2005

Albert Einstein Typed Letter Signed

Currency:USD Category:Collectibles / Autographs Start Price:NA Estimated At:6,000.00 - 8,000.00 USD
Albert Einstein Typed Letter Signed

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Auction Date:2020 Jul 16 @ 18:00 (UTC-05:00 : EST/CDT)
Location:15th Floor WeWork, Boston, Massachusetts, 02108, United States
ALS - Autograph Letter Signed
ANS - Autograph Note Signed
AQS - Autograph Quotation Signed
AMQS - Autograph Musical Quotation Signed
DS - Document Signed
FDC - First Day Cover
Inscribed - “Personalized”
ISP - Inscribed Signed Photograph
LS - Letter Signed
SP - Signed Photograph
TLS - Typed Letter Signed
TLS in German, signed “A. Einstein,” one page, 8.5 x 11, The Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton letterhead, January 15, 1942. Letter to Vaclav V. Kalcik. Responding to the content of his correspondent’s manuscript—apparently arguing that the distance of the planets from the Sun suggest a priori design principle of Nature—Einstein here tersely dismisses the argument by analogizing a planet to a shell shot out of a cannon. Since such a projectile can be directed as one wishes, Einstein argues that it is possible to affect the orbit of the planets through similar “arbitrary actions”: therefore “there can be no principal law from which one could draw conclusions about the elementary laws [of planetary orbits].” The argument that the distribution of the planets in our solar system is the result of the working of a higher intelligence goes back at least as far as Plato and was perhaps most famously argued in the modern era by Kepler. Einstein’s argument here suggests that he saw the present order of the solar system more as a matter of chance rather than as a product of divine design. In very good to fine condition, with scattered light foxing and soiling, and a vertical slice to the lower left corner area repaired with old tape on the reverse.