Albert Einstein the celebrity received many letters. The New York Times "Think Tank" column of 16 Nov 2002 featured a few samples, including a gem from a young girl who signed herself "Tyfanny" and who wrote, on 10 Jul 1946:

... My best friends are the Wilson twins. Every night after Lights Out at school, Pat Wilson and I lean out of our cubicle windows, which are next to each other, and discuss Astronomy, which we both prefer to anything as far as work goes. Pat has a telescope and we study those stars that we can see. For the first part of the year we had Pleiades, and the constellation of Orion, then Castor and Pollux, and what we thought to be Mars and Saturn. Now they have all moved over, and we usually have to creep past the prefect's room to other parts of the building to carry on our observations. We have been caught a few times now, though, so it's rather difficult....

Albert's reply was dated 25 Aug 1946 and offers some good thoughts about the proper response to Higher Authority:

... I hope that yours and your friend's future astronomical investigations will not be discovered anymore by the eyes and ears of your school-government. This is the attitude taken by most good citizens toward their government and I think rightly so....

(see also SeeingStars3 (14 Jan 2000), PersonalResponsibility (9 Oct 2002) ...)

TopicProfiles - TopicOrganizations - TopicSociety - 2002-11-25

(correlates: PoemCrazy, ReligionOfTraining, ZimmermannEnvironmental, ...)