September 9, 2005

Quantum Discovery

By AISHA LABI

Officials of the University of Leiden thought a series of long-ago visits by Albert Einstein had left them with nothing but nostalgia.

For a period in the 1920s he would spend about a month each year at the Dutch university at the invitation of his friend, the physicist Paul Ehrenfest .

"We have a few memories from that period, like a painting of him, but we thought that was it," says Carlo Beenakker, of Leiden's Lorentz Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Then last month,