Two autographed letters written by Albert Einstein in 1938 are among the top items at Profiles in History's June 13 auction in Los Angeles.
They will sell as a single lot, with an estimate of $60,000-80,000.
The letters are written in response to a young physics student, Herbert Salzer, who had contacted the eminent physicist to point out a flaw in his unified theory of distant parallelism (essentially an attempt to divine the structure of the universe).
 Albert Einstein wrote the letters to a young student named Herbert Salzer |
In his first response Einstein politely explains that Salzer's calculations are incorrect and takes the time to explain his reasoning.
In the second letter, dated just over two weeks later, he writes: "Dear Mr. Salzer! Shortly after I wrote you, I noticed that the error was on my side�ǪTherefore, your transformation equation is correct, mine wrong.
"I don't have my earlier work available. But it sure seems that I have made the same mistake there. This will make my assertions about the shape of the first Approximation inaccurate."
He signs off to the then 23-year-old student: "With the highest esteem, A. Einstein."
Letters by Einstein regularly achieve significant sums at auction, with a series of letters on relativity achieving $161,000 at Swann Auction Galleries in November 2013.
The record remains ?�207,600 ($404,000), set in 2008 for a letter outlining his scepticism over the existence of God.
We have this typed, signed and historically important letter from Einstein for sale. It was written to the philosopher and humanist Corliss Lamont and relates to a statement given during the infamous McCarthy hearings in 1954.
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