Einstein’s archive online

·         On March 20, 2012  fifty-seven years after the death of Albert Einstein, the Israeli university which he helped found, opened Internet access to some of the 80,000 documents Einstein bequeathed to it in his will.

·         It will go on adding more at <http://alberteinstein.info> and in time, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem says it is committed to digitizing its entire Einstein archive.

·         Among items likely to attract popular attention is a very rare manuscript example of the formula the author of the theory of relativity proposed in 1905, E=mc2, where energy, E, equals mass times c, the speed of light in a vacuum, squared.

Once published, a cache of two dozen love letters to the woman who would become his second wife, but written while he was still married to his first, may also attract the curious

·         So too may an idealistic proposal in 1930 for a "secret council" of Jews and Arabs to bring peace to the Middle East. At present, only a selection of documents dating from before 1923, when Einstein was 44, are available.

·         As papers are scanned, the bulk of them in Einstein's native German, the university will publish English translations and notes, said Hanoch Gutfreund, whose committee oversees the archive.

·         Some items, he acknowledged, were so personal that the archivists weighed carefully whether make them public.

·         Among these are 24 love letters the scientist wrote to his cousin, Elsa Einstein, with whom he conducted an affair for several years before finally divorcing his first wife, Mileva Maric, and remarrying in 1919.