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When Einstein and Kafka Met

Imagining a conversation between the two great minds.

  • By Ken Krimstein
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* Berta Fanta, 1865–1918. First woman graduate of Karl University in Prague, at that time called the Charles-Ferdinand University.
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* His father Hermann, desperate for his son to get a practical job, arranged several interviews to become an insurance agent and it’s said that the frustrated fledgling physicist even tried his hand at selling policies for a few months.
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* And write the first ever sci-fi novel!
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* The perihelion of Mercury, an anomaly of Mercury’s orbit that didn’t square with Newton’s math, that vexed physicists for more than 200 years, and that was perfectly explained by Einstein’s eventual insights.
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Copyright © Ken Krimstein, 2024. Excerpted from Einstein in Kafkaland: How Albert Fell Down the Rabbit Hole and Came Up with the Universe, published by Bloomsbury Publishing, Inc. August 20, 2024.

  • Ken Krimstein

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    Ken Krimstein has published cartoons in The New Yorker, Punch, the Wall Street Journal, and more. He is the author of The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt, which won the Bernard J. Brommel Award for Biography and Memoir, and was a finalist for the Jewish Book Award and the Chautauqua Prize, and also of Kvetch as Kvetch Can. He lives and writes and draws in Evanston, Illinois.

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