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 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...

The more than one thousand letters and several dozen writings included in this volume cover the years immediately before the final formulation of new quantum mechanics. The discovery of the Compton effect in 1923 vindicates Einstein's light quantum hypothesis. Niels Bohr still criticizes Einstein's conception of light quanta and advances an alternative theory, but Walther Bothe and Hans Geiger perform a difficult experiment that decides in favor of Einstein's theory. At the same time, Satyendranath Bose sends a new quantum theoretical derivation of Planck's law to Einstein and he discovers...