Afterlives of the Rich and Famous

Posted by admin_akashic on Aug 13th, 2022 in Stories

Albert Einstein

One of the great minds of the twentieth century and winner of the Nobel Prize in physics in 1921, Albert Einstein was born in
Ulm, Württemberg, Germany, on March 14, 1879. His father, Hermann, after a brief career as a featherbed salesman, went on to operate an electrochemical factory, while his mother, Pauline, took care of the middle-class Jewish household. Shortly after Albert’s birth the family moved to Munich, where his sister, Maja, was born two years later.

Einstein’s uniquely inquisitive mind was evident in what he recalled as the two “wonders” that fascinated him as a child. The first was the compass he came across when he was five and the “invisible forces” that moved the needle. The second, when he was twelve, was his introduction to what he came to call his “sacred little geometry book.”

Hermann Einstein moved his wife and daughter to Milan, Italy, in 1894, leaving Albert in a Munich boarding house to finish his education. Six months later, partly because he was miserable and partly because he was facing the prospect of being drafted into the military when he turned sixteen, he ran away and managed to make his way alone to his parents’ new home in another country.

He gained admission to the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich, where he enjoyed what he remembered as some of the happiest years of his life and met Mileva Maric, his future wife. He graduated in 1900, and Albert and Mileva were married on January 6, 1903. A daughter, Lieserl, was born to the couple in 1902, before their marriage, and seemingly vanished a year later. Albert is thought never to have seen her, and nothing was written or said about her after 1903. Two sons followed Albert and Mileva’s marriage—Hans in 1904 and Eduard in 1910. By then Albert was working as a clerk at the Swiss patent office, a job at which he was so capable that he had plenty of spare time to invest in his ongoing passion for physics.

In 1905, which scholars refer to as his “miracle year,” he published four papers in Annalen der Physik, one of the world’s most respected physics journals. Among his accomplishments in these papers, Albert assembled various pieces of the theory of special relativity developed by other scientists into one whole theory and recognized that it was a universal law of nature. The papers, credited with changing the course of modern physics, captured the attention of the most influential physicist of the time, Max Planck, who developed the quantum theory, and thanks to that attention, Albert became a popular lecturer at international conferences and was offered a series of prestigious jobs in the academic world. He ultimately accepted the position of director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics.

Unfortunately, Albert’s growing worldwide renown and immersion in his work had a fatal impact on his marriage. He and Mileva were divorced in 1919, and he later married a distant cousin, Elsa Lowenthal.

An intense backlash against Albert by the growing Nazi movement finally compelled him to leave Germany, and in 1932 he moved to the United States and relocated his work to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, prompting physicists from around the world to flock there to study with him. His brilliant successes were counterbalanced by a series of personal tragedies in the 1930s—his son Eduard was diagnosed with schizophrenia and was institutionalized for the rest of his life; his close friend Paul Ehrenfest committed suicide; and in 1936 his wife, Elsa, passed away from a combination of heart and liver problems.

It’s no surprise that a genius so fascinated with “invisible forces” put a great deal of thought into his own religious beliefs, and his writings expressed his faith in a God of harmony and beauty, an “old one” who was the ultimate lawmaker, but not a God who intervened in each of our personal human affairs. He’s quoted as saying: “I’m not an atheist, and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. . . The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books, but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God.”

The impact of Albert Einstein’s work is impossible to calculate; his celebrated theory of relativity barely scratches the surface of his accomplishments. He spent his later years in solitude, relying on music for relaxation, and on April 18, 1955, in Princeton, he died of an aneurysm. More than half a century later the results of his genius are still as inspiring, compelling, and motivating as they were during his extraordinary lifetime.

From Francine

The look of blissful awe on Albert’s face when he emerged from the tunnel reminded all who saw it of that “little child” he referred to when he described his belief in God. He wept with joy as he rushed first into his mother’s open arms and then into the arms of his beloved friend Paul Ehrenfest. (Both his father and his second wife had reincarnated by the time Albert returned Home.) His mentor, Isaac Newton, was there as well, to shake his hand and, with a smile filled with pride, ask Albert if he would please mentor him now, “until we’re back on a level playing field again”—Albert had far exceeded Isaac’s expectations during his lifetime. Albert is said to have replied, “I simply stood on the shoulders of a giant,” a reference to a quotation of Isaac’s. He then bowed deeply to the teacher and friend who was so influential in preparing him for this incarnation, which is his third and last. He remarked, “I do much better work here, without the weight of sadness.”

As often happens with physicists and other scientists, Albert was almost as mesmerized by the Scanning Machine itself as he was with the lifetime that played out inside it. He continues to visit it regularly, taking full advantage of another of its uses: just as all of us here have unlimited access to the life charts in the Hall of Records, we can also review anyone’s lifetime we choose at the Scanning Machine, from the first pharaohs of Egypt or Jesus’s disciples to Mozart, Thomas Jefferson, or the doomed residents of Atlantis. For a mind like Albert’s, the “mechanics” of what you might think of as the ultimate time machine are irresistible, especially since one of his greatest passions here is to unlock the secrets of time travel for you on earth. He believes that by the 2040s in your years, time travel will be common through what he calls such global “flues” as the Bermuda Triangle, through the infused work of a team that includes Albert, Nikola Tesla, Galileo, and George Hale. One of the recipients of these infusions, beginning in approximately 2018, will be a young man at Duke University whose name is Bernard or Bernhard.

Albert was especially moved by the arrival of his son Eduard, whose exceptional mind was clouded by schizophrenia during his lifetime. After being cocooned, Eduard rejoined his father as a coprofessor at physics and astrophysics seminars designed specifically for spirits who will be incarnating and have charted those sciences as their specialties—“our hands on earth,” as Albert calls them. Albert and Eduard live in a Cape Cod cottage in what corresponds to your Provincetown, Massachusetts, and they’re avid sailors on their ship called Yanqin, an Aramaic word for “children.” Albert has also reunited with his friend Johann Brahms, whose music he adores, and the two of them enjoy performing Brahms’s compositions and other great classical works at small salons throughout the Other Side, with Johann on the harpsichord and Albert on his beloved violin.