Albert Einstein was feeling his age at 57, letter reveals

Anyone concerned they are losing oomph in their middle age may console themselves they have one thing in common with Einstein.

Albert Einstein, who was 57 when he wrote to his son, portrayed himself as a delicate figure as he sat in his study at Princeton.

Anyone concerned that they are losing oomph in their middle age may console themselves that they have at least one thing in common with Albert Einstein.

The physicist admitted in an unpublished letter to his son that he found himself “losing steam” and that the “elasticity of youth” had left him.

Einstein, who was 57 when he wrote to his son, portrayed himself as a delicate figure as he sat in his study at Princeton university, New Jersey.

He wrote to his son, Eduard, on April 10, 1936: “I am sitting here in my study, wrapped in a blanket and still freezing cold, just because they are thinking it is spring and therefore the furnace must be turned off.

“I hardly get around to reading books. Scientific work is practically eating me up, especially once the elasticity of your youth is gone. When I am losing steam, I just need to look, from my giant window, to the meadows with flowers and trees, and in the distance I can see the top of the tall tower of the university buildings.”

He described how he was collaborating with Wolfgang Pauli, an Austrian physicist who later won the Nobel prize for physics for his work on quantum mechanics.

“Prof Pauli from Zurich is here with me, he is a very young and clever physicist who probably sees me as some sort of fossil,” Einstein said.

When Eduard was 20 he had schizophrenia diagnosed and for the rest of his life lived mostly in a psychiatric clinic in Zurich.

Einstein never saw his son again after he moved to America in 1933, but they corresponded regularly. He signed the letter “Papa.”

The letter fetched £7000 when it was auctioned at International Autograph Auction Europe in Malaga, southern Spain.

Einstein, who received the Nobel prize for physics in 1921, died at the age of 76 in Princeton in 1955.

The Times