Editor's Guest Blog
Senior Editor, Tilman Sauer, guest authored an entry on George Musser’s Critical Opalescence blog at Scientific American online. Musser explains in his introduction “The latest volume of the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, which contains Einstein’s publications, draft papers, letters, and scribblings from January 1922 through March 1923, shows that his deep concerns with the quantum predated his well-known duels with Niels Bohr and played a major role in shaping the emerging theory.” Sauer describes Einstein’s untiring application to theoretical and experimental explorations in the early years of quantum theory including his scientific dialogues with Paul Ehrenfest.
Further reading related to those very dialogues may be found in an Annalen der Physik article co-authored by Sauer and another EPP Editor, Issachar Unna. The article, Einstein, Ehrenfest and the quantum measurement problem, demonstrates how a paper that Einstein and Ehrenfest themselves co-authored was a prescient description of “what would later be recognized as a central conceptual difficulty of quantum mechanics”. 03-20-13
Serendipitous Connection
Senior Editor A. J. Kox received an unexpected email after his interview in the September 29th NRC-Handelsblad (EPP news 10-05-2012). Out of the blue, a reader of the paper sent Kox two Albert Einstein documents. Both were, up-‘til-now, unknown; one item is a manuscript of the speech Albert Einstein gave at the Genootschap Gold Medal ceremony in December of 1923. The other is a letter to the organizers of the ceremony in which Einstein explains that his manuscript was written after giving the speech—that he did not realize the speech would be published but that he has done his best to faithfully remember and record it for them in the manuscript he was sending them.
Coincidentally our next publication, Volume 14 of the CPAE covers the time period when the speech was given. This serendipitous connection led to a timely and fruitful lead in our research at the EPP. We are continually searching for unknown Einstein or Einstein-related material. If you are the owner of an Einstein letter or manuscript, or other pertinent document, or if you know someone who is: please get in touch with us. 03-20-13
