The 100th anniversary of Albert Einstein's "annus mirabilis" has not passed quietly. Newspapers, magazines and TV documentaries have all trumpeted the year in which Einstein published five papers fundamentally rethinking the laws of time and space. This year also marks the 50th anniversary of the former patent clerk's death. Yet lying between these two dates is a less well-known anniversary. It is 74 years since Einstein attended the only seance of his life. What could have persuaded Einstein, harbinger of the scientific age, to attend such an unscientific event? By 1930 Einstein was one of the most famous people on the planet. His general theory of relativity (with a little help from E=mc2) had thrust him into the spotlight as the foremost proponent of the new scientific age. Knowing of his plans to leave Germany, the world's leading universities tried to tempt him to their campuses. It was the offer from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, on the outskirts of Los Angeles, that proved most enticing, thanks to their top astronomer, Edwin Hubble, who had seen distant galaxies streaking away from Earth through his 100in telescope. Here was proof that the universe was expanding, an observation that refuted Einstein's view of the universe as a fixed sphere. Intrigued, he and his wife travelled west in 1931.

In Pasadena, the 51-year-old Einstein found solace in the company of one of the locale's most notorious gadflies, the author Upton Sinclair. The Michael Moore of his time, Sinclair's The Jungle (1906) had exposed the unsanitary conditions and labour exploitation rife in Chicago's meat-packing industry. The book caused a national outcry and so horrified President Theodore Roosevelt that he reputedly threw his sausages out of the White House window.

View: Full Article | Source: The Guardian