Albert Einstein

Police have recovered manuscripts by Albert Einstein from two youngsters caught breaking into Israel's National Library at Hebrew University, the library director said Sunday. The radio said the youngsters, caught Friday night when the break-in sounded an alarm, were placed under house arrest while police investigated whether they acted alone or on behalf of a collector or dealer.

To get better acquainted with Albert Einstein, visit the Online Einstein Museum that features history, photos and voice clips about the physicist who set the agenda for science in the 20th century. The address is: http://www.aip.org/history/einstein

Magazine publisher Malcolm S. Forbes paid $220,000 at an auction Friday for a 1939 letter from Albert Einstein to President Franklin D. Roosevelt disclosing the possibility of an atomic weapon. The letter was written when Leo Szilard asked Einstein's help in convincing Roosevelt of the need for an atomic program. Szilard, a scientific associate of Einstein, wrote two letters of different lengths, and Einstein signed both. Forbes bought the shorter version.

For Web surfers who want to get inside the mind of Albert Einstein, a new site will offer an extensive database, according to Wired magazine. It will include a collection of Einstein's writings, some previously unpublished, and 40,000 documents and images on his life and work. The site features digitized copies of his professional and personal correspondence, notebooks and travel diaries.

Banesh Hoffmann, a physicist, mathematician and colleague and biographer of Albert Einstein, died in his New York City home. He was 79. Hoffmann, who died Tuesday, was also known as a leading critic of multiple-choice testing, which he branded as superficial examinations of knowledge in his 1962 book, "The Tyranny of Testing." His other books included "The Strange Story of the Quantum" in 1947 and "Albert Einstein, Creator and Rebel" in 1972.

The original manuscript of a paper by Albert Einstein that was published in 1925 has been found in the archives of Leiden University's Lorentz Institute for Theoretical Physics, scholars said. The handwritten manuscript titled "Quantum Theory of the Monatomic Ideal Gas" is dated December 1924. It is considered one of Einstein's last great breakthroughs.

Albert Einstein's handwritten manuscript on the theory of relativity failed to sell at auction because bids fell short of the secret minimum selling price. Sotheby's had hoped to sell the 72-page manuscript, written in German in 1912, for $4 million to $6 million. The first time the manuscript came up for auction, in 1987, it sold for $1.2 million, setting a record for any manuscript sold in America. Auctioneer David Redden, after starting the bidding at $2 million, gave up at $3.

Albert Einstein's most famous equation, expressing the relationship between mass and energy, passes the best tests of accuracy scientists have yet devised, according to a report in the journal Nature. E = mc2 was confirmed in two tests, according to the report. Measured quantities of energy came within 0.00004% of the amounts predicted by Einstein. The energy in any object can be quantified by multiplying its mass by the square of the speed of light, according to the equation.

Albert Einstein's granddaughter filed a suit Monday to remove her nephew from a $15-million trust overseeing the late scientist's personal letters so she can sell them to raise money for her own medical expenses. Evelyn Einstein, a 54-year-old former Berkeley police officer turned social worker, now uses a wheelchair. She needs to pay for treatment of her cancer and failing liver, according to her lawyer, state Sen. Quentin Kopp (I-San Francisco).