nvm
IIRC, the reason he was so rude to his second wife that day was that he was passing a kidney stone and was in great pain. From what I read, passing kidney stones is extremely painful.
Asimov’s autobiography is one of my favorite books. Since his life wasn’t what I would call colorful, it is hard to explain. I remember what H.L. Mencken wrote: If a man can’t write an interesting book about himself, then he probably doesn’t have an interesting book in him.
The two volumes of Asimov’s autobiography (In Memory Yet Green; In Joy Still Felt) struck me as somewhat like Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, but with Asimov in the role of both Johnson and Boswell.
His books are interesting for what they don’t say… Very little about his son ahd his problems, reasons for his first marriage breakup, etc. But yes, he has a folksy style that makes him interesting to read.
As a point of correction, IAS is independent and not a part of Princeton University, and Einstein was never a professor at Princeton. It is possible but rare to be associated with both - von Neumann was, but not anyone else I’m aware of.
He has a third, independent, autobiography called I, Asimov not nearly as good as the two volume one, but it goes further being written later.
I remember both things being discussed - not in any great depth, but somewhat. It is interesting that his daughter showed up often in his F&SF columns, but almost never his son. He used to attend the MITSFS picnic. I was at his last in 1970, where he brought his son, and Asimov was quite nasty to him. He also brought Sondra Ley, Willy Ley’s daughter, I think. I don’t know that anything was going on, but I wouldn’t be surprised. He fled Boston for New York the next year.
Yeah, his son had pretty serious Aspergers, apparently. IIRC the only thing I remember he said in his books was that David “was a disappointment”. I suppose in the days well before Aspergers became a household word, that particular behaviour would appear to be a nasty combination of childishness, self-centeredness, stupidity and stubborness, etc.
(I once saw a chat about David’s troubles, someone mentioned working with him in a schlock warehouse when they had student summer jobs; a crate of plastic crap fell over, and David had a lying down screaming fit because the box was not cooperating. Classic Aspergers. I’m sure like JFK’s son, having a father that was a legend in his own time did not help matters either. )
I got the impression from reading Isaacson’s biography of Einstein wasn’t really as unworldly as most people think and he actually was quite keen about projecting a certain image to the public. Also he wasn’t great at handling family relationships and didn’t seem to worry much about his marriage vows.
Of course, when we talking about one of the great physicists who ever lived, I’m willing to cut him some slack for being a lousy husband and father.
On the subject of Asimov, It seems to me that he might not write about his affairs because that is something a gentleman doesn’t discuss.
I have been told by people who met Asimov at various science fiction conventions that he could be quite obnoxious in his interactions with random pretty young woman that he met, including groping them.
It was obvious in his autobiographies that his daughter was his favorite and that he was disappointed in his son. For what it’s worth, he recognized that his son’s problems weren’t his conscious actions but mental problems he couldn’t handle. Asimov was, as he sort of admits, somewhere on the autistic spectrum himself (although he didn’t call it that) and rather obsessive-compulsive. He felt compelled to spend eight hours a day writing, every day of the year, even when he no longer remotely needed the money. He says at one point that his son’s problem was that he was as obnoxious as Asimov himself, but he wasn’t as smart as Asimov, so he couldn’t get away with the cavalier way that he treated other people.
Back to the OP, there seems to be an impression that Einstein must have raked it in because he was so smart. It doesn’t really work that way in research. Researchers are supposed to pursue the truth wherever it leads, and fat salaries tend to get in the way of that.
Really, what “raking it in” means to an academic is being awarded large grants. But usually, having a larger grant doesn’t mean that you personally are taking more home; it means that you can hire more postdocs and grad students, or buy more laboratory equipment. At most, a good grant might have more generous travel allowances.
There are some few (very few) grants and awards which have no strings attached, and which you could take entirely personally, but even those generally end up getting folded back into research, because the kind of people who win them tend to be the kind of people who value research above other things to begin with.
I wonder how much money Einstein made from public speaking? I suspect he could make a pretty good honorarium just for showing up.
Einstein’s salary at the Swiss patent Office was 3500 swiss francs per year in 1903 (for a 6-day, 48-hour work week). (This was about double that of a University Assistant Professor.) In 1904, the Patent Office made his temporary position a permanent one, and raised his salary to 3900 per year. By 1906, he was an 'expert (second class) and earned 4500 swiss francs per year.
In 1906, he receives his PhD. (Yes, all his annus mīrābilis papers of 1905 were written before he received his doctorate.)
Then in 1909, the University of Zurich created a new professorship in ‘theoretical physics’ and hired him for the job. They got him by paying him the same salary he was receiving at the Patent Office, 4500 francs per year.
During much of this period, Einstein was very poor, living in very constrained circumstances. He had a wife & child to support, plus an ex-wife and child. To earn additional income, he obtained a teaching certificate in 1907, and in 1908 he taught a course in mathematics through the University of Bern. The classes were held early in the morning or in the evening, because he was still working an 8-hour day at the Patent office. Alas, his largest class had only 3 students.
He also supplemented his income by writing articles for the Annalen der Physik; he wrote about 20, but I can’t find out what he was paid for them.
In 1910, he moved to the German University of Prague, where he was paid the high salary of 9100 CHF.
Someone else will have to convert these figures into another currency, and current value equivalent, to get a reasonable answer.
t-bonham@scc.net writes:
> During much of this period, Einstein was very poor, living in very constrained
> circumstances. He had a wife & child to support, plus an ex-wife and child.
There was no period in his life when he had a wife and child and an ex-wife and child to support:
Einstein was married twice and had three children. The first marriage was to Mileva Marić. Before they married, they had a daughter Lieserl in 1902. Lieserl was apparently adopted by someone and disappeared from Einstein’s life. Nobody knows what happened to her, although there’s a common supposition that like most Germans Jews, she died in World War II. Einstein and Mileva got married in 1903. They had two sons, Hans in 1904 and Eduard in 1910. They got divorced in 1919. The same year, he married Elsa Löwenthal. They had no children.
Furthermore, unless you’re talking about some other period, how can you say that he was very poor? He was a patent clerk, a pretty good job at the time.
I suppose for career physicists whose life is the work they do, the objective is not “rake it in” so much as having a secure tenure and a more-than-adequate salary. This would allow one to simply do the thinking and experimenting, conferences and other interactions with fellow scientists. No pressure.
In this case, I assume Einstein nailed it. I also assume that a person whose work and obsession is physics, not their spouse or family can sometimes be difficult to get along with.
It’s the circle of life.
Well, even though we are missing some information, I’m going to go ahead and give an answer based on what we do know. Based on [=Switzerland"]this information](http://www.measuringworth.com/datasets/exchangeglobal/result.php?year_source=1905&year_result=1955&countryE[), I’m going to assume that a Swiss frank was worth around 5 U.S. Dollars, which gives us $780 per year in 1905, which would be equivalent to $20,200 in 2010, according to this site.
Obviously this is nowhere near the best way to go about this, but it’s the best answer I can give. Given the $15000/yr figure above (122,000 USD 2010) as his salary in 1955, that means his salary was about six times higher, while the $3000/yr he wanted would be 24400 USD 2010, not much more than he was making in 1905.
Great, great stuff.
And he certainly didn’t receive his doctorate for any of the work he’s currently known for; he received it for a dissertation titled “A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions” in which he used the known properties of sugar solution to figure out how large sugar molecules are.
http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teaching/HPS_0410/chapters/atoms_quantum/index.html
Yes, indeed. As Einstein himself noted, any of those papers would have been too controversial for a doctoral dissertation (which says something about the conservatism of German university scientists).
Einstein expected some reaction, possibly angry, to those papers, but was surprised to get none – not compliments, not complaints, just nothing. He was rather disappointed, and was considering dropping theoretical physics and putting his energy into finding a more lucrative teaching position. Then he got a very complimentary letter from Max Plank about his papers – 2 years later, in 1907.