Recently a letter from Albert Einstein to his daughter Lieserl, sharing his opinion on the “universal force” of love has gone viral. His message speaks of the innate desire of the human species to be loved, and believe that love has the ability to conquer all.
This letter was said to have been donated by Lieserl as one of 1,400 letters penned by Einstein to the Hebrew University in the late 1980s, donated with the order not to publish their content until two decades after his death.
Further research into the letter, and Lieserl herself, however, has painted a very different picture. The existence of Lierserl was almost entirely unknown to researchers and biographers until 1986 when a batch of letters between Einstein and his first wife Mileva Maric were discovered. These letters mentioned Lierserl, confirming her existence.
In his 1999 book Einstein’s Daughter: The Search for Lieserl, Michele Zackheim made the case that Lieserl was born with a mental handicap, and didn’t even live to see her third birthday, dying in 1903 due to scarlet fever. Others theorize that she was put up for adoption at that age. What is known is that the last mention of Lierserl in Eintstein’s letters to Mileva was September 19th, 1903.
Diana Kormos-Buchwald, director and editor of the Einstein Papers Project was consulted by the Huffington Post regarding the validity of the letters. She responded:
“This document is not by Einstein. The family letters donated to the Hebrew University – referred to in this rumor – were not given by Lieserl. They were given by Margot Einstein, who was Albert Einstein’s stepdaughter. Many of those letters were published in Volume 10 of The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein in 2006 and in subsequent volumes, in chronological order.”
While the history of the letter has been thoroughly debunked, that does not take away from the depth of its message, and is worth consideration! A copy of the letter can be found below.
“When I proposed the theory of relativity, very few understood me, and what I will reveal now to transmit to mankind will also collide with the misunderstanding and prejudice in the world.
I ask you to guard the letters as long as necessary, years, decades, until society is advanced enough to accept what I will explain below.
There is an extremely powerful force that, so far, science has not found a formal explanation to. It is a force that includes and governs all others, and is even behind any phenomenon operating in the universe and has not yet been identified by us. This universal force is LOVE.
When scientists looked for a unified theory of the universe they forgot the most powerful unseen force. Love is Light, that enlightens those who give and receive it. Love is gravity, because it makes some people feel attracted to others. Love is power, because it multiplies the best we have, and allows humanity not to be extinguished in their blind selfishness. Love unfolds and reveals. For love we live and die. Love is God and God is Love.
This force explains everything and gives meaning to life. This is the variable that we have ignored for too long, maybe because we are afraid of love because it is the only energy in the universe that man has not learned to drive at will.
To give visibility to love, I made a simple substitution in my most famous equation. If instead of E = mc2, we accept that the energy to heal the world can be obtained through love multiplied by the speed of light squared, we arrive at the conclusion that love is the most powerful force there is, because it has no limits.
After the failure of humanity in the use and control of the other forces of the universe that have turned against us, it is urgent that we nourish ourselves with another kind of energy…
If we want our species to survive, if we are to find meaning in life, if we want to save the world and every sentient being that inhabits it, love is the one and only answer.
Perhaps we are not yet ready to make a bomb of love, a device powerful enough to entirely destroy the hate, selfishness and greed that devastate the planet.
However, each individual carries within them a small but powerful generator of love whose energy is waiting to be released.
When we learn to give and receive this universal energy, dear Lieserl, we will have affirmed that love conquers all, is able to transcend everything and anything, because love is the quintessence of life.
I deeply regret not having been able to express what is in my heart, which has quietly beaten for you all my life. Maybe it’s too late to apologize, but as time is relative, I need to tell you that I love you and thanks to you I have reached the ultimate answer! “.
Your father,
Albert Einstein
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