2021 Highlights
big news this year was the release of The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 16. The nascent iteration of each CPAE volume is a spreadsheet, detailing all known documents from the time period to be covered. Approximately three years later, the clothbound hard copy and companion translation paperback are released. As the group collaborates on research and shaping the book, individual editors and contributors continue solo projects in their fields of expertise.
Project Director Diana K. Buchwald has long nurtured young researchers. Mara Julseth began work with the EPP in 2013 as a volunteer. Since then, as time and other pursuits permitted, Mara ably assisted us in our research both at Caltech and abroad. She is now solely devoted to completing a PhD at the Institute of Science and Technology, Austria. It was our longtime colleague, Rudy Hirschmann, who connected us to Mara. Rudy's unwavering dedication to our project began 21 years ago; his knowledge of computer science and German continue to be invaluable resources. Rudy's recent retirement is well deserved.
Caltech junior John Parker worked with Science Editor Joshua Eisenthal on a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellow project titled "Einstein's Early Alignment with Mach." Meanwhile, Josh's article "Hertz's Mechanics and a Unitary Notion of Force" was the winning entry for the 2020 Du Chatelet Prize in Philosophy of Physics, awarded by Duke University. At the JG University in Mainz, Tobias Schütz, a former Visiting Student Researcher at the EPP, successfully defended his PhD dissertation "Einstein at Work on Unified Field Theory" summa cum laude, under the supervision of our science editor Tilman Sauer.
Historian Jennifer Rodgers presented conference papers at odd hours over Zoom, among them a seminar on Pacific Standard Time for The Cedars-Sinai Program in the History of Medicine: "A 'New Order' of Obstetrics? Childbirth Cultures in Divided Germany." Senior Editor Ze'ev Rosenkranz's next installment of The Travel Diaries of Albert Einstein describing Einstein's trip to South America in 1925, which was covered by our Volume 15, is slated for release by Princeton University Press in 2022. Ze'ev and our colleague Barbara Wolff worked closely with German historian Siegfried Grundmann over many years. His most recent book, Albert Einstein Dringender Appell (1932) und Kongress Das Freie Wort (1933): Eine Dokumentation, will be released posthumously in the spring of 2022. Grateful for his scholarship, the project is sorry for his loss.
Anticipating the deluge of tributes and correspondence that was to arrive less than three months later on his 50th birthday, when asked by newspapers what he wished for the New Year of 1929, Einstein responded: "dass man mich in Ruhe lässt" ("that I be left alone"). Einstein was not given the peace and quiet he wished for, intrusions and interruptions continued. While Einstein may have wanted less fame, and the attendant inconveniences, we are pleased to share his work and thoughts with the scholarly and broader communities of which we are a part. Whatever your particular desires, we wish you and all those you are connected to much health, success, and joy in the New Year.