Greta Einstein-Haas and her attorney, Morris Blatt, leaving the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey on Friday with what Mr. Blatt described as “approximately one-third” of the supporting documentation. Credit: Janet Villanueva/The Time5
Greta Einstein-Haas and her attorney, Morris Blatt, leaving the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey on Friday with what Mr. Blatt described as “approximately one-third” of the supporting documentation. Credit: Janet Villanueva/The Time5

PRINCETON, N.J. — The great-great-granddaughter of Albert Einstein filed a sweeping intellectual property lawsuit on Friday in federal court, alleging that essentially every physicist who has conducted research since 1905 has engaged in systematic plagiarism of her ancestor’s work.

The complaint, filed by Greta Einstein-Haas in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey, names approximately 40,000 individual defendants — a figure her legal team described as “conservative” — including university faculty, government researchers, graduate students, and what the filing refers to as “the full downstream ecosystem of individuals who have built careers on another man’s ideas and not once sent a thank-you note.”

“Every single paper published in physics since 1905 is, at its foundation, derivative of my great-great-grandfather’s work,” Ms. Einstein-Haas said in a statement released through her attorney, Morris Blatt of the firm Blatt, Grunewald & Peck. “Relativity, quantum mechanics, cosmology — these are not separate fields. They are Einstein fan fiction.”

Mr. Blatt, who specializes in what he calls “ancestral intellectual property,” said the case rests on a straightforward legal theory: that Einstein’s foundational contributions to physics — including special relativity, general relativity, the photoelectric effect, and Brownian motion — constitute the essential infrastructure upon which all subsequent physics has been erected, and that this constitutes an ongoing, uncredited derivation of original work.

“If you build a house on someone’s land, you owe them rent,” Mr. Blatt said in an interview outside the courthouse, gesturing at two paralegals wheeling additional document boxes down the courthouse steps. “My client’s great-great-grandfather built the land. Physics built the house. No one has paid a dime.”

The suit seeks unspecified damages and a permanent injunction requiring all future physics publications to include a co-author credit reading “after Einstein” in parentheses following the title. Mr. Blatt acknowledged that enforcement “presents certain logistical challenges” but maintained that the legal principle was sound.

Among the named defendants is Kneel onGrass Tyson, the director of the Hayden Planétarium and a contributing columnist for The New York Time5, who responded to the filing in a written statement that began: “Consider this.” Dr. onGrass Tyson noted that Einstein himself built upon the work of Newton, who built upon the work of Kepler, who built upon the work of Copernicus, and that the true plaintiff in any intellectual property dispute concerning physics is “the Big Bang itself, which produced the matter that eventually became Albert Einstein, and which has yet to retain counsel, though I would argue it has standing.”

Dr. Helene Marquardt, a theoretical physicist at Columbia University who is named as Defendant No. 7,342, said she learned of the lawsuit when a process server interrupted her graduate seminar on quantum field theory. “He handed me the papers and I said, ‘Which part of my work is allegedly plagiarized?’” Dr. Marquardt recalled. “He said, ‘All of it.’ I asked him to be more specific. He said he couldn’t, because the complaint is four thousand pages long and he had eleven more buildings to visit.”

Legal scholars expressed skepticism about the suit’s prospects. Harold Fennimore, a professor of intellectual property law at NYU, said the complaint faces “roughly as many obstacles as it has defendants,” noting that Einstein’s publications are not protected by copyright, that scientific principles cannot be owned, and that the theory of plagiarism advanced in the filing “bears no resemblance to any recognized legal doctrine in any jurisdiction on Earth.”

Mr. Blatt dismissed these objections. “People said the same thing about relativity,” he said. “That it bore no resemblance to any recognized physics. And look how that turned out.”

Ms. Einstein-Haas, who is an interior designer in Montclair, N.J., said she first became aware of the scope of her ancestor’s influence during a home renovation project in 2024, when a contractor mentioned that GPS satellites rely on Einstein’s theory of general relativity to function. “I thought, if his work is in my phone, in my car, in satellites — and nobody is paying for it — then what exactly is the patent system for?” she said.

She acknowledged that she does not hold any patents related to Einstein’s work, but said that was “part of the problem.”