Berlin Retreat, Part 2
In addition to the library tour, discussed in the previous post, the EPP retreat meetings continued in the Dahlem neighborhood, where Einstein first lived after moving from Switzerland to Berlin in 1914 at the age of thirty-five. Jürgen Renn hosted us for two days at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. We had the opportunity to meet new and old colleagues. Felix F. Schäfer presented MPI's digitization project designed to chronicle the Max Planck Society's history, and Alexander Blum shared an overview of the Final Theory Program's genesis and plans. Our Friday afternoon shifted from 20th to 19th century history when we attended Caltech Professor Jed Buchwald's talk on Thomas Young and the Decipherment of Egyptian Hieroglyphs in the Harnack House.
In the village of Caputh near Potsdam, we followed a quiet path along a pebble-strewn road to see Einstein's summer home, designed by the architect Konrad Wachsmann and built on a plot purchased by Einstein himself in May 1929. We, and our traveling companions, enjoyed the docent talk in the garden. Continuing our tour afield, we went to Telegrafenberg in Potsdam and explored key sites in the Albert Einstein Science Park, particularly the 1921 Einstein Tower, designed by Erich Mendelsohn, and meant to confirm the gravitational redshift predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity in 1916.
