Volume 15: The Berlin Years: Writings & Correspondence, June 1925-May 1927, is the latest volume published as a collaboration between Caltech's Einstein Papers Project, Princeton University Press, and the Albert Einstein Archives at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. It covers Einstein's writings and correspondence on the new quantum theories emerging in the late 1920s, his unwitting collaboration with an academic fraud, and letters to his teenage sweetheart. The almost 100 writings by Einstein, of which a third have never been published, and the more than 1,300 letters contained in this latest volume, show Einstein’s immense productivity and hectic pace of life

Kormos Buchwald, Diana

Caltech Authors - Main

www.aip.org/history-programs16 History Newsletter | Volume 50, No. 1
Volume 15: The Berlin Years: Writings & 
Correspondence, June 1925-May 1927, is 
the latest volume published as a collabo-
ration between Caltech's Einstein Papers 
Project, Princeton University Press, and 
the Albert Einstein Archives at the Hebrew 
University of Jerusalem. It covers Ein-
stein's writings and correspondence on the 
new quantum theories emerging in the late 
1920s, his unwitting collaboration with an 
academic fraud, and letters to his teenage 
sweetheart. The almost 100 writings by 
Einstein, of which a third have never been 
published, and the more than 1,300 letters 
contained in this latest volume, show Ein-
stein’s immense productivity and hectic 
pace of life. 
The years 1925–1927 were an extraordi-
narily busy, engaged, and, on occasion, 
turbulent time in Einstein's life. Despite 
having won the Nobel Prize in Physics 
in 1922 for work he had produced nearly 
two decades before, Einstein remained im-
mensely active at the forefront of scientific 
research and academic commitments. We 
find him working daily on the latest de-
velopments in modern physics; engaging 
with his colleagues and perfect strangers 
in considerate discussions; being a referee 
CALTECH  AND  PRINCETON  UNIVERSITY  PRESS 
RELEASE  FIFTEENTH  VOLUME  OF  EINSTEIN’S 
COLLECTED  PAPERS
By Diana Kormos Buchwald, Director and General Editor, Einstein Papers Project
Einstein at his desk in 1920. 
Unknown photographer.
www.aip.org/history-programs 17History Newsletter | Volume 50, No. 1
for scientific journals; applying for grants; 
administering funds and institutions; grap-
pling with personal issues; and being bored 
in meetings.
The present volume covers a thrilling 
two-year period in 20th-century physics, 
for during this time matrix mechanics—
developed by Werner Heisenberg, Max 
Born, and Pascual Jordan—and wave me-
chanics, developed by Erwin Schröding-
er, supplanted the earlier quantum theory. 
In extensive exchanges with the creators 
of the new approaches, Einstein quickly 
recognized their great importance and the 
conceptual peculiarities involved. From 
the beginning he preferred wave mechan-
ics over matrix mechanics. He thought he 
had found a convincing refutation of the 
probabilistic interpretation of quantum 
mechanics in what would today be called a 
hidden variable theory, but he retracted the 
paper before publication.
In early 1925 he had turned to a new 
mathematical foundation of unified field 
theory that generalized Arthur S. Edding-
ton’s affine approach on which most of his 
previous attempts at a unified theory had 
been based. But he soon abandoned this 
approach, and in 1927 returned to a differ-
ent one that he had earlier dismissed: the 
idea of Theodor Kaluza, further developed 
by Oskar Klein, that gravity and electro-
magnetism can be unified by introducing a 
fifth spacetime dimension. Between these 
two approaches, and inspired by detailed 
correspondence with the mathematician 
G. Y. Rainich, Einstein explored features 
of general relativity in the hope of finding 
new hints at how the correct unified field 
theory might look. This correspondence 
eventually brought about the important 
Einstein-Grommer paper of 1927, in which 
they aimed to derive the motion of parti-
cles subject to gravitational fields from the 
gravitational field equations themselves.
At the same time, Einstein discussed the 
interpretation of general relativity and 
unified field theories with the philosopher 
Hans Reichenbach. It is here that we find 
the first statements expressing his de-
cade-long opposition to the idea that gen-
eral relativity shows that gravity is “ge-
ometrized.”
In a collaboration with Emil Rupp, Ein-
stein became convinced that Rupp’s exper-
iments showed that excited atoms emitted 
light in a finite time (in waves) rather than 
instantly (in quanta). However, in subse-
quent years Rupp’s experiments could not 
be reproduced and he was later revealed to 
have fabricated much of his work. Surpris-
ingly, we found no statements by Einstein 
so far decrying this mishap.
Much of Einstein’s correspondence in this 
volume engages with Dayton C. Miller’s 
interferometric experiments in which he 
claimed to have detected an ether drift, 
overturning the null result of the Michel-
son-Morley experiment and generating re-
newed interest in experiments of this type 
in both Europe and the United States.
As in the past, relativity remained a con-
tested topic among right-wing circles in 
Germany and abroad. In March 1927, Ein-
stein learned that a high school teacher in 
Virginia had been charged with blasphe-
my for teaching relativity. In his sarcastic 
retort, Einstein lampooned the school’s 
directors, pointing out that they were so 
lacking in confidence that they needed 
God’s help to assist them in their campaign 
against relativity.
The current volume encompasses a wealth 
of documents, ranging over several signif-
icant scientific topics, as well as politics, 
Zionism, and myriad family concerns. We 
present 535 documents as full text and 
more than 900 documents in the Calen-
dar of Abstracts. Among the former are 99 
writings, of which only 56 have previously 
been published. They include two dozen 
scientific papers, drafts, and calculations, 
as well as poems, aphorisms, homages to 
Isaac Newton and Hendrik A. Lorentz, 
more than three dozen appeals and writ-
ings on political matters and Jewish affairs, 
and several patents. Among the 440 letters 
presented as full text, 270 were written by 
Einstein. This massive personal and pro-
fessional correspondence of more than 
1,300 letters, and the almost 100 writings 
show that Einstein’s immense productivity 
and hectic pace of life were more intense 
during the 24 months covered by this vol-
ume than in the previous two years.
He undertook several unsuccessful at-
tempts to reduce his involvement in var-
ious spheres of activity and to balance 
private life, work, and public roles. In 
mid-June 1925, Einstein informed Mile-
va Marić that he felt well after his South 
American trip because the return voyage 
had been “so restful.” However, merely 
eight days later, he wrote to Paul Ehren-
fest and others that he did not intend to 
travel either to Pasadena or to Petrograd, 
as he needed to be “more frugal with his 
nerves.” During 1926, Einstein attempted 
to lighten the burden of responsibilities. 
In January, he offered his resignation from 
the board of the German League of Human 
Rights, but eventually decided to remain 
on it. He also informed the Marxist-Zionist 
party Poale Zion that he would no longer 
support multiple individual Jewish causes 
since the overuse of his name would lead 
to its devaluation. In this spirit, he also let 
the World Union of Jewish Students know 
that he had “resigned [his] honorary posi-
tion as king of the schnorrers for good.”
The 1925 Locarno Treaties renewed Ein-
stein’s optimism in the prospects for Eu-
ropean reconciliation. He continued to 
participate in the League of Nations’ In-
ternational Committee on Intellectual Co-
operation and efforts to end the boycott 
of German scientists. He also remained 
committed to the shaping of the Hebrew 
University in Jerusalem, although his en-
thusiasm for this cause was sorely tested 
during these years.
Einstein received many honors, among 
continued on page 18
www.aip.org/history-programs18 History Newsletter | Volume 50, No. 1
them the Royal Society’s Copley Medal, the 
Royal Astronomical Society’s Gold Medal, 
and election as corresponding member of 
the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. He 
was also offered a faculty position at Johns 
Hopkins University.
While the new volume focuses on the years 
1925–27, it also includes hitherto unknown, 
much earlier correspondence between the 
sixteen-year-old Einstein and members of 
the Winteler family, with whom he lodged 
while attending the Aargau Kantonsschule 
in 1895–1896. In 2015, the Bernisches 
Historisches Museum made accessible a 
bundle of letters and postcards written by 
Einstein that had been obtained from the 
Winteler family estate. Most of these let-
ters are addressed to the eighteen-year-old 
Marie Winteler, his hosts’ daughter, with 
whom he became romantically involved 
at the time. They also include a “Contract 
for the Purchase of a Box of Water Colors,” 
drawn up with great, yet most likely, mock 
seriousness, by Einstein and his cousin, 
Robert Koch. Some of the items only ex-
ist as fragments or snippets, as many were 
torn and subsequently glued back together. 
Prior to the release of this new correspon-
dence, only one letter by Einstein to Marie, 
and two letters by Marie to Einstein, were 
known to scholars. The 34 documents from 
this collection now published in Volume 15 
reveal Einstein’s passionate and tender sen-
timents toward Marie. Einstein mentioned 
to Marie his difficulties in being a disci-
plined correspondent, an issue he would 
often return to in later years, and allows 
glimpses into his career ambitions as well. 
On the eve of his departure from Aarau to 
take up his university studies at the ETH, 
he reported a conversation with the rector 
of the Kantonsschule during which he was 
told that he possessed the prerequisites for 
an academic career and was advised not to 
take up a position as a schoolteacher. 
In a surprising turn of events hitherto un-
known to scholars, three letters and one 
postcard written by Einstein in 1909–1910 
reveal that his love for Marie was rekindled 
at that time; more than a decade after their 
first relationship had ended. They apparent-
ly had a brief romantic encounter in 1909, 
by which time Einstein had already been 
married for over six years to Mileva Marić. 
But Marie seems to have ignored his subse-
quent advances, eliciting feelings of utmost 
anguish in Einstein. In his despair, he wrote 
in September 1909 that he felt “as if dead 
in this life filled with obligations, without 
love and without happiness,” decrying his 
“failed love, failed life, that’s how it always 
reverberates to me.”
We are always asked, “Is there anything we 
don't know about Einstein after all these 
years?” And as editors of the Einstein Pa-
pers Project we always reply, “Yes, there is 
a lot that we are learning and discovering.”
Published beginning in 1987, The Collect-
ed Papers eventually will comprise nearly 
30 volumes and will contain more than 
14,000 documents.  Sponsored by the He-
brew University of Jerusalem and Prince-
ton University Press, the project is located 
at and supported by Caltech.
P H Y S I C S   H E R I T A G E   & 
P R O M I S E   C A M P A I G N
MARIE CURIE HAS A 
FAVOR TO ASK...
The future of physics relies on its history.  You 
can be a part of that history by helping us 
acquire a collection of rare books containing 
the most important discoveries in the physical 
sciences over the past four centuries.
Learn about the collection at 
donate.aip.org/helphistory
HISTORY
NEWSLETTER
Volume 50 (2018), Number 1
Together We Make History
More on the Physics Heritage & Promise Campaign on page 8
A publication of the American Institute of Physics
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Caltech and Princeton University press release fifteenth volume of Einstein’s collected papers

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Caltech and Princeton University press release fifteenth volume of Einstein’s collected papers

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