Presented in this volume are Albert Einstein's writings from his arrival in Berlin in the spring of 1914 to take up his new position at the Prussian Academy of Sciences through the end of 1917. During these years he completed the general theory of relativity--the relativistic theory of gravitation--and this was surely the high point of his scientific life. His writings on relativity in this volume range from general treatments of the theory to detailed calculations of specific consequences and his first attempt at a relativistic account of cosmology. They also include his popular...

This volume, the first in the series to be devoted to Einstein's correspondence, begins in June 1902, when he went to work at the Swiss Patent Office. It closes in March 1914, as Einstein left Switzerland to take up his appointment as a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin. The great majority of the more than 500 letters from and to Einstein presented here have not been published before, and some of them will be new even to most Einstein scholars. They give us a much richer picture of Einstein in his twenties and early thirties than we have ever had. We see him through his...

This volume presents Einstein's writings from the final period of his work in Switzerland. Most of the material in Volume 4 documents Einstein's search for a relativistic theory of gravitation, a search that ended in Berlin in the fall of 1915 with the completion of the general theory of relativity.

Three scientific manuscripts, printed here for the first time, provide insights into Einstein's efforts to generalize his original relativity theory into a theory of gravitation. The first is a review article on the special theory of relativity. The second consists of notes that...

This volume opens in spring 1914 when Einstein takes up a research professorship at the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin and closes with the collapse of the German Empire four and one-half years later. A good portion of the documentation, which comprises more than 675 letters, has only recently been discovered by the editors. The letters touch on all aspects of Einstein's activities and shed new light on his inner life, while enriching our understanding of his published papers, presented in volumes 6 and 7 of this series.

The breakup of Einstein's first marriage and the...

In the spring of 1919, two British solar eclipse expeditions confirmed the correctness of general relativity theory and propelled Albert Einstein to instant celebrity. Before this major turning point, the majority of Einstein's writings published in this volume dealt with the clarification of general relativistic problems, such as the status of the metric field, the character of gravitational waves, the problem of energy-momentum conservation, and questions of cosmology, such as the nature and size of the universe and the distribution of matter within it. After his rise to international...

Volume 1 presents important new material on the young Einstein. Over half the documents made available here were discovered by the editors, including a significant group of over fifty letters that Einstein exchanged with Mileva Maric, his fellow student and future wife. These letters, together with other previously unpublished documents, provide an entirely new view of Einstein's youth. The documents in the volume also foreshadow the emergence of his extraordinary creative power. In them is manifested his intense commitment to scientific work and his interest in certain themes that proved...

This volume of The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein contains the scientific work Einstein published during the first decade of his career, and includes some of the most significant achievements of twentieth-century physics. The first paper was written in 1900 by the twenty-one-year-old Einstein, newly graduated from the Swiss Federal Polytechnical School, or ETH, in Zurich and still searching in vain for a job. The last paper in this volume is the text of an invited lecture given in 1909 to a major scientific meeting by Einstein after he was appointed to his first academic post at the...

This volume of The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein presents Einstein's writings for the two-year period starting in October 1909. The initial date marks Einstein's departure from the Swiss Patent Office at Bern, which had been his professional home for seven years, and the beginning of his first academic appointment, at the University of Zurich. The volume concludes with the masterful report that Einstein, by then a full professor at the German-language university in Prague, gave to the original Solvay Congress, the first international meeting devoted to the problems of...

The present volume, set in the turbulent post-World War I period, finds Einstein awaiting news of the 1919 British eclipse expedition to test the general relativistic prediction of the deflection of starlight by the sun. With the expedition's success, he becomes the first science celebrity of our age. Deeply interested in the other, stellar redshift test of his theory, Einstein supports astronomers engaged in experimental work on the issue. Piqued by early suggestions of a unified field theory, he ponders how to unify gravitation and electromagnetic field theory and also works to resolve...

The first half of this volume presents a substantial amount of heretofore unavailable correspondence. From among family letters closed for twenty years after the death of Margot Einstein, who donated them to the Albert Einstein Archives in Jerusalem, the volume presents, for the first time, letters written by Einstein's sons, the adolescent Hans Albert and little Eduard, and numerous letters written by Einstein to his cousin and future second wife Elsa Einstein. Combined with newly available correspondence with his close friend Heinrich Zangger, this supplementary correspondence provides...