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Vintage glossy 7 x 9 silver gelatin photo of Albert Einstein in a handsome three-quarter-length pose, an image captured during his visit to the California Institute of Technology physics department in early 1931, signed neatly at a later date in black ink, “Albert Einstein, 1933.” Archivally double-matted and framed to an overall size of 13.5 x 15.25. In fine condition, with some light silvering to darker areas of the image.
Einstein served as a researcher and visiting professor at the California Institute of Technology for three winter terms in 1931, 1932, and 1933, the year the offered photograph is dated. This picture of Einstein, however, was taken during his first visit to Caltech in 1931, a trip marked by his formal introduction to a brilliant 27-year-old physicist named Robert Oppenheimer. Although pictured in 1931, it’s believed that Einstein signed this photograph in 1933 during his final visit to the campus. It was also in 1933 when Einstein decided to escape Europe and settle permanently in the United States, where he assumed a position at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study.
During his first visit, Caltech’s new Athenaeum was the setting for many dinners to honor the great theoretical physicist. The first, on January 15, 1931, included guests like physicist and Nobel Laureate A. A. Michelson as well as 200 members of the California Institute Associates. Weeks later, a second dinner was held and attended by all the astronomers from the Institute and the Mt. Wilson Observatory, a group that included Edwin Hubble and Charles E. St. John, who verified the third prediction of the theory of general relativity. Colleagues from Berkeley also showed, including physical chemist and physicist Richard Tolman's close friend and co-author, G. N. Lewis, who wrote to say he was coming with a friend: ‘I have just accepted an invitation from Oppenheimer to drive me down. Do you think I should take out accident insurance?’
At a farewell luncheon held in his honor on February 24, 1931, Einstein humorously remarked: ‘I want to thank the extraordinary group of scholars in the fields of physics and astronomy who have afforded me glimpses of their work. They have conducted me not only into the world of atoms and crystals, but also to the surface of the sun and into the outermost depths of space. There I saw worlds which are flying away from us with incomprehensible rapidity, in spite of the fact that their inhabitants do not know us well enough to justify any such action.’
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