STACHEL, John (Jay) 1928-

PERSONAL:

Born March 29, 1928, in New York, NY; son of Jacob Abraham (a leader of the Communist Party, U.S.A.) and Bertha (Zunser) Stachel; married Evelyn Lenore Wassermann (a social worker), February 8, 1953; children: Robert, Laura, Deborah. Ethnicity: "Jewish." Education: City College of New York, B.S., 1956; Stevens Institute of Technology, M.S., 1959, Ph.D, 1962. Politics: "Independent Socialist." Hobbies and other interests: Hiking, reading, classical music, modern dance.

ADDRESSES:

Home—83 Ivy St., Brookline, MA 02446. Office—Boston University, Department of Physics—Center for Einstein Studies, Boston, MA 02215. E-mail—stachel@bu.edu.

CAREER:

Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, instructor in physics, 1959-61; University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, instructor in physics, 1961-62, research associate, 1962-64; Boston University, Boston, MA, assistant professor of physics, 1964-69, associate professor, 1969-72, professor, 1972-97, professor emeritus, 1997—, Center for Einstein Studies, director, 1985—. Visiting research associate, Institute for Theoretical Physics, Warsaw, Poland, 1962; visiting professor, King's College, London, 1970-71, University of Paris, 1990-91, Max Planck Institute for History of Science, Berlin, 1994—, and California Institute of Technology, 1998; visiting senior research fellow, Department of Physics, Princeton University, 1977-84; editor, Einstein papers, 1977-89; research associate, University of California—Berkeley, 1994.

WRITINGS:

Einstein from B to Z, Birkhauser (Boston, MA), 1999.

Going Critical: Selected Essays, Kluwer Academic Publishers (Boston, MA), 2004.

EDITOR

(With Robert S. Cohen and Marx W. Wartofsky) For Dirk Struik: Scientific, Historical, and Political Essays in Honor of Dirk J. Struik, D. Reidel (Boston, MA), 1974.

(With John Earman and Clark Glymour) Foundations of Space-Time Theories, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 1977.

(With Robert S. Cohen) Selected Papers of Leon Rosenfeld, D. Reidel (Boston, MA), 1979.

The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein (texts in German with English commentary), Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), Volume One: The Early Years, 1879-1902, 1987, Volume Two: The Swiss Years, Writing 1900-1909, 1989.

(With Don Howard) Einstein and the History of General Relativity: Based on the Proceedings of the 1986 Osgood Hill Conference, Birkhauser (Boston, MA), 1989.

(With Abhay Ashtekar) Conceptual Problems of Quantum Gravity: Based on the Proceedings of the 1988 Osgood Hill Conference ("Einstein Studies," Volume 2) Birkhauser (Boston, MA), 1991.

(With Kostas Gavroglu and Marx Wartofsky) Physics, Philosophy, and the Scientific Community: Essays in the Philosophy and History of the Natural Sciences and Mathematics, Kluwer Academic Publishers (Boston, MA), 1995.

(With Kostas Gavroglu and Marx Wartofsky) Science, Politics, and Social Practice: Essays on Marxism and Science, Philosophy of Culture and the Social Sciences, Kluwer Academic Publishers (Boston, MA), 1995.

(With Kostas Gavroglu and MarxWartofsky) Science, Mind, and Art: Essays on Science and the Humanistic Understanding in Art, Epistemology, Religion, and Ethics, Kluwer Academic Publishers (Boston, MA), 1995.

(With Robert S. Cohen and Michael Horne) Experimental Metaphysics, Kluwer Academic Publishers (Boston, MA), 1997.

(With Robert S. Cohen and Michael Horne) Potentiality, Entanglement, and Passion-at-a-Distance, Kluwer Academic Publishers (Boston, MA), 1997.

(With Robert S. Cohen and Michael Horne) Quantum Mechanical Studies for Abner Shimony, Kluwer Academic Publishers (Boston, MA), 1997.

(And author of introduction) Einstein's Miraculous Year: Five Papers That Changed the Face of Physics, foreword by Roger Penrose, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1998.

(With Don Howard) Einstein: The Formative Years, 1879-1909 ("Einstein Studies," Volume 8), Birkhauser (Boston, MA), 2000.

SIDELIGHTS:

John Stachel is an eminent scholar in the fields of relativity physics, the history of physics, and the philosophy of science. Stachel specializes in the area of general relativity, making him a follower of Albert Einstein, the grandfather of modern physics. As director of Boston University's Center for Einstein Studies, Stachel conducts conferences on general relativity with other leading scholars, and with Don Howard edits the resulting collections of papers in the "Einstein Studies" series. In reviewing Volume One in this series, Einstein and the History of General Relativity, Wolfgang Drechsler wrote in Physics Today that the volume "is a true and valuable source of information on the origin and development of Einstein's theory. The reader may only wonder why such a book had not been written decades ago."

As an editor of Einstein's own works, Stachel is credited with bringing together under one cover translations of the papers Einstein published in 1905 in Einstein's Miraculous Year: Five Papers That Changed the Face of Physics. He is also the founding editor of Einstein's collected papers (1977-1989). The late physicist's aversion to discussing personal matters during his lifetime was used as an excuse by the trustees of Einstein's estate to avoid complete publication of his papers. "There was never any question of the value of publishing Einstein's papers, but there was disagreement over the nature of an edition of them," remarked Russell McCormmach in the New York Times. After years of acrimonious debate between the estate's executor and Princeton University Press, leading first to arbitration and then to the courts, the first volume of a projected thirty-volume edition of Einstein's papers was published in 1987 as a kind of cause celébre. The reason for the excitement over the first volume was the inclusion of some fifty letters exchanged by the young Einstein and Mileva Maric, his first wife, during their courtship and marriage. "As far as I am concerned," wrote Jeremy Bernstein in the New Yorker, the discovery of these letters has "transformed what had promised to be a relatively routine scholarly enterprise into a fascinating, almost hypnotic, and above all, extremely moving human document."

Other reviewers similarly focused on the revelations of the letters in their reviews of The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume One. Above all, the letters reveal a young man not only determined to succeed in the field of physics, but one deeply in love with a young woman who was a fellow student of physics at the Zurich Polytechnic, where Einstein studied in the late 1890s. His letters to her revealed that "he had found a soul mate, and in her boardinghouse room he had found a sacred corner in which he could read, ponder and discuss his beloved physics," McCormmach contended. The letters included in this volume reveal the outlines of a friendship that burgeoned into love, and produced a daughter, and later, marriage, after Einstein had finally managed to secure a post as a patent examiner. Throughout, the two discussed physics, and Einstein's "letters are full of casual comments on his developing ideas of physics—comments that will keep historians of science busy for years," Bernstein predicted. The portrait of the private Einstein revealed in these letters was equally compelling to reviewers, who noted that it dispels the earlier belief that Einstein absentmindedly fell into his first marriage—which later turned unhappy and was dissolved in 1919. Further, the letters reveal the existence of a daughter by Einstein of Maric, a fact heretofore unknown. "Stachel tells us in an introduction that no one involved with the Einstein papers has been able to trace what happened to her or to discover whether Einstein ever saw her. Without the evidence of a handful of letters, she might never have existed," commented Bernstein.

Also edited by Stachel, The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, published in German with English annotations and in English translation simultaneously, was lauded as an exemplary work of scholarship and a valuable addition to the study of the man and of the history of physics. "All readers will take delight in Einstein's youthful charm, his wonderfully inventive way with words, his fresh observations on society, his witty character sketches, his verbal caressing of his lover and his self-determined, absolutely dedicated pursuit of the laws of the universe," McCormmach concluded.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, April, 1998, Gilbert Taylor, review of Einstein's Miraculous Year, p. 1288.

New Yorker, July 6, 1987, p. 77.

New York Times, September 27, 1987, sec. 7, p. 33.

Physics Today, February, 1991, pp. 96-98.

Science, January 29, 1988, p. 510; April 15, 1988, p. 278; May 18, 1990, p. 879.