CUNY Academic Commons

This is a transcript of Einstein’s 1919 letter to the public requested and published by The London Times. It concerns his theory of general relativity, which had been published in 1915, but which only became well-known in May of 1919, when scientists such as Arthur Eddington confirmed Einstein’s exactitude in predicting how light would bend around the sun during a solar eclipse. I used the publication of this letter–which was reproduced in major newspapers around the world and almost instantly inaugurated Einstein’s status as ‘greatest living scientist’–as a context for Joyce’s composition of the “Nausicaa” chapter of Ulysses, which he began the same month that the letter appeared, November, 1919. It is worth noting that articles on relativity regularly appeared in modernist journals such as The Egoist and The Little Review, the same journals that published Joyce’s work. It is also interesting that Freud openly lamented that the widespread dissemination of Einstein’s theory was the cause of much popular confusion over the empirical sciences. Copies of the letter are readily available through a Google search, but the significance of the letter as an intellectual event of the first order remains under-appreciated in modernist studies. I downloaded the PDF from the German Historical Institute’s website, “German History in Documents and Images.”