Professor Miguel Sanjuan, of the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, has kindly brought to my attention this fascinating recent article from the Journal of Comparative Physiology A (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00359-021-01490-6).

In 1949 Albert Einstein attended a lecture that Karl von Frisch gave at Princeton University about the extraordinary navigational abilities of the honey bee. The discovery that bees make use of polarised light to help them locate food sources, as well as communicating by means of a dance language, caused a sensation. A British radar engineer, Glyn Davies (who later became an actor), apparently wrote to Einstein to ask for his comments on this breakthrough, though his letter is lost.

Following Davies’s death, however, Einstein’s reply to him has come to light. In it he makes the following prescient remark:

”It is thinkable that the investigation of the behaviour of migratory birds and carrier pigeons may some day lead to the understanding of some physical process that is not yet known.”

As the authors of the article observe, Einstein would surely have been very excited to know of all the work currently being undertaken to determine exactly how different animals - including migratory birds and pigeons - detect the geomagnetic field (see blog 1 below), as well as the many discoveries that have been made since the 1940s in the fields of animal perception and navigation.

An image of Einstein’s typewritten letter is included in the article.