In 1902, an illegitimate daughter was born to Albert Einstein. In 1903, she vanished. Now, almost a century later, Michele Zackheim follows a mystery that has bewildered Einstein scholars the world over.

We are often amazed by the curiosity of children and the questions they ask. And letters to and from children are always appealing, especially so when they are written to someone famous. In Dear professor Einstein, Alice Calaprice has gathered a delightful and charming collection of more than sixty letters from children to Albert Einstein. Einstein could not respond to every letter written to him, but the responses he did find the time to write reveal the intimate human side of the great public persona, a man who, though he spent his days contemplating mathematics and physics, was very fond of children and enjoyed being in their company. Whether the children wrote to Einstein for class projects, out of curiosity, or because of prodding from a parent, their letters are amusing, touching, and sometimes quite precocious. Enhancing this correspondence are numerous splendid photographs showing Einstein amid children, wearing an Indian headdress, carrying a puppet of himself, and donning fuzzy slippers, among many other wonderful pictures. This book is complete with a foreword by Einstein's granddaughter Evelyn, a biography and chronology of Einstein's life, and an essay by Einstein scholar Robert Schulmann on the great scientist's educational philosophy.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY KIRKUS REVIEWS In a memoir of family bonding and cutting-edge physics for readers of Brian Greene’s The Hidden Reality and Jim Holt’s Why Does the World Exist?, Amanda Gefter tells the story of how she conned her way into a career as a science journalist—and wound up hanging out, talking shop, and butting heads with the world’s most brilliant minds. At a Chinese restaurant outside of Philadelphia, a father asks his fifteen-year-old daughter a deceptively simple question: “How would you define nothing?” With that, the girl who once tried to fail geometry as a conscientious objector starts reading up on general relativity and quantum mechanics, as she and her dad embark on a life-altering quest for the answers to the universe’s greatest mysteries. Before Amanda Gefter became an accomplished science writer, she was a twenty-one-year-old magazine assistant willing to sneak her and her father, Warren, into a conference devoted to their physics hero, John Wheeler. Posing as journalists, Amanda and Warren met Wheeler, who offered them cryptic clues to the nature of reality: The universe is a self-excited circuit, he said. And, The boundary of a boundary is zero. Baffled, Amanda and Warren vowed to decode the phrases—and with them, the enigmas of existence. When we solve all that, they agreed, we’ll write a book. Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn is that book, a memoir of the impassioned hunt that takes Amanda and her father from New York to London to Los Alamos. Along the way, they bump up against quirky science and even quirkier personalities, including Leonard Susskind, the former Bronx plumber who invented string theory; Ed Witten, the soft-spoken genius who coined the enigmatic M-theory; even Stephen Hawking. What they discover is extraordinary: the beginnings of a monumental paradigm shift in cosmology, from a single universe we all share to a splintered reality in which each observer has her own. Reality, the Gefters learn, is radically observer-dependent, far beyond anything of which Einstein or the founders of quantum mechanics ever dreamed—with shattering consequences for our understanding of the universe’s origin. And somehow it all ties back to that conversation, to that Chinese restaurant, and to the true meaning of nothing. Throughout their journey, Amanda struggles to make sense of her own life—as her journalism career transforms from illusion to reality, as she searches for her voice as a writer, as she steps from a universe shared with her father to at last carve out one of her own. It’s a paradigm shift you might call growing up. By turns hilarious, moving, irreverent, and profound, Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn weaves together story and science in remarkable ways. By the end, you will never look at the universe the same way again. Praise for Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn “Nothing quite prepared me for this book. Wow. Reading it, I alternated between depression—how could the rest of us science writers ever match this?—and exhilaration.”—Scientific American “To Do: Read Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn. Reality doesn’t have to bite.”—New York “A zany superposition of genres . . . It’s at once a coming-of-age chronicle and a father-daughter road trip to the far reaches of this universe and 10,500 others.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer

The Dean of a Swiss university persuades Sherlock Holmes to investigate the background of a would-be lecturer. To Dr. Watson it seems a very humdrum commission - but who is the mysterious 'Lieserl'? How does her existence threaten the ambitions of the technical assistant level III in Room 86 at the Federal Patents Office in Berne by the name of Albert Einstein? The assignment plunges Holmes and Watson into unfathomable Serbia to solve one of the intractable mysteries of the 20th Century. In Tim Symonds' previous detective novels, Sherlock Holmes and the Dead Boer At Scotney Castle and Sherlock Holmes And The Case Of The Bulgarian Codex the author based pivotal historic facts and a principal character on real life. So too in this new mystery.

In 1903, despite the vehement objections of his parents, Albert Einstein married Mileva Maric, the companion, colleague, and confidante whose influence on his most creative years has given rise to much speculation. Beginning in 1897, after Einstein and Maric met as students at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic, and ending shortly after their marriage, these fifty-four love letters offer a rare glimpse into Einstein's relationship with his first wife while shedding light on his intellectual development in the period before the annus mirabilis of 1905. Unlike the picture of Einstein the lone, isolated thinker of Princeton, he appears here both as the burgeoning enfant terrible of science and as an amorous young man beset, along with his fiance, by financial and personal struggles--among them the illegitimate birth of their daughter, whose existence is known only by these letters. Describing his conflicts with professors and other scientists, his arguments with his mother over Maric, and his difficulty obtaining an academic position after graduation, the letters enable us to reconstruct the youthful Einstein with an unprecedented immediacy. His love for Maric, whom he describes as "a creature who is my equal, and who is as strong and independent as I am," brings forth his serious as well as playful, often theatrical nature. After their marriage, however, Maric becomes less his intellectual companion, and, failing to acquire a teaching certificate, she subordinates her professional goals to his. In the final letters Einstein has obtained a position at the Swiss Patent Office and mentions their daughter one last time to his wife in Hungary, where she is assumed to have placed the girl in the care of relatives. Informative, entertaining, and often very moving, this collection of letters captures for scientists and general readers alike a little known yet crucial period in Einstein's life.

Rosa’s Einstein is a Latinx retelling of the Brothers Grimm’s Snow-White and Rose-Red, reevaluating border, identity, and immigration narratives through the unlikely amalgamation of physics and fairy tale. In this full-length poetry collection, the girls of Rosa’s Einstein embark on a quest to discover what is real and what is possible in the realms of imagination, spurred on by scientific curiosity and emotional resilience. Following a structural narrative arc inspired by the archetypal hero’s journey, sisters Rosa and Nieve descend into the desert borderlands of New Mexico to find resolution and healing through a bold and fearless examination of the past, meeting ghostly helpers and hinderers along the way. These metaphorical spirits take the shape of circus performers, scientists, and Lieserl, the lost daughter Albert Einstein gave away. Poet Jennifer Givhan reimagines the life of Lieserl, weaving her search for her scientist father with Rosa and Nieve’s own search for theirs. Using details both from Einstein’s known life and from quantum physics, Givhan imagines Lieserl in a circus-like landscape of childhood trauma and survival, guided by Rosa and Nieve.

Out of revenge for being given away for adoption, Einstein's daughter works with the Nazis to outdo her father in physics and create an atom bomb. A death-bed confrontation between father and daughter follows in America.