4 ms·

You forgot the best part! "...by means of a comical witticism"

• schoen 12y ago
  The German original (linked there) says "durch einen lustigen Witz", which I would have understood as 'by means of a funny joke'. It's a pretty amusing way for Einstein to describe his derivation, anyway.
  • logicallee 12y ago
    I didn't realize this was a translation! (Marie Curie was French/Polish, I could see Einstein writing to her in English.) I thought it was just Einstein writing extremely strained English. If the original reads fluidly, then the translation...could use improvement. It's comically strained.
    • schoen 11y ago
      I don't know what languages Curie spoke, but there would have been a strong incentive for European scientists in the 19th and 20th centuries to learn to read German. That would have opened up access to a huge amount of technical literature that was being published in German. My father said that when he was a kid in the 1960s, there was still a sense in the U.S. that it would be useful to learn some German if you planned to go into fields like math or physics. But I wonder how European scientists at the time of this letter chose what language to use in their personal correspondence.