On December 30th, 1940 Wilhelm Reich wrote to Albert Einstein in Princeton suggesting that he had an important scientific discovery to discuss. On January 13, 1941, Reich visited Einstein in Princeton. They talked for 5 hours, and Einstein agreed to test the apparatus that Reich would supply, an "orgone accumulator", a box made up of a Faraday cage (galvanized steel) insulated by wood and paper on the outside. Einstein performed the experiment which involved taking the temperatures atop and near the device. Einstein also stripped the device down to its Faraday cage. In both cases, Einstein observed a positive temperature difference for a week in his study, and confirmed Reich's finding in a published letter. Einstein originally agreed with Reich that this discovery was a "a bomb in physics". Since there was no explanation for the finding, Reich concluded that the heat was the result of a novel form of energy (massfree orgone energy) that accumulated inside the Faraday cage. However, Einstein's assistant, Leopold Infeld, interpreted the phenomenon as the result of thermal convection, but he failed to provide an experimental demonstration of his contention. Einstein reversed himself and concurred that the experiment seemingly could be explained by convection.

Reich and Einstein disagreed on the interpretation of the experiment. The entire correspondence between Reich and Einstein was published by the Orgone Institute Press in a book called The Einstein Affair. Official biographers of Einstein have seen fit to omit or insufficiently describe the only experiment that Einstein conducted with Reich, which is properly described in alternative scientific literature as "the Reich-Einstein experiment". In 2001, Paulo Correa and Alexandra Correa reproduced the experiment and introduced controls that rule out the possibility of convection as an explanation. A similar reproduction was independently carried out by Eugene Mallove.

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