Not only was Einstein a genius, he was a genuinely good person ~ I love his use of the word "reptile" to describe what we today call "troll" ~ this letter is evidence of the truth in the old saying that "the more things change, the more they stay the same" ~ Sooz

Einstein’s letter defending Marie Curie shows just how long trolls have been slut-shaming women
Scott Kaufman | 07 Dec 2014 at 13:34 ET

In 1911, nearly a decade after winning a Nobel Prize for her pioneering work on radiation, Marie Curie received a letter from Albert Einstein in which he urged her not to be beaten down by people who would, today, be called trolls.

The letter is among the thousand of Einstein’s documents released last week — which are being called “the Dead Sea Scrolls of physics” — and it begins by Einstein asking Curie “not [to] laugh at me for writing you without having anything sensible to say.”

“But I am so enraged by the base manner in which the public is presently daring to concern itself with you,” he continued, “that I absolutely must give vent to this feeling.”

The treatment to which Einstein referred included the fact that the French Academy of Sciences denied her application for a seat, possibly because of rumors that she was Jewish — or because she was having an affair with a married man, the physicist Paul Langevin.

“I am convinced that you consistently despise this rabble,” Einstein wrote, “whether it obsequiously lavishes respect on you or whether it attempts to satiate its lust for sensationalism!”

“Anyone who does not number among these reptiles,” he said of her critics, “is certainly happy, now as before, that we have such personages among us as you, and Langevin too, real people with whom one feels privileged to be in contact.”

Einstein concluded that “[i]f the rabble continues to occupy itself with you, then simply don’t read that hogwash, but rather leave it to the reptiles for whom it has been fabricated.”

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/12/einsteins-letter-to-marie-curie-shows-just-how-long-trolls-have-been-shaming-women/

I deeply respect, am awed by, and love this man's mindset ~ ~ Sooz

Albert Einstein: American ‘sense of equality and human dignity limited to men of white skins’
Scott Kaufman | 08 Dec 2014 at 09:03 ET

Albert Einstein addressed what was called, in 1946, “the Negro question” in another document belonging to the so-called “Dead Sea Scrolls of physics.”

“I am writing seriously and warningly,” he began, before noting that as a newcomer to America, he might not have the right to speak “about things which concern [Americans] alone, and which no newcomer should touch[.]”

But “I do not think such a standpoint is justified,” Einstein wrote. “One who has grown up in an environment takes much for granted. On the other hand, one who has come to this country as a mature person may have a keen eye for everything peculiar and characteristic.”

One characteristic Einstein observed as that the American “sense of equality and human dignity is mainly limited to men of white skins.”

“Even among these there are prejudices of which I as a Jew am clearly conscious,” he continued, “but they are unimportant in comparison with the attitude of the ‘Whites’ toward their fellow-citizens of darker complexion, particularly toward Negroes. The more I feel an American, the more this situation pains me. I can escape the feeling of complicity in it only by speaking out.”

Einstein then addressed the complaints of those who have had “unfavorable experiences…living side by side with Negroes” which have led them to believe “[t]hey are not our equals in intelligence, sense of responsibility, reliability.”

“I am firmly convinced that whoever believes this suffers from a fatal misconception,” he wrote. “Your ancestors dragged these black people from their homes by force; and in the white man’s quest for wealth and an easy life they have been ruthlessly suppressed and exploited, degraded into slavery. The modern prejudice against Negroes is the result of the desire to maintain this unworthy condition.”

Einstein maintained that this position was, in part, a conditioned response that Americans had “unconsciously absorb[ed] as children from [their] environment.” But he implored them to not only be better — but to be better than the Greek philosopher Aristotle.

“The ancient Greeks also had slaves,” he wrote. “They were not Negroes but white men who had been taken captive in war. There could be no talk of racial differences. And yet Aristotle, one of the great Greek philosophers, declared slaves inferior beings who were justly subdued and deprived of their liberty. It is clear that he was enmeshed in a traditional prejudice from which, despite his extraordinary intellect, he could not free himself.”

“We must try to recognize what in our accepted tradition is damaging to our fate and dignity,” Einstein concluded, “and shape our lives accordingly. I believe that whoever tries to think things through honestly will soon recognize how unworthy and even fatal is the traditional bias against Negroes.”

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/12/albert-einstein-american-sense-of-equality-and-human-dignity-limited-to-men-of-white-skins/

The link below is "live" so that anyone who wants to browse thru some of these documents [like me!] can do so ~ and Jabra, note the "Visitors to the new Digital Einstein website, ... will be able to toggle between the English and German versions of the texts." comment ~ Sooz

Thousands of Einstein Documents Are Now a Click Away
By DENNIS OVERBYE DEC. 4, 2014

They have been called the Dead Sea Scrolls of physics. Since 1986, the Princeton University Press and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, to whom Albert Einstein bequeathed his copyright, have been engaged in a mammoth effort to study some 80,000 documents he left behind.

Starting on Friday, when Digital Einstein is introduced, anyone with an Internet connection will be able to share in the letters, papers, postcards, notebooks and diaries that Einstein left scattered in Princeton and in other archives, attics and shoeboxes around the world when he died in 1955.

The Einstein Papers Project, currently edited by Diana Kormos-Buchwald, a professor of physics and the history of science at the California Institute of Technology, has already published 13 volumes in print out of a projected 30.

The published volumes contain about 5,000 documents that bring Einstein’s story up to 1923, when he turned 44, in ever-thicker, black-jacketed, hard-bound books, dense with essays, footnotes and annotations detailing the political, personal and cultural life of the day. A separate set of white paperback volumes contains English translations. Digitized versions of many of Einstein’s papers and letters have been available on the Einstein Archives of the Hebrew University.

Visitors to the new Digital Einstein website, Dr. Kormos-Buchwald said in an email, will be able to toggle between the English and German versions of the texts. They can dance among Einstein’s love letters, his divorce file, his high school transcript, the notebook in which he worked out his general theory of relativity and letters to his lifelong best friend, Michele Besso, among many other possibilities. Einstein, who like many other 20-year-old college students did not lack for a sense of self-dramatization, once wrote to his sister, Maja, “If everybody lived a life like mine, there would be no need for novels.” As it would turn out, he did not know the half of it.

The 14th volume, with more than 1,000 documents, is due in January. The digital versions are available at The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/05/science/huge-trove-of-albert-einstein-documents-becomes-available-online.html?_r=1