Two important and unpleasant events occurred in Albert Einstein’s life in 1920: That August an antirelativity rally was held in the large auditorium of the Berlin Philharmonic, and a few weeks later Einstein was drawn into a tense and highly publicized debate with Philipp Lenard on the merits of relativity at a meeting in Bad Nauheim, Germany. I review these events and discuss how they affected Einstein in light of new documentary evidence that has become available through the publication of Volume 10 of the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein.
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Jeroen van Dongen is Associate Editor with the Einstein Papers Project at the California Institute of Technology and Veni Research Fellow of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) at Utrecht University.
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van Dongen, J. Reactionaries and Einstein’s Fame: “German Scientists for the Preservation of Pure Science,” Relativity, and the Bad Nauheim Meeting. Phys. perspect. 9, 212–230 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00016-006-0318-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00016-006-0318-y