on developing nuclear physics and atomic physics. Most other physicists dismissed Einstein’s attempts to find a generalization of his gravity theory that unified it in a geometrical framework with James Clerk Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetism. Indeed, Einstein was ostracized by his physicist peers.
This ostracism began as early as the 1930s, when Einstein appeared before a committee at the Institute for Advanced Study, requesting financial assistance to bring Leopold Infeld from Poland to the institute to assist Einstein in his calculations of the motion of particles in his gravitation theory. He was denied this request. This prompted Einstein and Infeld to write a bestselling popular book together, titled The Evolution of Physics.Money from the sales of this book paid for Infeld to travel to Princeton and begin the collaboration. Much later, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when Robert Oppenheimer was director of the institute, he dissuaded the young physicists there from associating with Einstein because he believed that Einstein would be wasting their time; he didn’t want Einstein influencing the younger generation.
Is it possible that Albert Einstein showed interest in corresponding with me, an unknown, self-taught student of physics in Denmark, because I had shown critical interest in his work? Unlike his esteemed peers, I, a young aspiring physicist, was taking him and his recent work seriously. Also, in opposing the consensus view of what physics was worth doing and what was not, I had positioned myself as an outsider at the Niels Bohr Institute circle, just as Einstein himself had become an outsider.
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