Volume 3, Issue 5: The Untold Months of Einstein
The Untold Months of Einstein Michael D. Gordin: Einstein in Bohemia . Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2020, pp. xi + 343. Hardcover 978-0-691-17737-3. $29.95. You probably heard already that Einstein moved between different places, worked here and there—he is mainly known, though, as a Berlin- and Princeton-based physicist. Although he was a German by born, he was a Swiss citizen, who spent a lot of time in Zurich. It is also quite known that he attended Prague as well, developed some ideas there, but it was just a quick, transitory phase towards the bigger and meaningful periods. But things turn out to be quite different, of course, if you see them from a different angle. Michael D. Gordin has written recently an already well-quoted and notorious book about Einstein’s tiny time in Prague, situated in Bohemia. Einstein spent there only sixteen months between, April 1911 and July 1912. At that time he was a professor of theoretical physics at the