Press Release: 24 September 2012
New Volume of The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein captures his journey to the Far East while dealing with the consequences of celebrity in turbulent political times 9-24-12
Volume 13: The Berlin Years: Writings & Correspondence, January 1922—March 1923, Documentary Edition
Edited by Diana Kormos Buchwald, József Illy, Ze'ev Rosenkranz, & Tilman Sauer
Princeton University Press, the Einstein Papers Project at California Institute of Technology, and the Albert Einstein Archives at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, are pleased to be publishing the latest volume in the massively authoritative Einstein Papers Project THE COLLECTED PAPERS OF ALBERT EINSTEIN: Volume 13: The Berlin Years: Writings & Correspondence, January 1922—March 23, Documentary Edition on September 25, 2012.
When in the fall of 1922 it was announced that Albert Einstein had won the Nobel Prize in Physics, after more than a decade of nominations, Einstein was on a steamer headed for Japan. Although he was unofficially made aware of the upcoming award, he decided to leave Berlin, and makes no mention of the award in his detailed and poetic Travel Diary of his trip to the Far East, Palestine, and Spain, published here in its entirety for the first time. Together with a correspondence of 1,000 letters—most of which were never published before—with numerous colleagues, friends, and family members, the volume presents a rich trove of documents, central to understanding this period in Einstein's life and work, heavily marked by the assassination of Germany's foreign minister, his friend Walther Rathenau. As Einstein himself professed, the trip was an escape from the tense atmosphere in Berlin and rumored threats against his own life, as well as the fulfillment of his long-held desire to visit Japan.
Aside from his personal and political activities documented here, among which are his visit to Paris and his involvement in the League of Nations, Einstein was still heavily engaged in major current issues in theoretical physics. Thus, from among the thirty-six writings covering these fifteen months, a paper on the Stern-Gerlach experiment, written with Paul Ehrenfest, shows with uncompromising clarity that the experiment posed a problem that could not be solved by contemporary quantum theory and anticipates, in a sense, what later would become known as the quantum measurement problem. In relativity theory, Einstein continued to be concerned with its cosmological implications, and with the extent to which Mach's principle would be vindicated in special solutions. He also began to investigate the possibilities and restrictions that relativity implied for a unified field theory of the gravitational and electromagnetic fields. During periods of leisure on board the steamer on his return trip from Japan, he completed a paper which further developed Arthur S. Eddington's recent reinterpretation of relativity as being based solely on the concept of the so-called affine connection.
About the Series
Thirteen volumes covering Einstein's life and work up to his forty-fourth birthday have so far been published. They present more than 300 writings and 5,000 letters written by and to Einstein. Every document in The Collected Papers appears in the language in which it was written, while the introduction, headnotes, footnotes, and other scholarly apparatus is in English. Upon release of each volume, Princeton University Press also publishes an English translation of previously untranslated non-English documents.
About the Editors
At the California Institute of Technology, Diana Kormos Buchwald is professor of history; József Illy, Ze'ev Rosenkranz, and Tilman Sauer are senior researchers in history.
The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein
Volume 13: The Berlin Years: Writings & Correspondence, January 1922—March 1923, Documentary Edition
Cloth $125.00 • £85.00 | ISBN: 978-0-691-15673-6
904 pp. | 7 ½ x 10 | 24 halftones
ENGLISH TRANSLATION SUPPLEMENT
Translated by Ann M. Hentschel & Osik Moses, Klaus Hentschel, consultant
Paper $45.00 • £30.95 | ISBN: 978-0-691-15674-3
456 pages | 7 ½ x 10
Publication Date: September 25, 2012
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