A letter sent by Albert Einstein to an American soldier during World War II is now being sold for 40,000 dollars.
Less than a month after Sgt. Frank K. Pfleegor dashed off a letter to the 20th century's greatest mind came a reply: A typed, one-page letter from Einstein himself.
In the letter, now being offered for sale by Pfleegor's survivors for 40,000 dollars, Einstein humbly clarified his position and explained that "space should be looked at as a four-dimensional continuum."
Einstein's letter enlightened Pfleegor and his pals in the 26th Photographic Reconnaissance Squadron who had interpreted a late 1944 article in Science Digest to suggest the physicist was rethinking his 1915 theory of a four-dimensional universe to say there were as many as eight.
Writing on letterhead from the Institute for Advanced Study at the School of Mathematics, where he worked after settling in New Jersey following his exodus from Europe in 1933, Einstein admitted he, too, was still puzzled by the weighty concepts of space and time.
The original letter to Einstein, dated April 17, 1945, has been published and remains in the Einstein Papers at Jerusalem University.
Researchers had assumed Einstein simply never replied; the letter's existence was known only to the Pfleegor family, which has put it up for sale through the Pennsylvania-based historical document specialists The Raab Collection.
