We're excited to share that The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 16: The Berlin Years – available in a documentary edition in the original German, with a companion volume of select material in English translation – is now available to read on The Digital Einstein Papers website.
Volume 16 was published in print in 2021 and appears now in digital form on the centenary of Albert Einstein receiving the Nobel Prize for his "services to theoretical physics." Edited by Diana Kormos Buchwald, Ze'ev Rosenkranz, József Illy, A. J. Kox, Daniel J. Kennefick, Dennis Lehmkuhl, Tilman Sauer, and Jennifer Nollar James, the volume includes source material from June 1927 until May 1929, a period during which Einstein was working to discern whether an electron's equations of motion are derived from the field equations of general relativity and embarking on a new approach to the unified field theory founded on teleparallel geometry.
In 1927, Einstein attended the historic Solvay Conference and was invited to a research professorship at Princeton. Writings from the following year chronicle the onset of a severe heart ailment and despite a period of convalescence, ongoing engagement with scientific work and writing, as well as with social and political issues, including advocacy for domestic legislative reform, gay, and minority rights in Germany, European rapprochement, and conscientious objection to military service. Also covered are Einstein's resignation from the board of Hebrew University, his hiring of Helen Dukas – who was ultimately instrumental to the preservation of his written archive – as his assistant, and his fiftieth birthday, in March 1929.
Volume 16 and the supplemental translation appear on The Digital Einstein Papers site alongside the prior fifteen volumes, and English translations, beginning with Volume 1 The Early Years, 1879 – 1902. A collaboration between Princeton University Press, The Albert Einstein Archives at Hebrew University, and The Einstein Papers Project at the California Institute of Technology, the website was launched in 2014 and currently hosts and makes available close to 20,000 pages and more than 8,000 unique documents from Albert Einstein's written records. New materials are added online roughly 18 months after publication of the print edition.