Albert Einstein has long been one of the best-documented scientific figures. Now his voluminous papers have become among the most readily available records of a great thinker’s life and work.
In a project more than two decades in the making, Princeton University Press has created and made available, free, a digital edition of The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein. The scholars managing the project plan to post every document they consider important to understanding Einstein and his thinking—not just scientific papers and professional correspondence but also juvenilia and letters to loved ones.
“It’s a terrific achievement,” says Jürgen Renn, a director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, in Berlin. For the way it permits seamless searching and comparison among Einstein’s papers, “it will be one of the really important milestones in what people today call the digital humanities.”
The Digital Einstein Papers, as the Princeton press is calling the project, opened to the public on Friday. It presents the complete contents of the 26 volumes published to date of the press’s huge print edition of The Collected Papers, which is expected to expand by 30 more volumes during the next two decades.
The publications so far cover the first 44 years of Einstein’s life, from 1879 to 1923: up to the period of great acclaim following his winning the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Princeton’s project builds on two earlier ones with which it is closely allied: the Albert Einstein Archives, which house the original documents at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the Einstein Papers Project, an online repository of facsimiles run jointly by the Einstein Archives and the California Institute of Technology. Princeton’s print edition is edited by the Caltech-based staff and other Einstein specialists.
So what does Princeton’s digital project add? In addition to mimicking the appearance of the press’s printed volumes, to preserve the bibliographic and editorial investments made there, it allows for easy searching of the whole site’s digital documents. It provides links from its volumes of Einstein’s documents in their original German to paired volumes of translations, and to the facsimiles at the Einstein Papers Project.
Users will be able to toggle among originals, translations, footnotes, and other explanatory information, says Diana L. Kormos-Buchwald, a professor of history at Caltech who is director of the new project and also of the Einstein Papers Project.
“Specialized Einstein scholars have always known how to access the archives or the editions,” she says, “but we hope to reach a wider scholarly public—for example, historians more generally, European historians, American historians.”
Alfred Scharff Goldhaber, a professor of physics at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and Robert P. Crease, a professor of philosophy there, whose Quantum Moment: How Planck, Bohr, Einstein, and Heisenberg Taught Us to Love Uncertainty appeared this fall from W.W. Norton & Company, say they wish the site had been up and running when they were writing that book.
To have an “all-inclusive way of looking at topics such as Einstein’s evolving views on randomness in quantum physics … could have filled things out, helping us and thereby our readers,” they wrote in a joint email.
Humility on Display
The Digital Einstein project will allow readers to see the kind of juvenilia that appear prophetic once their writers’ genius is recognized. Einstein’s well-known humility is also evident early on: In 1896, at age 17, he writes in a high-school essay that he hopes to go to the polytechnic school in Zurich “if I am lucky and successfully pass my exams.” He will study mathematics and physics for four years, and teach, because of “my individual inclination for abstract and mathematical thinking, lack of imagination, and of common sense.”
At the age of 22, in a letter to his future wife, Mileva Mari, he asks after their daughter: “What kind of little eyes does she have?”
Just three years later, during his “annus mirabilis,” 1905, the documents include his papers on special relativity and energy quanta, of which the latter, “On a Heuristic Point of View Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light,” would be awarded the Nobel Prize. A telegram informing him of that came on November 10, 1922—"nobel prize for physics granted you more by letter."—while he was traveling to cheering gatherings in the Far East. Soon after, he took his first trip to the United States, which would lead to tenures at Caltech and Princeton.
The personal and professional are rarely far apart. On September 25, 1919, he writes to his ailing mother to share the news that a British expedition to view an eclipse has confirmed his prediction of gravitational light bending.
Unfortunately, says Ms. Buchwald, Einstein threw away the manuscripts of his first papers and in his early years didn’t always keep copies of his correspondence.
He made up for that later. For instance, the volume of the Princeton edition for the time, in 1922 and 1923, when he traveled for six months includes a thousand documents.
“It’s amazing to see how intensive his correspondence and writing could be,” she says, but such was his scholarly thoroughness and sense of responsibility.
That is evident not only in his papers and letters, but also in his reviews, speeches, popular-science articles, and essays. As the volumes go forward in time, Einstein’s scientific papers are increasingly mixed with documents relating to his involvement in international collaboration and cooperation, human rights, education, and disarmament.
The Collected Papers is “the complete papers” in the sense that it presents everything that Einstein is known to have written or that was written to him. Ms. Buchwald and her staff have been sorting those kinds of documents from duplicates and other material held at Hebrew University in order to prepare for Princeton to publish one pair of volumes, containing originals and translations, every 18 to 24 months.
After each print publication, Princeton will allow volumes to make their way in the market of library and other sales for 18 months before placing the material in the Digital Einstein Papers.
Princeton University Press invests very heavily in the books, says its director, Peter J. Dougherty; the project is a scholarly rather than a commercial enterprise, supported by an endowment set up in 1981 by the publishing magnate Harold W. McGraw Jr. Mr. Dougherty expects the primary users will be theoretical physicists and then historians of science like Ms. Buchwald and Mr. Renn, of the Max Planck Institute, with other cohorts following.
Mr. Renn, who was among the editors of the first five Princeton volumes, predicts that the opening up of the papers will generate new perceptions about Einstein. “This period of Einstein’s life and work has been very much studied, so now it’s time for a new generation to pick up new threads,” he says. To cater to that in the way the Princeton press and its collaborators have done is “very courageous and future-oriented.”
“There are surprises in every volume we publish,” says Ms. Buchwald.
There was a time when Einstein was perceived to be “a theoretical scientist locked up in his attic,” but his papers long ago showed how involved he was in a vast network of colleagues, and how alert he was to developments in technology, law, and other scientific fields, including biochemistry and medicine.
Themes and topics constantly emerge in the papers that surprise even specialists, she says, “particularly because we have a lot of drafts and calculations that were never published.”
When those detail, for example, his explorations of superconductivity in case it might advance his quest for a unified theory of electromagnetism, gravitation, and quantum theory, “we get a sense of the magnitude of his projects and the minutiae of his interests.”
