Photos of the Day Einstein Died
Trent Gilliss, senior editor
LIFE magazine recently released a series of photographs by Ralph Morse that it had been holding since the day of Albert Einstein’s death in April 1955:
“At the request of Einstein’s son, who asked that the family’s privacy be respected while they mourned, LIFE decided not to run the full story, and for 55 years Morse’s photographs lay unseen and forgotten.”
The photo above, one of my favorites, reminds me of his many papers Colleen and I sifted through at Princeton University while first producing our two-part series on “Einstein and the Mind of God” in 2007. The setting is rather cluttered, disheveled but contained. Messy but not sloppy. And that’s the way I think of Einstein’s mind: quiet and active, mischievous and driven.
