Resume (Cir­ca 1482)

Leonar­do da Vinci’s To-Do List from 1490: The Plan of a Renais­sance Man

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Before Bill Nye, There Was Julius Sumner Miller: Watch Complete Episodes of His Classic Science Show, Why Is It So?, Free Online (1962–73)

in Physics, Science, Television | June 19th, 2026

“We are approach­ing a dark­ness in the land. Boys and girls are emerg­ing from every lev­el of school with cer­tifi­cates and degrees, but they can’t read, write or cal­cu­late. We don’t have aca­d­e­m­ic hon­esty or intel­lec­tu­al rig­or.” That quote may sound like a famil­iar lament today, but it’s actu­al­ly drawn from an inter­view con­duct­ed about half a cen­tu­ry ago with the physi­cist and tele­vi­sion host Julius Sum­n­er Miller. If that name sounds famil­iar to you, there’s a fair chance you’re an Aus­tralian who grew up between the six­ties and the eight­ies — and it’s hard­ly impos­si­ble that, thanks to his pro­gram Why Is It So?, you went on to pur­sue a career in sci­ence or engi­neer­ing.

Gen­er­a­tions of young view­ers down under and else­where learned from Why Is It So? that physics and its prin­ci­ples could be fun. Even if you weren’t among them at the time, you can now watch full episodes of the show uploaded to YouTube by ABC, the Aus­tralian Broad­cast­ing Cor­po­ra­tion.

As you may notice after just a few sec­onds of lis­ten­ing to him, Miller him­self was Amer­i­can. The Mass­a­chu­setts-born son of immi­grants from Latvia and Lithua­nia, he stud­ied physics at Boston Uni­ver­si­ty and there­after taught and per­formed research at var­i­ous insti­tu­tions (befriend­ing Albert Ein­stein along the way) before tak­ing a long-term posi­tion at El Camino Col­lege in Tor­rance, Cal­i­for­nia in 1952.


Miller’s pop­u­lar­i­ty at El Camino, the school’s prox­im­i­ty to Hol­ly­wood, and tele­vi­sion’s rapid expan­sion into a mass medi­um led to his launch­ing Why Is It So? on KNXT in Los Ange­les in 1959. By the mid-six­ties, he was also explain­ing sci­en­tif­ic phe­nom­e­na on Dis­ney’s Mick­ey Mouse Club, Great Moments in Sci­ence, and Sci­ence and Its Mag­ic, as well as on Steve Allen’s late-night talk show. He made his debut on Aus­tralian tele­vi­sion when the Uni­ver­si­ty of Syd­ney brought him out as a vis­it­ing lec­tur­er. The appear­ance went wrong when he could­n’t per­form his stan­dard trick of dri­ving a drink­ing straw through a pota­to, but what it nev­er­the­less got him — apart from an office filled with the domes­tic straws he’d jok­ing­ly crit­i­cized on-air — was a new home for Why Is It So? on ABC.

ABC has so far made avail­able sev­en full broad­casts orig­i­nal­ly aired between the ear­ly six­ties and the ear­ly sev­en­ties. Despite their black-and-white pro­duc­tion and lack of visu­al effects, they hold up well today in both edu­ca­tion­al and enter­tain­ment val­ue. How­ev­er engag­ing his per­son­al­i­ty as what we would now call a sci­ence com­mu­ni­ca­tor, it seems that “Miller could be a ter­ror in the class­room,” accord­ing to his Los Ange­les Times obit­u­ary from 1987, “intol­er­ant of mis­spelled words or mis­placed punc­tu­a­tion” and insis­tent that “most fac­ul­ty were not rigid enough and that stu­dents were not learn­ing enough.” He’d hard­ly be pleased with what’s hap­pened to intel­lec­tu­al stan­dards in the near­ly four decades since his death, but he’d sure­ly appre­ci­ate that his teach­ing con­tin­ues to reach “every­body ages four to 94,” as he liked to describe his audi­ence. Age, nation­al­i­ty, and even cre­den­tials did­n’t mat­ter; what count­ed was gen­uine curios­i­ty and the will­ing­ness to pur­sue it, whether in the class­room or the liv­ing room.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Pio­neer­ing Physics TV Show The Mechan­i­cal Uni­verse Is Now on YouTube: 52 Com­plete Episodes from Cal­tech

Watch a Young Carl Sagan Appear in His First TV Doc­u­men­tary, The Vio­lent Uni­verse (1969)

Richard Feyn­man Enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly Explains How to Think Like a Physi­cist in His Series Fun to Imag­ine (1983)

The Great­est Shot in Tele­vi­sion: Sci­ence His­to­ri­an James Burke Had One Chance to Nail This Scene … and Nailed It

The Offi­cial Mis­ter Rogers’ Neigh­bor­hood YouTube Chan­nel Goes Live: Watch Com­plete Episodes, Includ­ing the Very First

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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How a Volcanic Eruption Helped Unleash the Black Death in Europe in 1347

in History, Science | May 8th, 2026

The flap of a but­ter­fly­’s wings on one side of the world can cause a hur­ri­cane on the oth­er, or so they say. If we take it a bit too lit­er­al­ly, that old obser­va­tion may make us won­der what a hur­ri­cane can cause. Or if not a hur­ri­cane, how about anoth­er kind of large-scale nat­ur­al dis­as­ter? If new find­ings by researchers from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge and the Leib­niz Insti­tute for the His­to­ry and Cul­ture of East­ern Europe are to be believed, a vol­cano’s erup­tion helped lead to the out­break and spread of the Black Death across Europe in the four­teenth cen­tu­ry. In the video above, British his­to­ry and envi­ron­men­tal sci­ence spe­cial­ist Paul Whitewick explains the evi­dence on a vis­it to one of the aban­doned medieval vil­lages strick­en by that plague.

As Cam­bridge’s Sarah Collins writes, “the evi­dence sug­gests that a vol­canic erup­tion — or clus­ter of erup­tions — around 1345 caused annu­al tem­per­a­tures to drop for con­sec­u­tive years due to the haze from vol­canic ash and gas­es, which in turn caused crops to fail across the Mediter­ranean region.” Des­per­ate Ital­ian city-states thus fell back on trad­ing with grain pro­duc­ers around the Black Sea. “This cli­mate-dri­ven change in long-dis­tance trade routes helped avoid famine, but in addi­tion to life-sav­ing food, the ships were car­ry­ing the dead­ly bac­teri­um that ulti­mate­ly caused the Black Death, enabling the first and dead­liest wave of the sec­ond plague pan­dem­ic to gain a foothold in Europe.”

An impor­tant clue came in the form of “infor­ma­tion con­tained in tree rings from the Span­ish Pyre­nees, where con­sec­u­tive ‘Blue Rings’ point to unusu­al­ly cold and wet sum­mers in 1345, 1346 and 1347 across much of south­ern Europe.” Records of lunar eclipses and lay­ers of sul­fur locked into ice cores dat­ing to about the same time fur­ther height­en the prob­a­bil­i­ty of vol­canic activ­i­ty. Key to tying these dis­parate pieces of evi­dence togeth­er are changes in trade routes: on a map, Whitewick traces “move­ment increas­ing along these cor­ri­dors, grain imports to the mar­itime republics of Venice and Genoa from north of the Black Sea and beyond, in 1347.” Accord­ing to writ­ten records, the Black Death came to Britain the fol­low­ing year, arriv­ing in “a coun­try already shaped by failed har­vests, weak­ened com­mu­ni­ties, and ris­ing move­ment of peo­ple and goods.”

Some com­mu­ni­ties weath­ered the plague and, in the full­ness of time, even bounced back; oth­ers, like the vil­lage amid whose remains Whitewick stands, prac­ti­cal­ly van­ished alto­geth­er. “This was a glob­al prob­lem that became very much a local one,” he says, under­scor­ing its rev­e­la­tion of the risk fac­tors present even in the ear­ly stages of what we now call glob­al­iza­tion. “A vol­canic erup­tion thou­sands of miles away altered cli­mate pat­terns, and that cli­mate reshaped har­vest and trade, and trade car­ried dis­ease. And here, in the qui­et Eng­lish fields, the con­se­quences have set­tled into the ground:” not quite as poet­ic an image as the but­ter­fly and the hur­ri­cane, grant­ed, but hard­ly less rel­e­vant to our own world for it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of the Plague: Every Major Epi­dem­ic in an Ani­mat­ed Map

A 1665 Adver­tise­ment Promis­es a “Famous and Effec­tu­al” Cure for the Great Plague

The Strange Cos­tumes of the Plague Doc­tors Who Treat­ed 17th Cen­tu­ry Vic­tims of the Bubon­ic Plague

How the Sur­vivors of Pom­peii Escaped Mount Vesu­vius’ Dead­ly Erup­tion: A TED-Ed Ani­ma­tion Tells the Sto­ry

The 1883 Kraka­toa Explo­sion Made the Loud­est Sound in His­to­ry — So Loud It Trav­eled Around the World Four Times

1,000 Years of Medieval Euro­pean His­to­ry in 20 Min­utes

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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“The Most Intelligent Photo Ever Taken”: The 1927 Solvay Council Conference, Featuring Einstein, Bohr, Curie, Heisenberg, Schrödinger & More

in History, Photography, Science | April 22nd, 2026

A curi­ous thing hap­pened at the end of the 19th cen­tu­ry and the dawn­ing of the 20th. As Euro­pean and Amer­i­can indus­tries became increas­ing­ly con­fi­dent in their meth­ods of inven­tion and pro­duc­tion, sci­en­tists made dis­cov­ery after dis­cov­ery that shook their under­stand­ing of the phys­i­cal world to the core. “Researchers in the 19th cen­tu­ry had thought they would soon describe all known phys­i­cal process­es using the equa­tions of Isaac New­ton and James Clerk Maxwell,” Adam Mann writes at Wired. But “the new and unex­pect­ed obser­va­tions were destroy­ing this rosy out­look.”

These obser­va­tions includ­ed X‑rays, the pho­to­elec­tric effect, nuclear radi­a­tion and elec­trons; “lead­ing physi­cists, such as Max Planck and Wal­ter Nernst believed cir­cum­stances were dire enough to war­rant an inter­na­tion­al sym­po­sium that could attempt to resolve the sit­u­a­tion.” Those sci­en­tists could not have known that over a cen­tu­ry lat­er, we would still be star­ing at what physi­cist Dominic Wal­li­man calls the “Chasm of Igno­rance” at the edge of quan­tum the­o­ry. But they did ini­ti­ate “the quan­tum rev­o­lu­tion” in the first Solvay Coun­cil, in Brus­sels, named for wealthy chemist and orga­niz­er Ernest Solvay.

“Rever­ber­a­tions from this meet­ing are still felt to this day… though physics may still some­times seem to be in cri­sis” writes Mann (in a 2011 arti­cle just months before the dis­cov­ery of the Hig­gs boson). The inau­gur­al meet­ing kicked off a series of con­fer­ences on physics and chem­istry that have con­tin­ued into the 21st cen­tu­ry. Includ­ed in the pro­ceed­ings were Planck, “often called the father of quan­tum mechan­ics,” Ernest Ruther­ford, who dis­cov­ered the pro­ton, and Heike Kamer­lingh-Onnes, who dis­cov­ered super­con­duc­tiv­i­ty.

Also present were math­e­mati­cian Hen­ri Poin­caré, chemist Marie Curie, and a 32-year-old Albert Ein­stein, the sec­ond youngest mem­ber of the group. Ein­stein described the first Solvay con­fer­ence (1911) in a let­ter to a friend as “the lamen­ta­tions on the ruins of Jerusalem. Noth­ing pos­i­tive came out of it.” The ruined “tem­ple,” in this case, was the the­o­ries of clas­si­cal physics, “which had dom­i­nat­ed sci­en­tif­ic think­ing in the pre­vi­ous cen­tu­ry.” Ein­stein under­stood the dis­may, but found his col­leagues to be irra­tional­ly stub­born and con­ser­v­a­tive.

Nonethe­less, he wrote, the sci­en­tists gath­ered at the Solvay Coun­cil “prob­a­bly all agree that the so-called quan­tum the­o­ry is, indeed, a help­ful tool but that it is not a the­o­ry in the usu­al sense of the word, at any rate not a the­o­ry that could be devel­oped in a coher­ent form at the present time.” Dur­ing the fifth Solvay Coun­cil, in 1927, Ein­stein tried to prove that the “Heisen­berg Uncer­tain­ty Prin­ci­ple (and hence quan­tum mechan­ics itself) was just plain wrong,” writes Jonathan Dowl­ing, co-direc­tor of the Horace Hearne Insti­tute for The­o­ret­i­cal Physics.

Physi­cist Niels Bohr respond­ed vig­or­ous­ly. “This debate went on for days,” Dowl­ing writes, “and con­tin­ued on 3 years lat­er at the next con­fer­ence.” At one point, Ein­stein uttered his famous quote, “God does not play dice,” in a “room full of the world’s most notable sci­en­tif­ic minds,” Aman­da Macias writes at Busi­ness Insid­er. Bohr respond­ed, “stop telling God what to do.” That room full of lumi­nar­ies also sat for a por­trait, as they had dur­ing the first Solvay Coun­cil meet­ing. See the assem­bled group at the top and fur­ther up in a col­orized ver­sion in what may be, as one Red­di­tor calls it, “the most intel­li­gent pic­ture ever tak­en.”

The full list of par­tic­i­pants is below:

Front row: Irv­ing Lang­muir, Max Planck, Marie Curie, Hen­drik Lorentz, Albert Ein­stein, Paul Langevin, Charles-Eugène Guye, C.T.R Wil­son, Owen Richard­son.

Mid­dle row: Peter Debye, Mar­tin Knud­sen, William Lawrence Bragg, Hen­drik Antho­ny Kramers, Paul Dirac, Arthur Comp­ton, Louis de Broglie, Max Born, Niels Bohr.

Back row: Auguste Pic­card, Émile Hen­ri­ot, Paul Ehren­fest, Édouard Herzen, Théophile de Don­der, Erwin Schrödinger, JE Ver­schaf­felt, Wolf­gang Pauli, Wern­er Heisen­berg, Ralph Fowler, Léon Bril­louin.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2019.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Marie Curie’s Research Papers Are Still Radioac­tive a Cen­tu­ry Lat­er

Read the Uplift­ing Let­ter That Albert Ein­stein Sent to Marie Curie Dur­ing a Time of Per­son­al Cri­sis (1911)

Marie Curie Became the First Woman to Win a Nobel Prize, the First Per­son to Win Twice, and the Only Per­son in His­to­ry to Win in Two Dif­fer­ent Sci­ences

The Bohr-Ein­stein Debates, Reen­act­ed With Dog Pup­pets

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. 

 

 

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Sci-Fi Writer Arthur C. Clarke Predicts the Future in 1964: Artificial Intelligence, Instantaneous Global Communication, Remote Work, Singularity & More

in Science, Technology | April 13th, 2026

Are you feel­ing con­fi­dent about the future? No? We under­stand. Would you like to know what it was like to feel a deep cer­tain­ty that the decades to come were going to be filled with won­der and the fan­tas­tic? Well then, gaze upon this clip from the BBC Archive YouTube chan­nel of sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke pre­dict­ing the future in 1964.

Although we best know him for writ­ing 2001: A Space Odyssey, the 1964 tele­vi­sion-view­ing pub­lic would have known him for his futur­ism and his tal­ent for calm­ly explain­ing all the great things to come. In the late 1940s, he had already pre­dict­ed telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion satel­lites. In 1962 he pub­lished his col­lect­ed essays, Pro­files of the Future, which con­tains many of the ideas in this clip.

Here he cor­rect­ly pre­dicts the ease with which we can be con­tact­ed wher­ev­er in the world we choose to, where we can con­tact our friends “any­where on earth even if we don’t know their loca­tion.” What Clarke doesn’t pre­dict here is how “loca­tion” isn’t a thing when we’re on the inter­net. He imag­ines peo­ple work­ing just as well from Tahi­ti or Bali as they do from Lon­don. Clarke sees this advance­ment as the down­fall of the mod­ern city, as we do not need to com­mute into the city to work. Now, as so many of us are doing our jobs from home post-COVID, we’ve also dis­cov­ered the dystopia in that fan­ta­sy. (It cer­tain­ly has­n’t dropped the cost of rent.)

Next, he pre­dicts advances in biotech­nol­o­gy that would allow us to, say, train mon­keys to work as ser­vants and work­ers. (Until, he jokes, they form a union and “we’d be back right where we start­ed.) Per­haps, he says, humans have stopped evolving—what comes next is arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (although that phrase had yet to be used) and machine evo­lu­tion, where we’d be hon­ored to be the “step­ping stone” towards that des­tiny. Make of that what you will. I know you might think it would be cool to have a mon­key but­ler, but c’mon, think of the ethics, not to men­tion the cost of bananas.

Point­ing out where Clarke gets it wrong is too easy—nobody gets it right all of the time. How­ev­er, it is fas­ci­nat­ing that some things that have nev­er come to pass—being able to learn a lan­guage overnight, or eras­ing your memories—have man­aged to resur­face over the years as sci­ence fic­tion films, like Eter­nal Sun­shine of the Spot­less Mind. His ideas of cryo­genic sus­pen­sion are sta­ples of numer­ous hard sci-fi films.

And we are still wait­ing for the “Repli­ca­tor” machine, which would make exact dupli­cates of objects (and by so doing cause a col­lapse into “glut­to­nous bar­barism” because we’d want unlim­it­ed amounts of every­thing.) Some com­menters call this a pre­cur­sor to 3‑D print­ing. I’d say oth­er­wise, but some­thing very close to it might be around the cor­ner. Who knows? Clarke him­self agrees about all this conjecture—it’s doomed to fail.

“That is why the future is so end­less­ly fas­ci­nat­ing. Try as we can, we’ll nev­er out­guess it.”

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2022.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How French Artists in 1899 Envi­sioned What Life Would Look Like in the Year 2000 

Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts the Future on The David Let­ter­man Show (1980)

In 1926, Niko­la Tes­la Pre­dicts the World of 2026

In 1922, a Nov­el­ist Pre­dicts What the World Will Look Like in 2022: Wire­less Tele­phones, 8‑Hour Flights to Europe & More

In 1894, A French Writer Pre­dict­ed the End of Books & the Rise of Portable Audio­books and Pod­casts

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts.

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What You Would See and Feel While Traveling Near the Speed of Light

in Astronomy, Physics, Science | April 10th, 2026

We all learn in school, or at least from our more rig­or­ous choic­es of sci­ence fic­tion, that we’ll nev­er be able to trav­el faster than the speed of light. At first, this may sound dis­ap­point­ing, but upon reflec­tion, 186,000 miles per sec­ond is noth­ing to sneeze at. Ques­tions about how to achieve that speed soon give way to ques­tions about what an attempt to do so would be like, many of them answered by the ani­mat­ed video from Sci­enceClic above. The first sur­prise is that mov­ing so fast, in and of itself, would have no neg­a­tive effect on us. When we trav­el by bicy­cle, car, air­plane, space­craft, or what have you, we feel only the accel­er­a­tion. If that remains at a safe rate, no absolute speed will be a prob­lem, in the­o­ry, assum­ing you can get up to it. Still, it could­n’t hurt to buck­le up, not that it would help much in the event of a col­li­sion, even with a speck of dust.

Putting that out of our minds by assum­ing that “our ship is equipped with a force field that repels dan­ger­ous objects and allows us to roam freely through space,” we can con­cen­trate on what we’d see through the win­dow. First, “the stars in front of us, which we get clos­er to, seem to grad­u­al­ly move away. The sky con­tracts before us,” much as rain appears to fall from the front when you’re dri­ving through it.

“Behind us, the sky seems to widen, and becomes dark­er,” and any object we pass “would appear to be slight­ly angled in our direc­tion.” Just as the light in the sky we see while stargaz­ing takes some time to reach us, thus con­sti­tut­ing a view of the stars as they were in the past, events on the Earth from which we’re mov­ing away — pre­sum­ing we had a way to see them — would appear to be tak­ing place in “slow motion.” Earth­’s image would shift toward the col­or red, and that of every­thing in front of us would shift toward blue. After a few hun­dred days, our ship begins to approach light speed, and that’s when things get even stranger.

This, sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly speak­ing, is when spe­cial rel­a­tiv­i­ty comes into play, caus­ing our ship to swerve onto its own “time axis” apart from the one fol­lowed by Earth. From our per­spec­tive, the entire uni­verse would con­tract along our length of motion, mak­ing our jour­ney short­er than we’d expect­ed. As we move faster and faster, the view in front of us inten­si­fies, while the view behind us turns com­plete­ly black. And what would hap­pen when we final­ly reach light speed? Noth­ing, because we can’t reach it: “You may try to catch a light ray, but from your point of view, it will always escape at the same speed.” Accel­er­ate all you like; “from your point of view, you are still motion­less, and light escapes inex­orably.” At best, “our ship will con­tin­ue to accel­er­ate for­ev­er, and our field of vision will shrink ever more, until form­ing an infi­nite­ly bright spot in front of us, sur­round­ed by an infi­nite­ly black sky.” But there may be a loop­hole, in that, even if an object can’t do it, “noth­ing pro­hibits space itself from mov­ing faster than light” — a premise for some tru­ly mind-blow­ing sci-fi if ever there was one.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

M.I.T. Cam­era Cap­tures Speed of Light: A Tril­lion-Frames-Per-Sec­ond

60 Sec­ond Adven­tures in Astron­o­my Explains the Big Bang, Rel­a­tiv­i­ty & More with Fun Ani­ma­tion

Does Einstein’s The­o­ry of Spe­cial Rel­a­tiv­i­ty Sug­gest That There Is an After­life?: A The­o­ret­i­cal Physi­cist Explains

Pro­fes­sor Ronald Mal­lett Wants to Build a Time Machine in this Cen­tu­ry … and He’s Not Kid­ding

Einstein’s The­o­ry of Rel­a­tiv­i­ty Explained in One of the Ear­li­est Sci­ence Films Ever Made (1923)

What It Feels Like to Fly Over Plan­et Earth

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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