Additional information provided at the end of the novel:

Albert’s second son, Eduard Einstein, was born to Albert and Mileva in 1910, and Albert and Mileva were divorced in 1919. Albert married his cousin Elsa in 1919.

Paul Klee in fact had his first public exhibition in 1910. He found his color sense in Tunisia in 1914, and his work has been noted to contain a certain musicality. He really did play in a concert with Pablo Casals.

I realize that the word ‘gypsy’ is less than acceptable today, and that Roma or Romani might be more appropriate, but in 1905, the ‘Travelers’ were believed to come from Egypt and thus the term. I have used it to help with the historical placement of the novel and not in a pejorative sense.

It is likely that Albert’s discoveries took place over a much shorter time-frame in the spring and summer of 1905, but I have stretched this back into the fall and winter of 1904 to build the story.

Much of what we now take for granted about the universe was unknown to science in 1905 when Albert Einstein developed his ideas. In Bern, he worked in relative isolation, cut off from the mainstream of the physics community, its resources, laboratories, and thinkers. He tackled some of the enigmas of physics at the time, and in rapid succession produced the results presented in this book in what was known as his “Miracle Year.” Ten years later, he was able to expand his special theory of relativity developed in 1905 and incorporate gravity into his general theory of relativity presented in 1915. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921 and, in 1930, received his own patent for refrigeration in partnership with Leo Szilard.

We are now aware of the Big Bang, the general nature of gravity, the expansion of the universe, the existence of other galaxies, and nuclear fission or fusion, among many other advances.