Albert Einstein's letter to US soldier on sale for $40000

Washington: A previously-unpublished letter written by physicist Albert Einstein in 1945 to a US soldier where he explains that "space should be looked at as a four-dimensional continuum" is up for sale for $40,000.

The typed, one-page letter was Einstein's reply to Sergeant Frank K Pfleegor and his friends who were puzzled by a scientific article they read and sought to clear up their confusion with the help of the 20th Century genius.

Less than a month after the group wrote a letter to Einstein, he replied.

The original letter to Einstein, dated April 17, 1945, has been published and remains in the Einstein Papers at Jerusalem University, FoxNews.com reported.

It was assumed Einstein simply never replied; the letter's existence was known only to the Pfleegor family, which has now put it up for sale through the Pennsylvania-based historical document specialists - The Raab Collection.

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In the letter Einstein wrote, "Dear Sir: I see from your letter of April 17th that the attempt of my last publication was not reported in an adequate way."

"I have not questioned there that space should be looked at as a four-dimensional continuum. The question is only whether the relevant theoretical concepts describing physical properties of this can or will be functions of four variables," he wrote.

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Einstein's letter enlightened Pfleegor and his friends who while in the Philippines during World War II had interpreted a late 1944 article in 'Science Digest' to suggest the physicist was rethinking his 1915 theory of a four-dimensional universe to say there were as many as eight.