Was Einstein a good student?

On Monday, March 19, a debuted online archive containing 2,000 documents unveiled missing pieces of Einstein's brain. There's another list of 80,000 documents which will be made available later by the archive.

These documents are kept intact by the ALbert EInstein Archives at the Hevrew University of Jerusalem and at the California Insititute of Technology under the Eindstein Papers Project. His personal letter and all the scientific manuscripts are contained in it.



If you visit the galleries, you'll see Einstein's high school certification, which he received upon finishing high school at 16 in 1896. It turns out Einstein was an excellent student, not a terrible one, as often said. However, according to the archives, he left because he couldn't handle the strict discipline and authority.

The archive also contains images of one of only three existing manuscripts containing the famous E=mc^2 equation written in Einstein's handwriting. This equation, which describes the relationship betweem energy, mass and the speed of light, derives from his theory of special relativity. His 1921 Nobel Prize for Physics is also on display.

On the personal side, the archive contains a postcard to his mother Pauline in September 1919, which spoke of results of his research, led by British astronomer Arthur Eddington, during the May 1919 solar eclipse; this data confirmed a prediction made by the general theory of relativity. It also spoke of his mother's pain as her health deteriorated. The letter began: "Dear Mother, Good news today. H.A. Lorentz has telegraphed me that the British expeditions have definitively confirmed the deflection of light by the Sun. Unfortunately, Maja has written me that you're not only in a lot of pain but that you also have gloomy thoughts. How I would like to keep you company again so that you're not left to ugly brooding. …"

The site was originally launched in 2003. Almost a decade later, a $500,000 grant from the Polonsky Foundation of London funded digitization of the 80,000 documents.