The correspondence was published, but only in 1953 when Reich and his work
were in great peril. *
I have described the encounter with Einstein from Reich’s viewpoint only. We do
not have Einstein’s version. His sympathetic biographer, Ronald W. Clark, has written off
the matter as quite insignificant. In a few amused paragraphs, he describes how Einstein,
“the most amiable of men,” kindly granted that “eccentric” figure Reich an audience, suc-
cumbing to “the bait” of Reich’s suggestion that orgone energy might be useful in the fight
against the Nazis. Einstein later found a “commonplace explanation” of the phenomena
Reich had shown him. That was that^23.
Clark’s tone is remarkably similar to the one employed by Ernest Jones in his offi-
cial description of the Reich-Freud conflict. In both instances, the Reich “affair” was treat-
ed as quite inconsequential in the careers of two great men.
There have been about twenty positive replications of varying quality of Reich’s
thermal and electroscopic findings, starting in the 1950s and continuing into the 1980s. The
best-controlled replication of the temperature difference was conducted by Dr. Courtney
Baker, son and student of Elsworth F. Baker, the man Reich subsequently placed in charge
oftraining orgonomic psychiatrists, as we shall see later.
Courtney, a psychiatrist with graduate training in physics, added to Reich’s experi-
mental design a very carefully constructed control box with precisely similar insulating prop-
erties as the accumulator. This “balanced” control box then showed the same sensitivity to
fluctuations in room temperature as did the accumulator. On the basis of 204 readings over
15 days, he found a positive temperature difference 51 percent of the time, a negative tem-
perature difference 25 percent of the time, and no temperature difference in 24 percent of
the readings^24. On only one occasion—just before a severe storm in 1950 had Reich
observed a negative temperature difference.
Baker hypothesized that the considerable number of negative temperature differ-
ences in his study was due to changes in the atmosphere, especially the effects of pollution
that had occurred since Reich’s original work. What is significant in this context, however, is
the large number ofpositive temperature differences. Also significant is that from the van-
tage point of traditional physics there should be notemperature difference, positive or neg-
ative.
The one available negative replication was conducted in the course of the Food and
Drug Administration (FDA) investigation of the accumulator during the late 1940s and early
1950s.This investigation belongs in detail to a later chapter, but one point deserves mention
here. The FDA contracted with Dr. Kurt Lion of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
to replicate Reich’s findings. He found no positive temperature difference within the accu-
270 Myron SharafFury On Earth
*There is no evidence that Reich ever sought permission to publish these letters from Einstein who was still
alive in 1953, nor is there any evidence that Einstein ever commented on them. The Einstein pamphlet had, in
any case, a very limited publication of about 1,000 copies.