Time’s arrow: Albert Einstein’s letters to Michele Besso
Thomas Venning, head of Books and Manuscripts at Christie’s in London, shares his personal recollections of cataloguing the correspondence between Einstein and Besso, his dear friend of more than 50 years
Einstein’s great letter of condolence to the family of his closest friend, written only a few weeks before his own death. ‘Now he has again preceded me a little in parting from this strange world. This has no importance. For people like us who believe in physics, the separation between past, present and future has only the importance of an admittedly tenacious illusion.’ Albert Einstein (1879-1955), autograph letter (signed ‘A. Einstein’) to Michele Besso’s son, Vero, and sister, Bice Rusconi, Princeton, 21 March 1955. Sold for £50,000 on 12 July 2017 at Christie’s in London
Cataloguing the letters from Albert Einstein to his closest friend, Michele Besso, was a roller-coaster ride: intellectually exhilarating, funny, endearing — and with an unexpected conclusion.
Michele Besso and Einstein first met as students in Zurich in the late 1890s, and their friendship was cemented during their time working together in the early 1900s in the Swiss Federal Patent Office in Bern. In the evenings after work, the two friends would stroll home together, and many years later Einstein would remember how thoughts of everyday life would fall away as they discussed scientific subjects. When Einstein changed the world of physics forever in 1905, with four groundbreaking papers, Michele Besso was his only acknowledged collaborator.
It was because of their close intellectual understanding that Einstein felt able to talk freely and in detail to Besso about the key scientific concepts of his career: special and general relativity, the ‘cosmological constant’, the red shift of spectral lines, ‘time’s arrow’, unified field theory, quantum mechanics and much else. For a non-scientist like me, it was hard — sometimes impossible — to keep up, but the sensation of observing this great mind working at full speed was extraordinary.
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Einstein’s eureka moment: a correspondence card written in a mood of euphoria after he has delivered the last of his four magisterial papers on general relativity. His ‘boldest dreams’ of general relativity, Berlin, 10 December 1915. Sold for $106,250 in 2017 at Christie’s Online
Science in miniature: on a picture postcard from Florence, Einstein draws a tiny diagram of an experiment on the deviation of light rays — ‘An interesting experiment about light emission’, Florence, 20 October 1921. Sold for $13,750 in 2017 at Christie’s Online
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Mathematics for Einstein always came second to creative speculation: here he gives a dazzling exposition of his great ‘theory of everything’ — unified field theory — but concludes with a sense of resignation. ‘What is logically simple is so difficult mathematically’, Princeton, 16 August 1949. Sold for $35,000 on 6 December 2017 at Christie’s Online
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On ‘time’s arrow’: Einstein explains that our subjective experience of time has no objective significance, and that the Big Bang must have happened independently of ‘time’s arrow’. Albert Einstein (1879-1955), autograph letter (signed ‘Albert’) to Michele Besso, Princeton, 29 July 1953. Sold for £100,000 on 12 July 2017 at Christie’s in London
Michele Besso died in March 1955, and the very last letter in the correspondence is written to members of Besso’s family a few days later, and just weeks before Einstein’s own death at the age of 76. The letter ends with a famous sentence, which reflects their deep friendship and the scientific understanding they shared, as well as the distance they had travelled since those happy days as patent clerks in Bern: ‘Now he has again preceded me a little in parting from this strange world. This has no importance. For people like us who believe in physics, the separation between past, present and future has only the importance of an admittedly tenacious illusion.’
After I had finished cataloguing this letter, I sat staring at my computer for a moment, and then I did something I’ve never done before in nearly 20 years of cataloguing autograph letters. I burst into tears.
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