Autograph signed by Professor Albert Einstein, a short time after he was informed that he will be the recipient of a Nobel Prize. Tokyo, 1922. 
 
 Specifications: [1] leaf, official paper of the Imperial Hotel, Tokyo, Japan. 13x21 cm. German. 
 
 Content: Stilles bescheidenes Leben gibt mehr Glueck als erfolgreiches Streben, verbunden mit bestaendiger Unruhe. 
 
 Translation: A calm and modest life brings more happiness than the pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness. 
 
 The Background to the Writing of the Letter: In October 1922, Albert Einstein took a trip to Japan to deliver a series of lectures. While travelling from Europe to Japan he was informed by telegram that he will be awarded the Nobel Prize of 1921. Einstein decided to continue his journey according to his original plan, and he was absent from the ceremony in Stockholm in December. 
 
 The news of the Nobel Prize winner's arrival in Japan spread quickly, and when he arrived he found himself being welcomed by thousands of people flocking to see him. 
 
 He was impressed but also a little embarrassed by the publicity he received and while he was staying at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo he tried to record his thoughts and feelings on paper. When a messenger came to his room to give him something, Einstein did not have a tip available, and he decided to make the most of his new exalted status and give the messenger two of his writings. When he gave him the articles he told the messenger to keep them, as their future value may be much higher than a standard tip. 
 
 Condition: Fine-very fine. Fold marks, tiny tears which do not damage the text. ||||| This article is over 1 year old 
 
 Handwritten advice to Japanese courier in lieu of a tip exceeds pre-auction estimate by more than 31,000% 
 
 'More valuable than a regular tip': Einstein's handwritten note to courier sells for $1.5m 
 
 A note that Albert Einstein gave to a courier in Tokyo briefly describing his theory on happy living has sold at auction in Jerusalem for $1.56m (€1.33m ), according to auctioneers. 
 
 The winning bid for the note far exceeded the pre-auction estimate of between $5,000 and $8,000, according to Winner’s auctions. 
 
 Playful Einstein photograph goes up for auction Read more 
 
 “It was an all-time record for an auction of a document in Israel,” said Winner’s spokesman Meni Chadad, adding that the buyer was a European who wished to remain anonymous. 
 
 The note, on Imperial Hotel Tokyo stationery, says in German that “a quiet and modest life brings more joy than a pursuit of success bound with constant unrest”. 
 
 A quiet and modest life brings more joy than a pursuit of success bound with constant unrest Albert Einstein 
 
 Bidding in person, online and by phone started at $2,000. A flurry of offers pushed the price rapidly up for about 20 minutes until the final two potential buyers bid against each other by phone. 
 
 Applause broke out in the room when the sale was announced. 
 
 “I am really happy that there are people out there who are still interested in science and history and timeless deliveries in a world which is developing so fast,” the seller said on condition of anonymity after the sale. 
 
 A second Einstein note written at the same time that simply reads “where there’s a will, there’s a way” sold for $240,000, Winner’s said. 
 
 The German-born physicist, most famous for his theory of relativity, was on a lecture tour in Japan when he wrote the autographed notes, previously unknown to researchers, in 1922. He had recently been informed that he was to receive the Nobel prize for physics, and his fame outside scientific circles was growing. 
 
 A Japanese courier arrived at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo to deliver Einstein a message. The courier either refused to accept a tip, in line with local practice, or Einstein had no small change available. 
 
 Either way, Einstein didn’t want the messenger to leave empty-handed, so he wrote him two notes by hand in German, according to the seller, a relative of the messenger. 
 
 Dreamer, rebel, lover: the hidden sides of Albert Einstein Read more 
 
 “Maybe if you’re lucky those notes will become much more valuable than just a regular tip,” Einstein told the messenger, according to the seller, a resident of the German city of Hamburg. 
 
 Two other letters Einstein wrote in later years were also auctioned on Tuesday, fetching prices of $33,600 and $9,600. 
 
 In June, letters written by Einstein about God, Israel and physics sold for nearly $210,000 at a Jerusalem auction. 
 
 Einstein served as a non-resident governor of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University. When he died in 1955, he left the institution his archives, making it the owner of the world’s most extensive collection of his documents. ||||| Einstein's theory of general relativity predicted that the space-time around Earth would be not only warped but also twisted by the planet's rotation. Gravity Probe B showed this to be correct. 
 
 In 1905, Albert Einstein determined that the laws of physics are the same for all non-accelerating observers, and that the speed of light in a vacuum was independent of the motion of all observers. This was the theory of special relativity. It introduced a new framework for all of physics and proposed new concepts of space and time. 
 
 Einstein then spent 10 years trying to include acceleration in the theory and published his theory of general relativity in 1915. In it, he determined that massive objects cause a distortion in space-time, which is felt as gravity. 
 
 Two objects exert a force of attraction on one another known as "gravity." Sir Isaac Newton quantified the gravity between two objects when he formulated his three laws of motion. The force tugging between two bodies depends on how massive each one is and how far apart the two lie. Even as the center of the Earth is pulling you toward it (keeping you firmly lodged on the ground), your center of mass is pulling back at the Earth. But the more massive body barely feels the tug from you, while with your much smaller mass you find yourself firmly rooted thanks to that same force. Yet Newton's laws assume that gravity is an innate force of an object that can act over a distance. 
 
 Albert Einstein, in his theory of special relativity, determined that the laws of physics are the same for all non-accelerating observers, and he showed that the speed of light within a vacuum is the same no matter the speed at which an observer travels. As a result, he found that space and time were interwoven into a single continuum known as space-time. Events that occur at the same time for one observer could occur at different times for another. 
 
 As he worked out the equations for his general theory of relativity, Einstein realized that massive objects caused a distortion in space-time. Imagine setting a large body in the center of a trampoline. The body would press down into the fabric, causing it to dimple. A marble rolled around the edge would spiral inward toward the body, pulled in much the same way that the gravity of a planet pulls at rocks in space. [Video: How To See Spacetime Stretch] 
 
 Although instruments can neither see nor measure space-time, several of the phenomena predicted by its warping have been confirmed. 
 
 Einstein's Cross is an example of gravitational lensing. Credit: NASA and European Space Agency (ESA) 
 
 Gravitational lensing: Light around a massive object, such as a black hole, is bent, causing it to act as a lens for the things that lie behind it. Astronomers routinely use this method to study stars and galaxies behind massive objects. 
 
 Einstein's Cross, a quasar in the Pegasus constellation, is an excellent example of gravitational lensing. The quasar is about 8 billion light-years from Earth, and sits behind a galaxy that is 400 million light-years away. Four images of the quasar appear around the galaxy because the intense gravity of the galaxy bends the light coming from the quasar. 
 
 Gravitational lensing can allow scientists to see some pretty cool things, but until recently, what they spotted around the lens has remained fairly static. However, since the light traveling around the lens takes a different path, each traveling over a different amount of time, scientists were able to observe a supernova occur four different times as it was magnified by a massive galaxy. 
 
 In another interesting observation, NASA's Kepler telescope spotted a dead star, known as a white dwarf, orbiting a red dwarf in a binary system. Although the white dwarf is more massive, it has a far smaller radius than its companion. 
 
 "The technique is equivalent to spotting a flea on a light bulb 3,000 miles away, roughly the distance from Los Angeles to New York City," Avi Shporer of the California Institute of Technology said in a statement. 
 
 Changes in the orbit of Mercury: The orbit of Mercury is shifting very gradually over time, due to the curvature of space-time around the massive sun. In a few billion years, it could even collide with Earth. 
 
 Frame-dragging of space-time around rotating bodies: The spin of a heavy object, such as Earth, should twist and distort the space-time around it. In 2004, NASA launched the Gravity Probe B GP-B). The precisely calibrated satellite caused the axes of gyroscopes inside to drift very slightly over time, a result that coincided with Einstein's theory. 
 
 "Imagine the Earth as if it were immersed in honey," Gravity Probe-B principal investigator Francis Everitt, of Stanford University, said in a statement. 
 
 "As the planet rotates, the honey around it would swirl, and it's the same with space and time. GP-B confirmed two of the most profound predictions of Einstein's universe, having far-reaching implications across astrophysics research." 
 
 Gravitational redshift: The electromagnetic radiation of an object is stretched out slightly inside a gravitational field. Think of the sound waves that emanate from a siren on an emergency vehicle; as the vehicle moves toward an observer, sound waves are compressed, but as it moves away, they are stretched out, or redshifted. Known as the Doppler Effect, the same phenomena occurs with waves of light at all frequencies. In 1959, two physicists, Robert Pound and Glen Rebka, shot gamma-rays of radioactive iron up the side of a tower at Harvard University and found them to be minutely less than their natural frequency due to distortions caused by gravity. 
 
 Gravitational waves: Violent events, such as the collision of two black holes, are thought to be able to create ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves. In 2016, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) announced that it found evidence of these tell-tale indicators. 
 
 In 2014, scientists announced that they had detected gravitational waves left over from the Big Bang using the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization (BICEP2) telescope in Antarctica. It is thought that such waves are embedded in the cosmic microwave background. However, further research revealed that their data was contaminated by dust in the line of sight. 
 
 "Searching for this unique record of the very early universe is as difficult as it is exciting," Jan Tauber, the European Space Agency's project scientist for the Planck space mission to search for cosmic waves, said in a statement. 
 
 LIGO spotted the first confirmed gravitational wave on September 14, 2015. The pair of instruments, based out of Louisiana and Washington, had recently been upgraded, and were in the process of being calibrated before they went online. The first detection was so large that, according to LIGO spokesperson Gabriela Gonzalez, it took the team several months of analyzation to convince themselves that it was a real signal and not a glitch. 
 
 "We were very lucky on the first detection that it was so obvious," she said during at the 228 American Astronomical Society meeting in June 2016. 
 
 A second signal was spotted on December 26 of the same year, and a third candidate was mentioned along with it. While the first two signals are almost definitively astrophysical—Gonzalez said there was less than one part in a million of them being something else—the third candidate has only an 85 percent probability of being a gravitational wave. 
 
 Together, the two firm detections provide evidence for pairs of black holes spiraling inward and colliding. As time passes, Gonzalez anticipates that more gravitational waves will be detected by LIGO and other upcoming instruments, such as the one planned by India. 
 
 "We can test general relativity, and general relativity has passed the test," Gonzalez said. 
 
 [See our full discovery story here; a video on the find here; and our complete coverage of the historic scientific discovery here]
– You really can put a price on happiness, or at least Albert Einstein's pithy theory on the matter: The theory, scribbled on a piece of paper and handed to a messenger, sold at auction for $1.56 million, AFP reports. The record-setting bid at Tuesday's sale in Jerusalem far surpassed estimates of $5,000 to $8,000, per Winner's auction house. Einstein scrawled the note on Imperial Hotel Tokyo stationery in 1922 while on a tour of Japan after being informed he'd won the Nobel Prize for physics. It reads in German: "A calm and humble life will bring more happiness than the pursuit of success and the constant restlessness that comes with it," per the BBC. The physicist better known for another theory gave the note to a courier who made a delivery to his room. Einstein didn't want the man to leave empty-handed, so instead of a tip he handed him two notes, the anonymous seller tells AFP. The second missive, which sold for $240,000, was less original. "Where there’s a will, there’s a way," it reads. "Maybe if you’re lucky those notes will become much more valuable than just a regular tip," Einstein told the man, says the seller, a relative of the courier who lives in Hamburg, Germany. The auction house says the buyer was a European who wants to remain anonymous, per the BBC. Two other letters Einstein wrote later were also auctioned, fetching prices of $33,600 and $9,600, per AFP. Other Einstein letters about God, Israel, and physics sold for almost $210,000 in June. (These US cities are the happiest.)