Einstein, AlbertBiblio.com
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réf. 56748556-75Princeton University Press. Used - Very Good. Pages intact with possible writing/highlighting. Binding strong with minor wear. Dust jackets/supplements may not be included. Stock photo provided. Product includes identifying sticker. Better World Books: Buy Books. Do Good. Princeton University Press unknown
1926réf. 6414Berlin: Akademie der Wissenschaften 1926. First edition. First edition very rare author's presentation offprint extremely rare author's presentation offprint not to be confused with the much more common trade separate - see below from the library of the great German physicist Arnold Sommerfeld of the notorious Einstein/Rupp experiments which demonstrated the wave-theory of light contrary to Einstein's expectations. . SCIENTIFIC FRAUD: THE EINSTEIN-RUPP EXPERIMENTS. First edition extremely rare author's presentation offprint not to be confused with the much more common trade separate - see below from the library of the great German physicist Arnold Sommerfeld of the notorious Einstein/Rupp experiments. "In the fall of 1926 Albert Einstein published the outline of two experiments in the Proceedings of the Berlin Academy. They addressed one of the most urgent questions in physics at the time: the experiments were to show if the emission of light was a process that was extended in time or if instead light emission occurred in an instantaneous act. Of course the first possibility would confirm a traditional oscillator-and-wave-like view whereas the second possibility would cohere well with Einstein's own ideas on light quanta. It is quite surprising that these experiments are so unfamiliar today. Apart from addressing a central question and being proposed by no lesser figure than Einstein they also circulated at a crucial moment in the history of quantum theory. Still the experiments are not mentioned in any of the standard Einstein biographies and there is no substantial treatment of them in histories of the quantum theory . The likely cause for this lack of attention is at least as surprising: the experiments were-supposedly-conducted by Emil Rupp yet a decade later Rupp was exposed as a scientific fraudster; the results obtained by Rupp in close consultation with Einstein and published back-to-back with the latter's theoretical paper were in the end generally believed to have been fabrications" Van Dongen. As Walter Gerlach of Stern-Gerlach fame said in an interview with Thomas Kuhn in 1963 "Rupp in the late twenties early thirties was regarded as the most important and most competent physicist. He did incredible things. . Later it turned out that everything that he had ever published everything was forged. This had gone on for ten years ten years!" Nevertheless "these experiments played a substantial role in developments in 1926. Most importantly they confirmed a wave picture of light when many including Einstein himself initially expected a particle-like instantaneous picture of light emission to be confirmed. After all only a few years before Compton scattering had been shown and as little as a year before the Einstein-Rupp experiments Walther Bothe and Hans Geiger had done the experiments that dismissed the BKS theory. But the experiments of Einstein and Rupp also influenced events in other ways. For instance their initial interpretation was most likely of direct importance for Max Born when he proposed the probabilistic interpretation of the wave function. The experiments further played a role in the thinking of Werner Heisenberg as he formulated his uncertainty relations . these experiments deserve renewed attention and their current obscure status is not warranted by their historical importance" Van Dongen. OCLC locates only three copies two in Switzerland one in Germany but it is unclear which of these if any are author's presentation offprints. The presentation offprint was not present in the collection of Einstein's son Hans Albert Christie's 2006 but it was in Einstein's own collection of his offprints Christie's 2008. Provenance: Arnold Sommerfeld 1868-1951 his characteristic numbering '46' in red pencil on front cover. "The son of a physician Sommerfeld was educated at the University of Königsberg. After teaching briefly at the universities of Göttingen Clausthal and Aachen he was appointed professor of physics at the University of Münich in 1906. Sommerfeld should have retired in 1936 in favour of his pupil Werner Heisenberg. Opposition from the Nazi party to Heisenberg's appointment prolonged Sommerfeld's tenure and it was not in fact until late 1939 that he finally retired to be succeeded not by Heisenberg but by Wilhelm Müller a Nazi aerodynamicist without a single publication in physics to his credit. Although Sommerfeld and Heisenberg were not Jewish they were regarded by the Nazis as Jewish sympathizers. Sommerfeld however survived the war and returned to his Münich chair in 1945 continuing to work at physics until he died in a car accident in 1951" Oxford Reference. "Arnold Sommerfeld was one of the most distinguished representatives of the transition period between classical and modern theoretical physics. The work of his youth was still firmly anchored in the conceptions of the nineteenth century; but when in the first decennium of the century the flood of new discoveries experimental and theoretical broke the dams of tradition he became a leader of the new movement and in combining the two ways of thinking he exerted a powerful influence on the younger generation. This combination of a classical mind to whom clarity of conception and mathematical rigour are essential with the adventurous spirit of a pioneer are the roots of his scientific success while his exceptional gift of communicating his ideas by spoken and written word made him a great teacher" Max Born p. 275. "Born in 1898 Rupp began his career in the 1920s studying canal rays beams of positive ions and atoms formed between an anode and cathode the latter punctured with holes or "canals" in a gas discharge tube. When these rays shoot through the canals and into a vacuum chamber the ions rapidly lose and gain charge emitting visible light that becomes less intense at the other end of the canal. "In his first experiments in the mid-1920s Rupp measured the coherence length of light - the distance over which the light maintains a consistent phase - emitted by hydrogen and mercury atoms in the canal rays. He measured these lengths as 62 centimeters for hydrogen and 15.2 centimeters for mercury. These were blockbuster results: A moving hydrogen atom was expected to stay coherent over a much smaller distance. "What's more Rupp's extra-long hydrogen canal ray seemed like it could be used to test one of physics' biggest questions at the time: Is light a particle or a wave Einstein had devised experiments to test if light was emitted instantaneously or over time but he needed a light with an extra-long coherence length - and only Rupp had achieved it. "After reading Rupp's 1926 paper Einstein published his own "Proposal for an Experiment on the Nature of the Elementary Process of Radiation Emission" and reached out to Rupp directly to discuss a collaboration. But because Rupp's boss at Heidelberg University the physicist Philipp Lenard was "a fervent anti-relativist - and anti-Semite" writes van Dongen Einstein chose to forgo a visit to the institution and sent instructions for Rupp to do the experiments on his own. "There were red flags from the start. In one instance Rupp appeared to have altered the mirrors in his interferometer the instrument he used to study interference just so into an arrangement that would obtain desired outcomes. In another instance when Einstein corrected the settings Rupp reported using for another instrument Rupp chalked the mistake up to a typo. There were other 'alarming discrepancies' in Rupp's calculations van Dongen writes and Einstein's letters show that he pushed back on several occasions. Each time Rupp responded with new results that perfectly explained the oddities Einstein questioned. "Initially Einstein expected to find that light was emitted instantaneously. But as the collaboration stretched on he began to expect the experiments would confirm the alternative the 'classical' theory. 'One of the reasons for his changing position likely was that that outcome had inadvertently already been corroborated by Rupp' van Dongen writes. "When Rupp furnished Einstein with a final set of results supporting the classical emission picture Einstein facilitated their publication in the proceedings of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. They were published back-to-back with a paper by Einstein explaining the theory behind the experiments in which Einstein cited Rupp's work. Einstein even helped Rupp draft his paper's abstract. "The association with Einstein rocketed Rupp to scientific prominence and in 1928 he accepted a position in the research labs of German electronics company AEG 'a kind of counterpart to General Electric' writes MIT physicist Anthony French in his 1999 retrospective of Rupp's case. "However scientists had begun voicing skepticism about Rupp's canal ray work. Among them were British spectroscopist Robert d'Escourt Atkinson who doubted Rupp's extraordinary coherence lengths and a researcher named Harald Straub who tried and failed to replicate Rupp's measurements in 1930. Rupp came down hard on Straub with a rebuttal sending photographs that supposedly showed his interference fields and forcefully defending his work in the same journal where Straub published his. Straub wrote that he had nothing else to add and the matter appeared settled. "But Rupp's reputation was bruised in the episode and his letters from the time indicate that his funding at AEG was drying up. He published work on electron scattering then took up experiments with positrons producing them by pounding lithium with protons. In a 1934 paper Rupp claimed to have accelerated protons at potential differences of 500 kV. This was impossible for him to have done - he simply did not have the requisite accelerator in his lab. "In December 1934 two of Rupp's fellow scientists at AEG brought the glaring problem to the attention of the institute's director who launched an investigation and subsequently fired Rupp. In January 1935 Rupp published the retraction statement appended to his doctor's note claiming he had no knowledge of or control over the fabrications. And later that year experimentalists Walther Gerlach and Eduard Rüchardt published 'On the Coherence Length of Light emitted by Canal Rays' which essentially confirmed that Rupp's early canal ray work was also erroneous. Amid this public humiliation Rupp experienced a nervous breakdown and spent time in a sanatorium. He never worked in physics again. "Einstein however escaped from the episode unscathed. Historians like van Dongen think his credulousness was an honest mistake underpinned by his desire to see his theories confirmed by experiments. Rupp's work and life are now a footnote but following his downfall it appears that German scientists mentioned his name often. According to French 'for a number of years afterward the word 'geruppt' became an epithet among German physicists to describe questionable work'" Jooss. This author's presentation offprint is of extreme rarity and must be distinguished from other so-called 'offprints' of papers from the Berlin Sitzungsberichte many of which are commonly available on the market. The celebrated bookseller Ernst Weil 1919-1981 in the introduction to his Einstein bibliography wrote: "I have often been asked about the number of those offprints. It seems to be certain that there were few before 1914. They were given only to the author and mostly 'Überreicht vom Verfasser' Presented by the Author is printed on the wrapper. Later on I have no doubt many more offprints were made and also sold as such especially by the Berlin Academy." If the term 'offprint' means as we believe it should a separate printing of a journal article given only to the author for distribution to colleagues then 'offprints' were not commercially available. Although there is certainly some truth in Weil's remark in our view it requires clarification and explanation. Until about 1916 most of Einstein's papers were published in Annalen der Physik; from 1916 until he left Germany for the United States in 1933 most were published in the Berlin Sitzungsberichte. The Sitzungsberichte differed from other journals in which Einstein published in that it made separate printings of its papers commercially available. These separate printings have 'Sonderabdruck' printed on the front wrapper the usual German term for offprint but they are not offprints according to our definition. They were available to anyone; indeed a price list of these 'trade offprints' is printed on the rear wrapper. True author's presentation offprints can be distinguished from these trade separates by the presence of 'Überreicht vom Verfasser' on the front wrapper. In the period 1916 to 1919 or 1920 the Sitzungsberichte trade separates are themselves rare. After 1919 or 1920 however the trade separates become much more common although the author's presentation offprints are still very rare. The reason for this change is that it was only in 1919 that Einstein became famous among the general public. It might seem obvious that Einstein's fame dates from 1905 his 'annus mirabilis' in which he published his epoch-making papers on special relativity and the light quantum. However these works did not make him immediately well known even in the physics community - many physicists did not understand or accept his work and it was two or three years before his genius was fully accepted even by his colleagues. Einstein did not secure an academic position until 1908. Among the general public Einstein became well known only in late 1919 following the success of Eddington's expedition to observe the bending of light by the Sun which confirmed Einstein's general theory of relativity. This was front-page news and made Einstein universally famous. See Chapter 16 'The suddenly famous Doctor Einstein' in Pais Subtle is the Lord for an account of these events. Before 1919 the trade separates of Einstein's papers would probably only have been purchased by professional physicists; after 1919 everyone wanted a memento of the famous Dr. Einstein whether or not they understood anything of theoretical physics and the trade separates of his papers were printed and sold in far greater numbers than before to meet the demand. It is telling that when these post-1919 trade separates appear on the market they are often in mint condition - they were never read simply because their owners were unable to understand them. BRL 160; Weil 153. Born 'Arnold Johannes Wilhelm Sommerfeld 1868-1951' Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society 8 1952 pp. 275-296. French 'The strange case of Emil Rupp' Physics in Perspective 1 1999 pp. 3-21. Joosse 'December 1934: Emil Rupp's research which fooled even Einstein is exposed as fraud' APS News Nov. 14 2023. Van Dongen 'Communicating the Heisenberg uncertainty relations: Niels Bohr complementarity and the Einstein-Rupp experiments' Scientia Danica. Series M Mathematica et physica 1: One Hundred Years of the Bohr Atom Proceedings 2015 pp. 310-343. 8vo 252 x 180 mm pp. 334-340; 341-351. Original printed wrappers portion of ink postmark stamp on lower cover just into text of publisher's advertisements light vertical crease for posting. Akademie der Wissenschaften unknown
1923réf. 6416Berlin: Akademie der Wissenschaften 1923. First edition. First edition extremely rare author's presentation offprints "Überreicht vom Verfasser" from the library of the great German physicist Arnold Sommerfeld of Einstein's most important early publications on unified field theory. Einstein's work on unified field theory was inspired by James Clerk Maxwell's success in finding a unified theory of electricity and magnetism one of the greatest achievements of nineteenth-century physics. Einstein's contributions in this area represent about a quarter of his entire research output and half his scientific production after 1920. Such presentation offprints were issued in very small numbers unlike the commercially available separate printings which are common on the market. . UNIFIED FIELD THEORY. First edition extremely rare author's presentation offprints "Überreicht vom Verfasser" not to be confused with the much more common trade separates - see below from the library of the great German physicist Arnold Sommerfeld of Einstein's most important early publications on unified field theory. Einstein's work on unified field theory was inspired by James Clerk Maxwell's success in finding a unified theory of electricity and magnetism one of the greatest achievements of nineteenth-century physics which showed that light was a form of electromagnetic wave and made possible modern inventions such as radio television and the telephone. Einstein's contributions in this area represent about a quarter of his entire research output and half his scientific production after 1920. Although he was ultimately unsuccessful a similar vision was realized in the decades after his death in the construction of the 'standard model' a unified theory of electromagnetism with the weak and strong nuclear forces which were unknown in Einstein's time and efforts to incorporate gravity into the model continue to this day. 'Zur allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie' written on board ship during his return journey from Japan "gives us insight into the workings of Einstein's mind as it searched for a unified theory of gravitation and electromagnetism a search that would dominate his thinking for the rest of his life" Collected Papers 13 p. lxxvii. 'Einheitliche Feldtheorie von Gravitation und Elektrizität' was the first paper to use the term 'Unified Field Theory' in its title. In its opening paragraph Einstein wrote: "After incessant search during the last two years I now believe I have found the true solution" Pais Subtle is the Lord p. 343. The half-dozen papers Einstein had already written on unified field theory were reactions to the ideas of others such as Eddington Kaluza and Weyl; it was in this paper that Einstein put forward the first original approach of his own. "His theory rested in major part on the following arithmetical coincidence. In one of the customary ways of describing electromagnetism 6 field quantities are used. The metrical tensor of general relativity has a certain symmetry. Remove that symmetry and it will automatically contain not 10 but 16 field quantities. Use 10 combinations of these for gravitation and there will be 6 left over - just the number of field quantities with which to represent electromagnetism" Hoffmann Einstein p. 225. In 1928 Einstein embarked upon a new approach to a unified field theory involving what he called 'distant parallelism.' This was introduced in 'Riemann-Geometrie mit Aufrechterhaltung des Begriffes des Fernparallelismus' and 'Neue Möglichkeit für eine einheitliche Feldtheorie von Gravitation und Elektrizität.' By early 1929 he had solved the main problems involved in writing down field equations for his unified theory and presented his solution in 'Zur einheitlichen Feldtheorie'. "Einstein did propose in this last paper a set of field equations but added that 'further investigations will have to show whether these will give an interpretation of the physical qualities of space'. His attempt to derive his equations from a variational principle had to be withdrawn. Nevertheless in 1929 he had 'hardly any doubt' that he was on the right track" Pais p. 346. "Within three days the first printing of the journal offprint i.e. the commercial separate-a thousand copies-sold out and another thousand copies were soon printed. Soon thereafter Nature's News and Views section published a more accessible account of the work including a quote by Einstein: 'Now but only now we know that the force which moves electrons in their ellipses about the nuclei of atoms is the same force which moves our earth in its annual course about the sun and is the same force which brings to us the rays of light and heat which make life possible upon this planet.' With Einstein's 50th birthday approaching his new idea rapidly caught fire at least in the popular press. The New York Times published almost a dozen articles that year about distant parallelism rivaling its coverage of the 1919 eclipse results" Halpern. "In this frenzied unscientific atmosphere Einstein's new theory was hailed in the press as an outstanding scientific advance. Yet Einstein had stated in his article that it was still tentative; and soon he found he had to abandon it" Hoffman p. 226. Only paper III was present in the collection of presentation offprints of Einstein's son Hans Albert Christie's 2006 and in Einstein's own collection Christie's 2008; and no other copies of any of the offprints with "Überreicht vom Verfasser" can be identified on RBH. Similarly although several copies of each offprint can be found in institutional collections it is unclear how many are presentation offprints as the library records do not mention "Überreicht vom Verfasser". Provenance: Arnold Sommerfeld 1868-1951 his ink stamp on the front cover of III-V and characteristic numbering in red pencil on each - 40 45 47 48 49. "The son of a physician Sommerfeld was educated at the University of Königsberg. After teaching briefly at the universities of Göttingen Clausthal and Aachen he was appointed professor of physics at the University of Münich in 1906. Sommerfeld should have retired in 1936 in favour of his pupil Werner Heisenberg. Opposition from the Nazi party to Heisenberg's appointment prolonged Sommerfeld's tenure and it was not in fact until late 1939 that he finally retired to be succeeded not by Heisenberg but by Wilhelm Müller a Nazi aerodynamicist without a single publication in physics to his credit. Although Sommerfeld and Heisenberg were not Jewish they were regarded by the Nazis as Jewish sympathizers. Sommerfeld however survived the war and returned to his Münich chair in 1945 continuing to work at physics until he died in a car accident in 1951" Oxford Reference. "Arnold Sommerfeld was one of the most distinguished representatives of the transition period between classical and modern theoretical physics. The work of his youth was still firmly anchored in the conceptions of the nineteenth century; but when in the first decennium of the century the flood of new discoveries experimental and theoretical broke the dams of tradition he became a leader of the new movement and in combining the two ways of thinking he exerted a powerful influence on the younger generation. This combination of a classical mind to whom clarity of conception and mathematical rigour are essential with the adventurous spirit of a pioneer are the roots of his scientific success while his exceptional gift of communicating his ideas by spoken and written word made him a great teacher" Max Born p. 275. "Einstein's early work on the unification program after the completion of the theory of general relativity was by and large a reaction to approaches advanced by others. This is the case for the first geometrization of the electromagnetic field proposed in 1918 by Hermann Weyl; for the first exploration of a five-dimensional theory suggested by Theodor Kaluza in 1919; and for the first attempt to base a unified field theory on the concept of the affine connection rather than on the metric field as advanced by Arthur Eddington in 1921" Sauer pp. 289-90. Weyl 1885-1955 had introduced a new geometrical object into the theory that he called a "length connection" and he used it to establish a link between the geometrical structure given by the length connection and the electromagnetic field. Einstein was initially enthusiastic about Weyl's idea calling it "a first-class stroke of genius" but quickly found a serious objection to it showing that it implied that the wavelength of light emitted by a radiating atom would depend on the prehistory of that atom contrary to observation. Nevertheless in March 1921 Einstein elaborated on Weyl's theory in his paper 'Uber eine naheliegende Ergänzung des Fundamentes der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie.' Another idea to which Einstein responded was put forward as early as 1919 by Theodor Kaluza 1885-1954 at the time Privatdozent in mathematics at the University of Königsberg; he introduced the concept of a fifth dimension to the underlying space-time manifold of general relativity and attempted to represent the electromagnetic field in terms of the additional components of the metric tensor. Einstein showed that for the equation of motion of an electron Kaluza's theory predicted that the influence of the gravitational field was larger by many orders of magnitude than any reasonable physical interpretation would allow for. Nevertheless Einstein later encouraged Kaluza to publish his idea and Einstein and Jakob Grommer 1879-1933 published a response to it in 1923 'Beweis der Nichtexistenz eines überall regulären zentrisch symmetrischen Feldes nach der Feld-Theorie von Kaluza'. A third approach toward a unified field theory was advanced most notably by Eddington 1882-1944 in the early twenties and was also taken up by Einstein. The idea was to base the theory on the concept of an affine connection as the fundamental mathematical quantity rather than on the metric tensor. The associated Ricci curvature of spacetime is not then in general a symmetric tensor and Eddington suggested that the anti-symmetric part of the curvature could be identified with the electromagnetic field the symmetric part being the usual metric. Eddington did not however provide the field equations that would determine the affine connection a problem Einstein addressed in 'Zur allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie' paper I. Einstein identified the symmetrized part of the Ricci tensor with the 'natural' metric of the theory and like Eddington he linked the antisymmetrized Ricci tensor to the electromagnetic field. Einstein's criticism of Eddington's approach focused on Eddington's failure to provide field equations that determine all forty connection coefficients and the derivation of such field equations became the focal point of the published paper. Lastly Einstein explicitly introduced a scale factor λ that mediates between the scale of the 'natural' metric defined by the Ricci tensor and that of the physical metric. "With Einstein's response to Weyl Kaluza and Eddington in the early twenties we find him reacting to approaches that had been advanced by others . The first original approach put forward by Einstein himself was published in a paper of 1925 paper II in which also the term 'unified field theory' appeared for the first time in a title. In that paper he explored a metric-affine approach i.e. he took both a metric tensor field and a linear affine connection at the same time as fundamental variables. Both connection and metric were assumed to be asymmetric. Parallel transport then again defines a Ricci tensor and a Riemann curvature scalar and Einstein defined tentative field equations in terms of a variational principle taking the Riemann scalar as a Lagrangian just as in standard general relativity. As regards the interpretation of the mathematical objects he tried to associate the gravitational and electromagnetic fields with the symmetric and anti-symmetric parts of the metric field. In his attempt to recover the known cases he could show that the metric was symmetric for the purely gravitational case and the usual compatibility condition for the Levi-Civita connection can be recovered. Maxwell's equations could be recovered in the limit of weak gravitational fields but only in a slightly different form that is not entirely equivalent to the original equations. "The basic problem of this approach seems to have been that Einstein did not know how to go on from here. Dealing with both an asymmetric metric tensor and an asymmetric connection opened up a vast field of possibilities inherent in the mathematical framework and many familiar results of the theory of Riemannian geometry no longer held. In particular verifying the existence of non-singular spherically symmetric charge distributions posed a formidable challenge. It was also unclear how to explicitly investigate the non-vacuum case beyond the first order approximation of weak gravitational fields. Einstein did not pursue this approach any longer in print but he did take it up once more twenty years later as his final approach toward a unified field theory working on it until his death" Sauer pp. 293-5. "At some point in May 1928 while convalescing at home in Berlin Einstein had an idea for what he thought was 'an entirely new way of realizing the general theory of relativity and that may be groundbreaking.' Key to this new approach was the notion of a field of mutually orthogonal normal vectors defined on the space-time manifold. This was a so-called n-Bein-Feld or in more modern terminology for n = 4 a field of tetrads. Such a theory admits the definition of a natural notion of distant parallelism by identifying vectors on this orthonormal frame field. Two vectors at distant points of the manifold are parallel by definition if they are represented by the same vector of the orthonormal frames at the respective points. The manifold also carries a Riemannian metric which can be expressed in terms of the tetrad field. Since the tetrad field determines the metric field but not the other way around the tetrads provide more degrees of freedom which Einstein hoped could be put to use to provide a representation of the electromagnetic field. "At Einstein's request on 7 June 1928 Max Planck presented a brief note on this 'Riemannian Geometry Retaining the Concept of Distant Parallelism' paper III to the Prussian Academy for publication in its Proceedings. Since Einstein was not sure at the time whether the notion of Fernparallelismus that is distant parallelism or teleparallelism and its associated geometric concepts were known in the mathematical literature he asked Planck to inquire among his mathematician colleagues whether any of this was known before submitting the paper for publication. Planck did not find the occasion to do as requested but nevertheless submitted the paper. "Only a week later Einstein realized how to put the geometry of distant parallelism to use for his project of a unified theory of both the gravitational and the electromagnetic fields. The idea was to postulate a variational principle for an invariant action integral that depended on the tetrad field as the dynamical variable. "From this perspective the problem presented itself as a fairly well-defined mathematical problem but posed difficulties of interpretation in terms of physical concepts. From the mathematical side the required invariance of the variational integral created a clearly defined problem. One needed to identify all possible invariants that can be constructed from the tetrads as well as a combination of these invariants that would be suitable as a Lagrangian for the variational integral. Second variation with respect to the tetrad field would produce differential equations that had to be associated with the known field equations of gravitation and electromagnetism in certain limiting cases. Third solutions for the differential equations had to be found. Finally Einstein later would become interested in finding identities that would be satisfied by the tetrads by virtue of general covariance or that might be postulated to derive field equations. As far as the physical interpretation was concerned the metric field would take on its old role as in the general theory namely corresponding to the gravitational field. But the electromagnetic field also had to be identified with quantities occurring in the geometric framework. "As a first step Einstein identified the relevant possible invariants to be constructed from the tetrads. He also realized that in addition to the possibility of constructing a metric-compatible Levi-Civita connection from the metric as well as the associated notion of parallel transport the tetrad field allowed the definition of another connection with its notion of parallelism. In contrast to the Levi-Civita connection the teleparallel connection is asymmetric and describes a geometry that has vanishing Riemann curvature. Instead it is characterized by the nonvanishing of a tensorial quantity constructed from the teleparallel connection that is now known as the torsion tensor. Taking the mathematical expression of torsion a third-rank tensor Einstein tentatively identified its contraction with the electromagnetic four-potential. And settling on what seemed to be the simplest invariant to be taken as a basis for a tentative field theory Einstein succeeded in deriving to first approximation in the field components both the gravitational field equations of general relativity as well as an equivalent version of the Maxwell equations. "Again a brief note on this work was presented by Planck to the Academy on 14 June 1928 and was published in July under the title 'New Possibility for a Unified Field Theory of Gravitation and Electricity' paper IV. These two notes mark the beginning of a search for a unified field theory in this teleparallel framework that would preoccupy Einstein for the next two or three years . "The new approach to unified field theory opened the possibility of finding solutions to long-standing problems and work along these lines continued with intense phases of calculation and collaboration partly done when Einstein withdrew from public life and spent extended periods of time in secluded residences in Scharbeutz and Gatow or later in Caputh. However in mid-December 1928 difficulties in working out the consequences of the new differential equations had piled up to such a point that Einstein reconsidered the basis of their derivation by means of Hamilton's principle. On 13 December he wrote to his collaborator Chaim Herman Müntz that he had a 'simple bold idea that will throw Hamilton's principle overboard'. Instead of trying to recover the Maxwell equations in some acceptable limit he would now 'put the cart before the horse' and 'choose the field equations in such a way that I can be certain that they will lead to the Maxwell equations'. But yet again things turned out to be more difficult and for a few days in late December he reverted to the 'old Hamilton method once again'. But over the New Year's break on another retreat in Gatow Einstein gave up again on the variational approach and derived field equations based instead on some identities. On 27 December he wrote to Müntz: 'EUREKA!' convinced that he had found a solution that was 'so splendid nothing nicer could be imagined'. "The new progress was written up in a brief paper completed by 5 January 1929. Einstein was exhausted but happy about this new paper 'lying finished in front of me compressed into seven pages under the title 'Unified Field Theory'.' To his son Eduard he wrote on the same day that he was 'very happy' because he had 'more or less completed my life's work'. The paper was submitted on 10 January 1929 for publication in the Prussian Academy's Proceedings and appeared under the somewhat less assertive title 'On Unified Field Theory' paper V. "When published the paper made a big splash in the press and received much public attention. A press release appeared in the New York Times on 11 January and reports followed on 12 January in the German and international press. The paper was reprinted in a record number of copies and Einstein wrote a popular exposition English translations of which appeared in the London Times and the New York Times as well as in the Observatory. In Britain Nature contacted Einstein for a copy in order to report on it a request that Einstein diverted to Eddington. The latter informed Einstein a little later about the craze that his latest publication had stirred in London where 'one of our great Department Stores in London Selfridges has pasted up in its window your paper six pages pasted up side-by-side so that passers-by can read it all through. Large crowds gather round to read it!'. "The paper is indeed a rather technical brief note as Einstein soon pointed out and 'no occasion for anybody to be excited about it' as there will be 'only a few mathematicians who will be inclined to read it'. In a letter to Karl Kerkhof he admitted that he himself might carry some responsibility for the excitement since he 'may have alluded to it in speaking with one or another of my friends'. Among them was Hans Reichenbach who reported on the new approach in a column in the Vossische Zeitung before Einstein's printed paper was actually issued and thereby caused a deep rift between them. In any case it soon became clear that the brief paper would not be the last word on the theory. Already the published version carried an addendum in which Einstein indicated a simpler way of looking at things" Collected Papers 16 pp. lxiv-lxix. "Einstein soon was to learn that the mathematical concept of distant parallelism was by no means new and had already been explored by mathematicians notably by Roland Weitzenböck and Élie Cartan. While immediately acknowledging the priority of others as far as the mathematics was concerned Einstein nevertheless held high hopes for his idea of formulating a unified field theory within this structure. For him the critical question was to find a field equation for the components of the dynamical tetrad fields. Each field of tetrads defines a metric tensor field. But the converse is not true since the metric tensor components can only fix ten of the sixteen components of a tetrad. The additional six degrees of freedom are just what would be needed so he thought to accommodate the six degrees of freedom of the Maxwell field in a unified description of gravitation and electromagnetism. "The story of the distant parallelism approach can be told largely as a story of attempts to find and justify a uniquely determined set of field equations for the tetrad components with the demand that solutions of those field equations be given a sensible physical interpretation. The distant parallelism approach in this respect shows a number of marked similarities with Einstein's search for general relativistic field equations of gravitation in the years 1912-15. In 1912 it had been the introduction of the metric tensor into the theory that had started Einstein's research and existing mathematical theorems had to be adapted to the theory. In 1928 it was the tetrad fields that allowed the investigation of a non-Euclidean geometry of vanishing curvature and similarly Einstein was made aware of existing mathematical results by mathematician colleagues. In both cases Einstein's research quickly focussed on finding a set of field equations for the dynamical variables and in both cases it was difficult to satisfy all heuristic requirements. In response to these difficulties Einstein changed back and forth between two different and complementary strategies each starting from one particular set of heuristic postulates. In both episodes Einstein at one point settled on a set of field equations that was justified more by physical considerations rather than by mathematical soundness. In both cases Einstein continued to work out consequences of the field equations as well as continued to find a satisfactory mathematical justification for these equations. And finally the demise of both theories came about by a combination of realizing more and more shortcomings of the theory and by discovering that an alternative approach promised to be more successful. However while in 1915 the more successful theory that Einstein substituted for his earlier so-called Entwurf theory was the final version of general relativity the successor approach to the distant parallelism episode turned out to be yet another attempt at a unified field theory" Sauer pp. 296-7. These author's presentation offprints are of extreme rarity and must be distinguished from other so-called 'offprints' of papers from the Berlin Sitzungsberichte many of which are commonly available on the market. The celebrated bookseller Ernst Weil 1919-1981 in the introduction to his Einstein bibliography wrote: "I have often been asked about the number of those offprints. It seems to be certain that there were few before 1914. They were given only to the author and mostly 'Überreicht vom Verfasser' Presented by the Author is printed on the wrapper. Later on I have no doubt many more offprints were made and also sold as such especially by the Berlin Academy." If the term 'offprint' means as we believe it should a separate printing of a journal article given only to the author for distribution to colleagues then 'offprints' were not commercially available. Although there is certainly some truth in Weil's remark in our view it requires clarification and explanation. Until about 1916 most of Einstein's papers were published in Annalen der Physik; from 1916 until he left Germany for the United States in 1933 most were published in the Berlin Sitzungsberichte. The Sitzungsberichte differed from other journals in which Einstein published in that it made separate printings of its papers commercially available. These separate printings have 'Sonderabdruck' printed on the front wrapper the usual German term for offprint but they are not offprints according to our definition. They were available to anyone; indeed a price list of these 'trade offprints' is printed on the rear wrapper. True author's presentation offprints can be distinguished from these trade separates by the presence of 'Überreicht vom Verfasser' on the front wrapper. In the period 1916 to 1919 or 1920 the Sitzungsberichte trade separates are themselves rare. After 1919 or 1920 however the trade separates become much more common although the author's presentation offprints are still very rare. The reason for this change is that it was only in 1919 that Einstein became famous among the general public. It might seem obvious that Einstein's fame dates from 1905 his 'annus mirabilis' in which he published his epoch-making papers on special relativity and the light quantum. However these works did not make him immediately well known even in the physics community - many physicists did not understand or accept his work and it was two or three years before his genius was fully accepted even by his colleagues. Einstein did not secure an academic position until 1908. Among the general public Einstein became well known only in late 1919 following the success of Eddington's expedition to observe the bending of light by the Sun which confirmed Einstein's general theory of relativity. This was front-page news and made Einstein universally famous. See Chapter 16 'The suddenly famous Doctor Einstein' in Pais Subtle is the Lord for an account of these events. Before 1919 the trade separates of Einstein's papers would probably only have been purchased by professional physicists; after 1919 everyone wanted a memento of the famous Dr. Einstein whether or not they understood anything of theoretical physics and the trade separates of his papers were printed and sold in far greater numbers than before to meet the demand. It is telling that when these post-1919 trade separates appear on the market they are often in mint condition - they were never read simply because their owners were unable to understand them. I. BRL 140; Weil 131. II. BRL 155; Weil 147. III. BRL 174; Weil 161. IV. BRL 175; Weil 162. V. BRL 183; Weil 165 cf. PMM 416. Born 'Arnold Johannes Wilhelm Sommerfeld 1868-1951' Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society 8 1952 pp. 275-296. Halpern 'Albert Einstein celebrity physicist' Physics Today 1 April 2019 pp. 38-45. Sauer 'Einstein's unified field theory program' Chapter 9 in: The Cambridge Companion to Einstein Janssen & Lehner eds. 2014. 8vo 252 x 180 mm pp. 334-340; 341-351. Original printed wrappers portion of ink postmark stamp on lower cover just into text of publisher's advertisements light vertical crease for posting. Akademie der Wissenschaften unknown
1928réf. 6594Paris: Gauthier Villars 1928. First edition. First edition rare in the original printed wrappers of the proceedings of the Fifth Solvay Congress 1927-the most celebrated of the Solvay conferences and the setting in which the Bohr-Einstein debate over the consistency and completeness of quantum mechanics first took public programmatic form. Convened under the banner "Electrons and Photons" the meeting brought together nearly all the principal architects of the old and the new quantum theory; seventeen of the twenty-nine participants were or became Nobel Prize laureates. . The Bohr-Einstein Debate Begins. First edition rare in the original printed wrappers of the proceedings of the fifth Solvay Congress where the debate between Bohr and Einstein on the consistency and completeness of quantum mechanics began. It was at this the most famous of the Solvay conferences that Einstein disenchanted with Heisenberg's uncertainly principle made his famous remark that "God does not play dice" to which Niels Bohr replied "Einstein stop telling God what to do!" Seventeen of the twenty-nine attendees which included nearly all the principal architects of the old and the new quantum theory were or became Nobel Prize winners. "The three and a half years since the fourth Solvay Conference . were marked by enormous progress in quantum physics. Partly based on discoveries and ideas that had been available already before 1924 − such as the Compton effect and matter waves − the new atomic theory had arisen which did more than throw new light on the difficulties discussed at the 1924 conference: quantum or wave mechanics went right to the heart of the problems posed by atomic phenomena. The two subjects put programmatically into the title of the fifth Solvay Conference − electrons and photons − designated the crucial points of interest because 'electrons' also stood for the smallest massive constituents of matter and they now became associated with waves and 'photons' a name given only recently in October 1926 by the physical chemist Gilbert N. Lewis to Einstein's light-quanta characterized the quantum-theoretical aspect of electromagnetic radiation. It was the declared intention of the Scientific Committee of the Institut International dePhysique Solvay to contribute by scientific reports and discussions about them to the clarification of the scientific concepts in the physics of the day. In retrospect one may indeed attribute an important success to the 1927 Solvay Conference in marking the completion of the ideas that had first been discussed in the international physics community sixteen years previously at the first Solvay Conference of 1911" Mehra & Rechenberg pp. 233-4. Following a 'Notice nécrologique' by Lorentz the present volume contains the following reports and discussions about them by the participants all articles in French: 'The Intensity of the Reflection of X-rays' by Bragg; 'Disagreement between Experience and the Electromagnetic Theory of Radiation' by Compton; 'The New Dynamics of Quanta' by de Broglie; 'The Mechanics of Quanta' by Born and Heisenberg; 'The Mechanics of Waves' by Schrödinger; 'The Quantum Postulate and the New Development of Atomic Theory' by Bohr. No copies located in auction records. In 1911 the Belgian industrialist Ernest Solvay invited a group of the world's most prominent physicists including Einstein Planck Lorentz Sommerfeld Rutherford and Marie Curie to participate in a scientific conference on the difficulties of reconciling classical physics with quantum theory. The conference "set the style for a new type of scientific meetings in which a select group of the most well informed experts in a given field would meet to discuss the problems at its frontiers and would seek to define the steps for their solution" Mehra Solvay Conferences p. xv. The first Solvay Conference-widely considered a turning point in the history of modern physics-was so successful that in the following year Solvay established a foundation now known as the International Solvay Institutes for Physics and Chemistry "to encourage the researches which would extend and deepen the knowledge of natural phenomena" ibid. and to sponsor further conferences. The next two Solvay Conferences met in 1913 and 1921; subsequent conferences have been held every three years except during wartime. "From amongst the members of the Scientific Committee of the 1927 Congress two had already played a leading role in 1911: the Chairman Hendrik Lorentz and Albert Einstein; the latter had presented then the most revolutionary report on the light quantum. In spring 1926 in the early stage of preparing for the new conference Lorentz again requested Einstein to write a report. The latter answered promptly: 'If you wish that I take over the report on quantum statistics I shall do so with pleasure; because without being in great difficulty I shall never say "no" to you' Einstein to Lorentz 1 May 1926 . On 17 June 1927 Einstein wrote to Lorentz: 'I recall having committed myself to you to give a report on quantum statistics at the Solvay Conference. After much reflection back and forth I came to the conclusion that I am not competent for giving such a report in a way which really corresponds to the state of the thing. The reason is that I have not been able to participate as intensively in the modern development of quantum theory as would be necessary for that purpose. This is in part because I have on the whole too little receptive talent for fully following the stormy developments in part also because I do not approve of the purely statistical way of thinking on which the new theory is founded .' As a substitute speaker for the topic assigned to him he proposed either Enrico Fermi from Italy or Paul Langevin from France. Ultimately however neither of them gave the report on Einstein's subject. Instead Niels Bohr agreed to contribute a report on a different topic: namely on his latest considerations on the problem of the interpretation of quantum mechanics. "The rapporteurs at the fifth Solvay Conference fell into three groups: the experimentalists Bragg and Compton; the theoreticians advocating the Gottingen-Cambridge-Copenhagen versions of quantum mechanics − Bohr Born and Heisenberg; and those of the wave-mechanical camp − de Broglie and Schrodinger. "The selection of Arthur Holly Compton seemed to be most appropriate because the Compton effect − discovered in late 1922 − had been one of the crucial results triggering the entire development which ended with the new atomic theory by providing Einstein's light-quantum hypothesis of 1905 a firm experimental foundation. Since its discovery and even more so after the refutation of the Bohr-Kramers-Slater theory of radiation . Einstein's fundamental light-quantum conception . became a physical reality. Compton's report dwelt on the conceptual consequences rather than on experimental details. In particular he addressed the questions of the aether and of electromagnetic waves on the one hand and the phenomena contradicting the classical wave concepts such as the photoelectric effect X-ray diffraction certain electron-recoil effects observed by C. T. R. Wilson and W. Bothe in 1923 and the individual interaction between radiation-quanta and electrons i.e. the Compton effect. Compton showed also in some detail how the Bohr-Kramers-Slater theory failed to account for these observations. "The report of William Lawrence Bragg a regular participant in the Solvay Conferences since 1913 appeared to address on first inspection less central points. However from his presentation of the material on reflection of X-rays one easily recognizes the strategy of the Scientific Committee of the Conference: Bragg had to take over the task of stressing those radiation phenomena that could be described by the wave theory namely the diffraction of X-rays by crystal lattices. Consequently he gave the story from Laue's discovery in 1912 over the subsequent work of his father William Henry Bragg and himself to the later investigations of Paul Ewald William Duane and others. Bragg demonstrated in detail how the old and the new wave theories worked to describe the phenomena of diffraction and refraction of X-rays. In the discussion of Bragg's report Hendrik Kramers presented at some length the recent development of the dispersion theory by himself and Ralph Kronig. "Both experimental reports served as a firm basis for the discussion of the theoretical concepts which provided the central theme of the conference. This significance was shown by the discussions immediately following them. Compton's talk especially gave rise to a lively exchange of ideas and arguments in which besides the experimentalists e.g. Bragg Madame Curie O. W. Richardson and C. T. R. Wilson almost all of the theoretical experts present participated i.e. Bohr Born Debye Dirac Ehrenfest Lorentz Pauli and Schrödinger − with one important exception: according to the published proceedings of the fifth Solvay Conference offered here Einstein remained silent after the presentations of Compton and Bragg . "The presentation of the theoretical reports at the Solvay Conference proceeded by following the historical order in which the ideas had been published between 1923 and 1926: thus de Broglie's talk came first then Born and Heisenberg's followed by Schrödinger's and finally Bohr's . "In the course of the year 1927 the Copenhagen physicists Heisenberg among them clarified their ideas on the interpretation of atomic phenomena. Although they admitted the existence and persistence of statistical relations in quantum mechanics they searched for − and succeeded in − formulating principles that in their opinion at least provided the deeper reason for these statistical features: the uncertainty relations and the complementarity principle. In spite of this difference in attitude toward what they regarded as truly fundamental and actually derived Heisenberg felt no difficulty in preparing a joint Solvay report together with his former teacher Max Born. Their report provided a view of the work performed in Göttingen and Cambridge in establishing quantum mechanics with chapters on matrix mechanics and its transformation into wave mechanics I the physical interpretation of the theory II and the uncertainty principle III. The balance in representing the main interests of the two authors was achieved insofar as Section II dealt with Born's statistical interpretation and Section III with Heisenberg's limitation on measurements in quantum mechanics. Moreover the Born-Heisenberg report also signaled the agreement reached by Heisenberg and Niels Bohr during the summer of 1927 . "Louis de Broglie entitled his report 'The new dynamics of quanta'; he covered the story from his first ideas on matter waves in 1923-24 to the advent of Schrödinger's equation in 1926 and on to the new pilot-wave theory in 1927. He further applied the pilot-wave theory to the problem of the hydrogen atom and claimed that the treatment yielded an easier understanding of the actual situation; finally he spoke about the experimental verification of matter waves obtained recently in the experiments of Clinton Joseph Davisson and Lester Halbert Germer and George Paget Thomson and Alexander Reid . Erwin Schrödinger on the other hand concentrated on the mathematical aspects of his wave-mechanical scheme the time-independent as well as the time-dependent equations the formal equivalence of wave mechanics to the Born-Heisenberg-Jordan matrix scheme and the relativistic wave equation. At the end of the conference Niels Bohr presented a modified version of his Como lecture under the title 'The Quantum Postulate and the New Development of Atomic Theory' . "Although the Born-Heisenberg and Schrödinger reports provoked only technical questions that of de Broglie and especially the one of Bohr stimulated some conceptual discussion. Thus Lorentz asked de Broglie how the old Sommerfeld quantum conditions could be obtained from the new matter-wave ideas and Pauli provided an appropriate calculation using the conservation law for the relativistic electric current; also Leon Brillouin illustrated some 'optical' applications of matter waves. Finally Bohr's report at the end provided the proper start for a very excited 'General Discussion of the New Ideas Put Forward.' "Upon an opening reflection of Hendrik Lorentz − who expressed some reservation with respect to the new pictures of electrons in quantum and wave-mechanics − and a technical illustration of Max Born for dealing with many-electron systems in the probability scheme Einstein addressed an elementary problem in the physical interpretation of the theory. He suggested in particular to consider an electron passing through a slit in a screen and to discuss the diffraction phenomena obtained. He claimed that 'with respect to quantum mechanics one can take two standpoints regarding its validity' namely: Interpretation I: The de Broglie-Schrodinger waves do not correspond to a single electron but to an electron cloud extended in space. The theory does not give then any information about an ensemble of an infinity of elementary processes. Interpretation II: The theory claims to be a complete theory of individual processes. Each particle which moves towards the screen as far as one can determine from its position and velocity is described by a de Broglie-Schrödinger wave packet of small length and small aperture. This wave packet is diffracted and after diffraction arrives partly at the film where it is registered in a resolved state Einstein in the present work pp. 254-5. "Evidently Interpretation II went beyond I and even included the latter; it also implied that the conservation laws especially for momentum were valid for individual atomic processes thus explaining the Bothe-Geiger experiment as well as other experiments. Still Einstein also objected to this interpretation because: 'If Ψ2 where Ψ is the wave function were simply considered as the probability for a particle to be at a place at the definite instant it might happen that one and the same elementary process would cause an action at two or more places on the screen' which would imply an action-at-a-distance hence a violation of the relativity postulate. The only way out of this difficulty had to be sought with de Broglie in further attempts to localize the microscopic particle. Einstein claimed further that the multidimensional phase space assumed for many-particle systems in quantum or wave mechanics and the corresponding permutation properties contradicted the new statistical results. "Although Lorentz tried to illuminate the statistical argument further Wolfgang Pauli contradicted Einstein by referring to the recent work of Paul Dirac Pascual Jordan and Oskar Klein on field quantization. He also refuted another argument of Einstein's that the range of forces in quantum mechanics might create problems by pointing to the work of Walter Heitler and Fritz London on molecular binding. Dirac at first supported Pauli's plea; then he stated his 'opinion about determinism and the significance of numbers which occur in the calculus of quantum theory' notably: 'In the classical theory one starts from certain numbers which completely specify the initial state of the system and one deduces certain numbers which specify the final state. This determination applies only to an isolated system' Dirac in the present work p. 261. "Now according to Bohr isolated systems are by definition unobservable because any observation must disturb the system; as a result already 'the classical deterministic theory cannot be defended.' Furthermore: 'In the quantum theory one starts from certain numbers from which one deduces certain other numbers . The perturbations which an observer inflicts on a system in order to observe it are directly subject to his control and are acts of his free will. It is exclusively the numbers which describe these acts of free choice that can be taken as initial numbers for a calculation in the quantum theory. Other numbers specifying the initial state of the system are fundamentally unobservable and do not appear in the quantum-theoretical treatment' Dirac loc. cit. . "After Dirac had illustrated his interpretation of the quantum-mechanical process and its observation in the case of a sample collision experiment Heisenberg remarked that he did 'not agree' with Dirac saying 'that in the experiment described nature makes a choice' because: 'Even if you place yourself very far from your scattering material and if you measure after a very long time you can obtain interference by taking two mirrors. If nature were to make a choice it would be difficult to imagine how the interference can be produced. Evidently we can say that nature's choice can never be known until the decisive experiment has been done; for this reason we cannot make any real objection to this choice because the expression "nature makes a choice" does not have any physical consequences. I would say as I have done in my latest paper that the observer himself makes the choice because it is not until the moment when the observation is made that the "choice" becomes a physical reality and that the phase relation in the waves i.e. the ability to interfere is destroyed' Heisenberg in the present work pp. 264-5 . "The differences in interpretation among the main pioneers of quantum mechanics that showed in this exchange notably between Bohr and Heisenberg and Dirac would become more pronounced in the future . "In the recollections of some participants of the fifth Solvay Conference the exchange between Bohr and Einstein on fundamental questions concerning the interpretation of quantum mechanics stands out vividly. Thus Bohr after more than twenty years wrote a detailed account of his 'Discussions with Einstein on Epistemological Problems in Atomic Theory' where he introduced the important part dealing with the 1927 exchange by saying: 'At the general discussions in Como we all missed the presence of Einstein but soon after in October 1927 I had the opportunity to meet him in Brussels at the Fifth Physical Conference of the Solvay Institute . At the Solvay meetings Einstein had from their beginning been a most prominent figure and several of us came to the Conference with great anticipations to learn his reaction to the latest stage of the development which to our view went far in clarifying the problems which he had himself from the outset elicited so ingeniously. During the discussions where the whole subject was reviewed by contributions from many sides Einstein expressed however a deep concern over the extent to which causal account in space and time was abandoned in quantum mechanics.' "The official discussions referred to above throw light on some of the exchanges on the questions that did interest Einstein although Bohr's participation in them does not seem to have been so active. For example no answer from Bohr to Einstein's analysis of the electron's passage through a slit or screen was recorded. Bohr just made some notes which are to be found in his files and as Louis de Broglie recalled: 'Also Einstein said hardly anything beyond presenting a very simple objection to the probability interpretation. Then he fell silent'. However Heisenberg took away quite a different impression from the conference and decades later he wrote enthusiastically: 'The discussions were soon focused upon a duel between Einstein and Bohr on the question as to what extent atomic theory in its present form could be considered to be the final solution of the difficulties which had been discussed for several decades. We generally met already at breakfast in the hotel and Einstein began to describe an ideal Gedanken experiment in which he thought the inner contradictions of the Copenhagen interpretation were especially clearly visible. Einstein Bohr and I walked together from the hotel to the conference building and I listened to the lively discussion between those two people whose philosophical attitudes were so different and from time to time I added a remark on the structure of the mathematical formalism. During the meeting and particularly in the pauses we younger people mostly Pauli and I tried to analyze Einstein's experiment and at lunch time the discussions continued between Bohr and the others from Copenhagen. Bohr had usually finished the complete analysis of the ideal experiment by late afternoon and would show it to Einstein at the supper table. Einstein had no good objection to this analysis but in his heart he was not convinced. Bohr's friend Ehrenfest who was also a close friend of Einstein said to him 'I am ashamed of you Einstein! You put yourself here just in the same position as your opponents in their futile attempts to refute your relativity theory." "Thus by piecing together the contemporary documents of 1927 with the later recollections of the participants a fairly consistent historical picture of the great epistemological debate between Bohr and Einstein has arisen. The fifth Solvay Conference would not end this debate however. Both participants returned to the problems involved again and again especially at the sixth Solvay Conference in 1930 and a few years later in 1935. Still quantum mechanics had already scored the main points in its favour. 'The most important success of the Brussels meeting was that we could see that against any objections against any attempts to disprove the theory we could get along with it' Heisenberg summarized the result in an interview in 1963 and added: 'At that time in 1927 it was practically Bohr Pauli and myself perhaps just the three of us. That very soon spread out'" Mehra & Rechenberg The Historical Development of Quantum Theory vol. 6 pp. 232-256. For an English translation and detailed analysis of the conference reports see Bacciagaluppi & Valentini Quantum Theory at the Crossroads. Reconsidering the 1927 Solvay Conference Cambridge 2009. 8vo 255 x 165 mm pp. viii 289 with frontispiece portrait of Lorentz. Original printed wrappers spine ends slightly chipped upper margin of front wrapper sunned. Gauthier Villars unknown
1931réf. 73651-A-64388Berlin: Propyläen 1931. Signed by Johan Dijkstra on the title page. Cloth binding gilted. Many tipped-in ills in color and many ills in b/w. 655 p. -Boards worn around the edges dedication in ink on the fly-leaf but otherwise the book is in very good condition. Johan Dijkstra 1896-1978 was a Dutch artist and one of the foudners of Groninger Kunstkring De Ploeg. Propyläen hardcover
1938réf. 69317-A-65099Amsterdam: D.B. Centen 1938. Linnen gebonden. Met prospectus van het boek gevouwen a-4. 319 pp. ills. -Schutbladen verkleurd wat roestvlekken op de snee onderstrepingen in potlood verder in goede staat. D.B. Centen unknown
1917réf. 6411Berlin: W. de Gruyter 1917. First edition. First edition an extremely rare author's presentation offprint from the library of the eminent German physicist Arnold Sommerfeld of the groundbreaking paper that "laid the foundations of modern theories of the universe" O'Raifeartaigh. In this seminal work Einstein first applied the principles of general relativity to cosmology introducing the cosmological constant to allow for a static universe - a pivotal conceptual innovation that shaped modern theoretical physics. "There is little doubt that Einstein's 1917 paper 'Cosmological Considerations in the General Theory of Relativity' constituted a key milestone in 20th-century physics" ibid. This presentation offprint - issued in very limited numbers for private distribution by Einstein himself - is vastly scarcer than the commercially available separate printings which appear more regularly on the market. . LAID THE FOUNDATIONS OF MODERN THEORIES OF THE UNIVERSE . First edition extremely rare author's presentation offprint not to be confused with the more common trade separate - see below from the library of the great German physicist Arnold Sommerfeld of Einstein's 'cosmological constant' paper which "laid the foundations of modern theories of the universe" O'Raifeartaigh. "There is little doubt that Einstein's 1917 paper 'Cosmological Considerations in the General Theory of Relativity' constituted a key milestone in 20th century physics. As the first relativistic model of the universe the paper later known as 'Einstein's Static Universe' or the 'Einstein World' set the foundations of modern theoretical cosmology" O'Raifeartaigh et al. "It is generally agreed that the seeds of a revolution in theoretical cosmology were planted when Einstein completed his general theory of relativity in the fall of 1915. On 25 November he read to the Prussian Academy of Sciences the final communication which contained a consistent set of gravitational equations. One and a half years later in a paper announced on 8 February 1917 Einstein took the revolutionary step of exploring the consequences of his new theory for no less than the entire universe" Kragh p. 8. "The consequence of Einstein's version of Mach's principle is that at infinity the components of the metric tensor should degenerate: for an isotropic field the spatial components become zero whereas the timelike component goes to infinity. It turned out to be impossible to realize these conditions for centrally symmetric static fields. Einstein's way out was to postulate a universe that is spatially finite closed and static with a uniform mass distribution a universe in which no boundary conditions are needed. In order to do so however Einstein had to modify his field equations to include what became known as the 'cosmological constant'" Papers 6 p. xx. Max Born said of Einstein's conception "This suggestion of a finite but unbounded space is one of the greatest ideas about the nature of the worlds which has ever been conceived . It solved the mysterious fact why the system of stars did not disperse and thin out which it would do if space were infinite; it gave a physical meaning to Mach's principle which postulated that the law of inertia should not be regarded as a property of empty space but as an effect of the total system of stars; and it opened the way to the concept of the expanding universe" quoted in Clark p. 270. The 'Einstein world' described a static universe but in 1929 Edwin Hubble demonstrated that the universe is not static but expanding. Soon after Einstein rejected his cosmological constant as unnecessary and compromising the simplicity of his field equations. Nevertheless recent discoveries regarding dark matter and dark energy suggest that the cosmological constant may have a role to play in the explanation of the fact that the expansion of the universe appears to be accelerating. OCLC lists copies of this offprint at American Philosophical Society Burndy Huntington and University of Florida but it is unclear if any of these are author's presentation offprints rather than trade separates. We have been unable to locate any other presentation offprint on RBH - it was not present in the collection of Einstein's son Hans Albert Christie's 2006 nor in Einstein's own collection Christie's 2008. RBH lists only four copies of the trade separate in the last 75 years the last sold at Bonham's in 2022 for $15300. Provenance: Arnold Sommerfeld 1868-1951 his characteristic numbering '36' in red pencil on front wrapper. "The son of a physician Sommerfeld was educated at the University of Königsberg. After teaching briefly at the universities of Göttingen Clausthal and Aachen he was appointed professor of physics at the University of Münich in 1906. Sommerfeld should have retired in 1936 in favour of his pupil Werner Heisenberg. Opposition from the Nazi party to Heisenberg's appointment prolonged Sommerfeld's tenure and it was not in fact until late 1939 that he finally retired to be succeeded not by Heisenberg but by Wilhelm Müller a Nazi aerodynamicist without a single publication in physics to his credit. Although Sommerfeld and Heisenberg were not Jewish they were regarded by the Nazis as Jewish sympathizers. Sommerfeld however survived the war and returned to his Münich chair in 1945 continuing to work at physics until he died in a car accident in 1951" Oxford Reference. "Arnold Sommerfeld was one of the most distinguished representatives of the transition period between classical and modern theoretical physics. The work of his youth was still firmly anchored in the conceptions of the nineteenth century; but when in the first decennium of the century the flood of new discoveries experimental and theoretical broke the dams of tradition he became a leader of the new movement and in combining the two ways of thinking he exerted a powerful influence on the younger generation. This combination of a classical mind to whom clarity of conception and mathematical rigour are essential with the adventurous spirit of a pioneer are the roots of his scientific success while his exceptional gift of communicating his ideas by spoken and written word made him a great teacher" Max Born p. 275. "The new relativistic theory of the universe had conceptual roots far back in time especially in problems discussed by Newton in a famous correspondence with the Reverend Richard Bentley in 1692-93 first published as Four letters from Sir Isaac Newton to Doctor Bentley . London 1756. Newton considered the universe as an infinite container with an infinite number of stars but in that case it seemed impossible to define the gravitational force acting upon a body in a definite way. Later scientists sought to resolve the dilemma by keeping to Newton's idea of an infinite space but including a modification of his law of gravitation. In the mid-1890s two German theoreticians Carl von Neumann and Hugo Seeliger suggested independently that the amount of matter in the spatially infinite universe was finite. Although this led to a well-defined gravitational force it also led to a universe which would seem to collapse under the influence of gravitation as realized by Newton. To avoid this consequence Neumann and Seeliger proposed to change Newton's law of gravitation . "When Einstein attacked the cosmological problem he was much aware of the Newtonian anomaly and earlier attempts to solve it such as that of Neumann and Seeliger. He wrote: 'I shall conduct the reader over the road that I have myself travelled rather a rough and winding road because otherwise I cannot hope that he will take much interest in the result at the end of the journey. The conclusion I shall arrive at is that the field equations of gravitation which I have championed hitherto still need a slight modification so that on the basis of the general theory of relativity those fundamental difficulties may be avoided . which confronted the Newtonian theory.' "That the road to the cosmological theory had been rough and winding an intellectual tour de force was also what Einstein wrote to his friend the Dutch physicist Paul Ehrenfest. In early February 1917 Einstein told him that the work had exposed him 'to the danger of being confined in a madhouse.' The conceptual problem which Einstein faced was essentially the same as that Newton had struggled with namely to formulate boundary conditions for an infinite space. In December 1916 he argued in a letter to his friend Michele Besso that a homogeneous symmetrical distribution of matter throughout all of infinite space would not be sufficient to produce the stable universe that both he and Besso presupposed. 'Only the closedness of the universe can get rid of this dilemma' he wrote and added that his new idea was 'one of great scientific significance and not a product of my imagination.' Einstein's solution was to circumvent the problem which he could do by conceiving the universe as a spatially closed continuum in accordance with his general theory of relativity: 'If it were possible to regard the universe as a continuum which is finite closed with respect to its spatial dimension we should have no need at all of any such boundary conditions. We shall proceed to show that both the general postulate of relativity and the fact of the small stellar velocities are compatible with the hypothesis of a spatially finite universe; though certainly in order to carry through this idea we need a generalizing modification of the field equations of gravitation.' Einstein thus assumed the universe to be a spatially closed continuum 'spherical' in four dimensions. This model is also referred to as Einstein's 'cylinder' world: with two of the spatial dimensions suppressed the model universe can be pictured as a cylinder where the radius represents the space and the axis the time coordinate. Einstein was also and naturally so guided by the available empirical evidence. This suggested that the universe was indeed spatially finite that it was static and that it contained a finite amount of matter . "Apart from being influenced by the existing discussion of Newtonian cosmology Einstein was also motivated by the ideas of the famous Austrian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach. According to Mach's principle proposed in the 1880s the laws of mechanics including the law of inertia should be seen as purely relational namely relative to the universe as a whole. Einstein's version of the principle was rather different; he tended to understand it in the sense that the space-time metric is determined by the masses of the universe and thus that the local dynamics is conditioned by the universe at large. In general Mach's principle is interpreted as the assumption that local inertial frames are determined by some average of the motion of the distant celestial objects. Originally Einstein believed that his relativistic theory of cosmology embodied Mach's principle but in his later years he concluded that the principle could not be harmonized with the general theory of relativity" Kragh pp. 7-9. "Only a year before publishing the present work Einstein had finally completed his great masterwork a new theory of gravity space and time known as the general theory of relativity. From a scientific point of view it is hardly surprising that Einstein quickly turned his attention to cosmology. A fundamental tenet of the general theory was that the geometric structure of a region of spacetime is not an independent self-determined entity but is determined by mass-energy. In modern notation that idea is expressed as the field equations Gμν = −κTμν 1 where Gμν is a four-dimensional tensor that describes the geometry of a region of spacetime and Tμνis a four-dimensional tensor that describes the flux of mass-energy within that region the quantity κ is a constant known as the Einstein constant. Once Einstein had completed the theory it was natural for him to ask if general relativity could deliver a consistent model of all of spacetime-a plausible model of the universe as a whole. As he remarked in a letter to the Dutch astronomer Willem de Sitter 'For me though it was a burning question whether the relativity concept can be followed through to the finish or whether it leads to contradictions.' "Einstein soon found that assuming a universe with a static distribution of matter evidence to the contrary did not emerge until 1929 it was no easy task to obtain a satisfactory solution to the field equations for the case of the universe as a whole. The main difficulty was his insistence that a model of the cosmos should reflect both the principle of relativity which demanded that all frames of reference be equivalent and an assumption he later named Mach's principle-that the inertia of a body is determined entirely by the presence of other masses in the universe. "The outcome of those deliberations was Einstein's 'Cosmological considerations' paper of 1917. His ingenious breakthrough was to postulate that we inhabit a universe of closed spatial geometry. Relativity could deliver a satisfactory model of the known universe if it was assumed that the cosmos had the geometry of a three-dimensional sphere-unbounded spatially yet finite in content. However the Einstein universe came at a price. In his analysis Einstein found that a nonzero solution to the field equations could be obtained only if a new term was introduced to the equations according to: Gμν λgμν = −κTμν. 2 To some the new term λgμν known as the 'cosmological constant' term marred the symmetry and simplicity of the original field equations. However general relativity certainly permitted the term; indeed Einstein had noted the possibility of such an extension to the field equations in his original exposition of 1916. Now the cosmological constant found an important application because it allowed a model of the universe that was consistent with Einstein's views on the relativity of inertia . "Einstein's analysis culminated in a simple relation between the cosmological constant λ the mean density of matter Ï and the radius of the cosmos R according to λ = κÏ/2= 1/R2. 3 "One puzzling aspect of Einstein's 'Cosmological considerations' paper is that he made no attempt to estimate the size of his model universe from equation 3. After all even a rough approximation of the mean density of matter in the universe could have given some estimate of the cosmic radius R. Instead he merely declared at the end of the paper that the model was logically consistent: 'At any rate this view is logically consistent and from the standpoint of the general theory of relativity lies nearest at hand; whether from the standpoint of present astronomical knowledge it is tenable will not here be discussed' . "A second puzzle associated with the 'Cosmological considerations' paper is Einstein's failure to consider the stability of his model universe. After all the quantity Ï in equation 3 represented a mean value for the density of matter in the universe; one could expect a variation in that parameter from time to time which raises the question of the stability of the model against such perturbations. Indeed it was later shown that the Einstein universe is highly unstable against perturbations in matter density a slight increase in density would trigger an inexorable contraction while a slight decrease would result in a runaway expansion . "In 1929 American astronomer Edwin Hubble published the first evidence of a linear relation between the redshifts of the spiral nebulae and their radial distance. Many theorists viewed Hubble's results as evidence of a non-static universe and proposed a variety of relativistic time-varying models of the cosmos. Einstein himself lost little time in abandoning his static cosmology at that point. In the early 1930s he published two distinct models of the expanding universe one of positive spatial curvature and one of Euclidean geometry. In each case he also abandoned the cosmological constant stating that the term was both unsatisfactory it gave an unstable solution and redundant relativity could describe expanding models of the universe without the term . "Some years later the Russian scientist George Gamow reported in his memoirs that Einstein once described the cosmological constant as his 'biggest blunder' . It is intriguing to think that Einstein might have predicted the expansion of the universe many years before Hubble's observations had he not introduced the cosmological constant. However it must be remembered that Einstein's task in 1917 was to investigate whether relativity could describe the known universe that is a universe that was assumed to be static. If Einstein did make the 'biggest blunder' comment he may have been referring to his failure to notice the instability of his model" O'Raifeartaigh. "In the latter third of the twentieth century the situation in cosmology began to change dramatically. Theoretical cosmology became more and more closely associated with elementary particle theory and observational cosmology began to accumulate more and more data limiting the possibilities for and influencing the construction of cosmological models. The cosmological constant has had a dramatic rebirth with the accumulating observation evidence that rather than slowing down as current theories had predicted the expansion of the universe is actually accelerating with cosmic time. By an appropriate choice of sign and value for λ cosmological models with this property are easily constructed. The problem is to give a physical explanation for such a choice of λ. One favored explanation as of 2007 is that the λ-term in the field equations is actually the stress-energy-momentum tensor for 'dark energy' a hitherto unobserved component pervading the entire universe. If this explanation stands the test of time it may also turn out that the 'cosmological constant' is not constant but varies with cosmological time!" DSB. "Today the term cosmological constant has made a dramatic return to the field equations due to the observation of an acceleration in the expansion of the cosmos. It might therefore be argued that Einstein's real blunder was to abandon the term in the 1930s. However such a view is once again somewhat retrospective because evidence of an accelerated expansion was not known to him. "In recent years the Einstein universe has once more become a topic of interest in theoretical cosmology. In attempts to avoid the well-known problem of a big bang singularity some theorists have become interested in the possibility of a universe that inflates from a static Einstein universe a scenario known as the emergent universe. Whether the emergent universe will offer a plausible consistent description of the early universe is not yet known. But it is intriguing to think that like the cosmological constant the Einstein universe might yet make a dramatic comeback" O'Raifeartaigh. This author's presentation offprint is of extreme rarity and must be distinguished from other so-called 'offprints' of papers from the Berlin Sitzungsberichte many of which are commonly available on the market. The celebrated bookseller Ernst Weil 1919-1981 in the introduction to his Einstein bibliography wrote: "I have often been asked about the number of those offprints. It seems to be certain that there were few before 1914. They were given only to the author and mostly 'Überreicht vom Verfasser' Presented by the Author is printed on the wrapper. Later on I have no doubt many more offprints were made and also sold as such especially by the Berlin Academy." If the term 'offprint' means as we believe it should a separate printing of a journal article given only to the author for distribution to colleagues then 'offprints' were not commercially available. Although there is certainly some truth in Weil's remark in our view it requires clarification and explanation. Until about 1916 most of Einstein's papers were published in Annalen der Physik; from 1916 until he left Germany for the United States in 1933 most were published in the Berlin Sitzungsberichte. The Sitzungsberichte differed from other journals in which Einstein published in that it made separate printings of its papers commercially available. These separate printings have 'Sonderabdruck' printed on the front wrapper the usual German term for offprint but they are not offprints according to our definition. They were available to anyone; indeed a price list of these 'trade offprints' is printed on the rear wrapper. True author's presentation offprints can be distinguished from these trade offprints by the presence of 'Überreicht vom Verfasser' on the front wrapper as in the present offprint. In the period 1916 to 1919 or 1920 the Sitzungsberichte trade offprints are themselves rare: for example RBH list only three 'offprints' of Einstein's famous 1917 Sitzungsberichte paper 'Kosmologische Betrachtungen zur allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie' the auction records do not distinguish between trade and author's presentation offprints. After 1919 or 1920 however the trade offprints become much more common although the author's presentation offprints are still very rare. The reason for this change is that it was only in 1919 that Einstein became famous among the general public. It might seem obvious that Einstein's fame dates from 1905 his 'annus mirabilis' in which he published his epoch-making papers on special relativity and the light quantum. However these works did not make him immediately well known even in the physics community - many physicists did not understand or accept his work and it was two or three years before his genius was fully accepted even by his colleagues. Among the general public Einstein became well known only in late 1919 following the success of Eddington's expedition to observe the bending of light by the Sun which confirmed Einstein's general theory of relativity. This was front-page news and made Einstein universally famous. See Chapter 16 'The suddenly famous Doctor Einstein' in Pais Subtle is the Lord for an account of these events. Before 1919 the trade offprints of Einstein's papers would probably only have been purchased by professional physicists; after 1919 everyone wanted a memento of the famous Dr. Einstein whether or not they understood anything of theoretical physics and the trade offprints of his papers were printed and sold in far greater numbers than before to meet the demand. It is telling that when these post-1919 trade offprints appear on the market they are often in mint condition - they were never read simply because their owners were unable to understand them. In our view Einstein's author's presentation offprints are rare from any journal and any period though of course some are rarer than others. Before 1919 or 1920 the Sitzungsberichte trade offprints are also rare although not are rare as the author's presentation offprints; after 1919 or 1920 the trade offprints are much more common. BRL 96; Weil 92. Clark Einstein: The Life and Times 1971. Kragh Cosmology and Controversy 1996. O'Raifeartaigh O'Keeffe Nahm & Mitton 'Einstein's 1917 Static Model of the Universe: A Centennial Review' The European Physical Journal H 42 2017 pp. 431-74. O'Raifeartaigh 'Albert Einstein and the origins of modern cosmology' Physics Today 3 February 2017 . 8vo 252 x 180mm pp. 142-152 1 blank. Original printed orange wrappers light vertical crease for posting small piece of paper adhered to rear wrapper. W. de Gruyter unknown
1916réf. 6409Berlin: Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften 1916. First edition. First editions extremely rare author's presentation offprint not to be confused with the much more common trade separate - see below from the library of the great German physicist Arnold Sommerfeld of Einstein's derivation of the field equations of gravitation from a variational principle. This was the first time Einstein had derived the field equations of gravitation in arbitrary coordinates - in his celebrated 1915 papers he derived the equations in generally-covariant form but only in special 'unimodular' coordinates. . THE GRAVITATIONAL EQUATIONS FROM A VARIATIONAL PRINCIPLE. First editions extremely rare author's presentation offprint not to be confused with the much more common trade separate - see below from the library of the great German physicist Arnold Sommerfeld of Einstein's derivation of the field equations of gravitation from a variational principle. This was the first time Einstein had derived the field equations of gravitation in arbitrary coordinates - in his celebrated 1915 papers he derived the equations in generally-covariant form but only in special 'unimodular' coordinates. In the early 19th century William Rowan Hamilton 1805-65 showed that Newton's equations of motion for a classical mechanical system were equivalent to the statement that the 'action' of the system now called the Lagrangian has a stationary value generally a minimum. A first variational approach to the gravitational field equations of general relativity was unsuccessfully sketched by Einstein and Marcel Grossmann in 1913-1914 and subsequently by Einstein himself in 1914 the so-called Entwurf Theory. But Einstein's 1914 theory was invalidated by a misconception related to the physically unjustified requirement of restricting the covariance of the gravitational field equations and by some mathematical errors in a crucial proof in the theory. Between March and May 1915 the Italian mathematician Tullio Levi-Civita 1873-1941 in his private correspondence with Einstein singled out the mathematical flaws of the Entwurf theory setting Einstein back on the path of general covariance which eventually brought him in November 1915 to the correct formulation of the gravitational field equations. Also in November 1915 the great German mathematician David Hilbert 1862-1943 published an article in which he correctly showed that Einstein's gravitational field equations could be obtained from a variational principle at least in the presence of an electromagnetic field. Five days later independently of Hilbert Einstein obtained in the present paper the same results thus obtaining the definitive variational formulation of the field equations. Einstein considered his approach to be more general than Hilbert's as Hilbert had made some hypotheses about matter which Einstein dispensed with Einstein also refused to accept the electromagnetic origin of matter which Hilbert had assumed. In the course of this paper Einstein also proved a special case of Emmy Noether's second theorem on the relation between symmetry and conservation laws which she published in full generality two years later. The only author's presentation offprint listed on RBH is that is the collection of Einstein's son Hans Albert Christie's 2006; it was not in Einstein's own collection of his offprints Christie's 2008. Provenance: Arnold Sommerfeld 1868-1951 his characteristic numbering in red pencil '34' on front cover; Institut für Theoretische Physik Munich ink stamp on upper cover. "The son of a physician Sommerfeld was educated at the University of Königsberg. After teaching briefly at the universities of Göttingen Clausthal and Aachen he was appointed professor of physics at the University of Münich in 1906. Sommerfeld should have retired in 1936 in favour of his pupil Werner Heisenberg. Opposition from the Nazi party to Heisenberg's appointment prolonged Sommerfeld's tenure and it was not in fact until late 1939 that he finally retired to be succeeded not by Heisenberg but by Wilhelm Müller a Nazi aerodynamicist without a single publication in physics to his credit. Although Sommerfeld and Heisenberg were not Jewish they were regarded by the Nazis as Jewish sympathizers. Sommerfeld however survived the war and returned to his Münich chair in 1945 continuing to work at physics until he died in a car accident in 1951" Oxford Reference. "Arnold Sommerfeld was one of the most distinguished representatives of the transition period between classical and modern theoretical physics. The work of his youth was still firmly anchored in the conceptions of the nineteenth century; but when in the first decennium of the century the flood of new discoveries experimental and theoretical broke the dams of tradition he became a leader of the new movement and in combining the two ways of thinking he exerted a powerful influence on the younger generation. This combination of a classical mind to whom clarity of conception and mathematical rigour are essential with the adventurous spirit of a pioneer are the roots of his scientific success while his exceptional gift of communicating his ideas by spoken and written word made him a great teacher" Max Born p. 275. "Einstein's first paper on a metric theory of gravity co-authored with his mathematician friend Marcel Grossmann was published as a separatum in early 1913 and was reprinted the following year in Zeitschrift für Mathematik und Physik. Most of the formalism of general relativity as we know it today was already in place in this Einstein-Grossmann theory. Still missing were the generally-covariant Einstein field equations . "In the fall of 1915 Einstein came to the painful realization that the 'Entwurf' field equations are untenable. Casting about for new field equations he fortuitously found his way back to equations of broad covariance that he had reluctantly abandoned three years earlier . on November 4 1915 presented the rediscovered old equations to the Berlin Academy. He returned a week later with an important modification and two weeks after that with a further modification . "When it was all over Einstein commented with typical self-deprecation: 'unfortunately I have immortalized my final errors in the academy-papers;' and 'it's convenient with that fellow Einstein every year he retracts what he wrote the year before.' What excused Einstein's rushing into print was that he knew that the formidable Göttingen mathematician David Hilbert was hot on his trail. Nevertheless these hastily written communications to the Berlin Academy proved hard to follow even for Einstein's staunchest supporters such as the Leyden theorists H. A. Lorentz and Paul Ehrenfest . Ehrenfest's queries undoubtedly helped Einstein organize the material of November 1915 for an authoritative exposition of the new theory . "In March 1916 Einstein sent his new review article 'Die Grundlage der Relativitätstheorie' to Wilhelm Wien editor of the Annalen . In this paper the field equations and energy-momentum conservation are not developed in generally-covariant form but only in special coordinates. Einstein had found the Einstein field equation in terms of these coordinates in November 1915. This part of the review paper is basically a sanitized version of the argument that had led Einstein to these equations in the first place . "As he was writing his review article he was already considering redoing the discussion of the field equations and energy-momentum conservation in arbitrary coordinates. In November 1916 he published such a generally-covariant account in the Berlin Sitzungsberichte the offered paper. This paper is undoubtedly much more satisfactory mathematically than the corresponding part of the review article but it does not offer any insight into how Einstein actually found his theory. Reading the offered paper without having read the November 1915 papers and the 1916 review article one easily comes away with the impression that Einstein hit upon the Einstein field equations simply by picking the mathematically most obvious candidate for the gravitational part of the Lagrangian for the metric field namely the Riemann curvature scalar. This is essentially how Einstein himself came to remember his discovery of general relativity. He routinely trotted out this version of events to justify the purely mathematical speculation he resorted to in his work on unified field theory. "In this paper he derived the generally-covariant field equations from an action principle with the Riemann curvature scalar as the Lagrangian . The present paper fills two important gaps in the review article. First Einstein derived the generally-covariant version of the Bianchi identities which in conjunction with the field equations imply energy-momentum conservation . Second Einstein showed that the identities guaranteeing energy-momentum conservation are a direct consequence of the covariance of the action functional. Einstein had thus in a mathematically impeccable way found a special case of one of Noether's theorems published two years later. "From a purely mathematical point of view the discussion of the field equations and energy-momentum conservation in the present paper is far more elegant than in the review article. This more elegant treatment however obscures the way in which Einstein found the Einstein field equations. It makes it look as if it was a matter ofpicking the most obvious candidate for the Lagrangian the Riemann curvature scalar at which point everything else fell into place. Ironically this is exactly what Einstein in his later years came to believe himself in part no doubt because it made his successful search for the field equations of general relativity look so similar to his fruitless search for a unified field theory. The clumsier discussion in unimodular coordinates in the review article however may serve as a reminder that-whatever he believed said or wrote about it later on-Einstein only discovered the mathematical high road to the Einstein field equations after he had already found these equations at the end of a poorly paved road through physics. Serving as road signs were Newton's gravitational theory Maxwell's electrodynamics and such key results of special relativity as the law of energy-momentum conservation. Considerations of mathematical elegance played only a subsidiary role" Janssen. This author's presentation offprint is of extreme rarity and must be distinguished from other so-called 'offprints' of papers from the Berlin Sitzungsberichte many of which are commonly available on the market. The celebrated bookseller Ernst Weil 1919-1981 in the introduction to his Einstein bibliography wrote: "I have often been asked about the number of those offprints. It seems to be certain that there were few before 1914. They were given only to the author and mostly 'Überreicht vom Verfasser' Presented by the Author is printed on the wrapper. Later on I have no doubt many more offprints were made and also sold as such especially by the Berlin Academy." If the term 'offprint' means as we believe it should a separate printing of a journal article given only to the author for distribution to colleagues then 'offprints' were not commercially available. Although there is certainly some truth in Weil's remark in our view it requires clarification and explanation. Until about 1916 most of Einstein's papers were published in Annalen der Physik; from 1916 until he left Germany for the United States in 1933 most were published in the Berlin Sitzungsberichte. The Sitzungsberichte differed from other journals in which Einstein published in that it made separate printings of its papers commercially available. These separate printings have 'Sonderabdruck' printed on the front wrapper the usual German term for offprint but they are not offprints according to our definition. They were available to anyone; indeed a price list of these 'trade offprints' is printed on the rear wrapper. True author's presentation offprints can be distinguished from these trade separates by the presence of 'Überreicht vom Verfasser' on the front wrapper. In the period 1916 to 1919 or 1920 the Sitzungsberichte trade separates are themselves rare. After 1919 or 1920 however the trade separates become much more common although the author's presentation offprints are still very rare. The reason for this change is that it was only in 1919 that Einstein became famous among the general public. It might seem obvious that Einstein's fame dates from 1905 his 'annus mirabilis' in which he published his epoch-making papers on special relativity and the light quantum. However these works did not make him immediately well known even in the physics community - many physicists did not understand or accept his work and it was two or three years before his genius was fully accepted even by his colleagues. Einstein did not secure an academic position until 1908. Among the general public Einstein became well known only in late 1919 following the success of Eddington's expedition to observe the bending of light by the Sun which confirmed Einstein's general theory of relativity. This was front-page news and made Einstein universally famous. See Chapter 16 'The suddenly famous Doctor Einstein' in Pais Subtle is the Lord for an account of these events. Before 1919 the trade separates of Einstein's papers would probably only have been purchased by professional physicists; after 1919 everyone wanted a memento of the famous Dr. Einstein whether or not they understood anything of theoretical physics and the trade separates of his papers were printed and sold in far greater numbers than before to meet the demand. It is telling that when these post-1919 trade separates appear on the market they are often in mint condition - they were never read simply because their owners were unable to understand them. BRL 90; Weil 88. Born 'Arnold Johannes Wilhelm Sommerfeld 1868-1951' Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society 8 1952 pp. 275-296. Janssen 'Einstein's First Systematic Exposition of General Relativity' 2004 . 8vo 252 x 180 mm pp. 1111-1116. Original orange printed wrappers light vertical crease for posting. Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften unknown
1916réf. 6408Berlin: Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften 1916. First edition. First editions extremely rare author's presentation offprint not to be confused with the much more common trade separate - see below from the library of the great German physicist Arnold Sommerfeld of Einstein's derivation of the field equations of gravitation from a variational principle. This was the first time Einstein had derived the field equations of gravitation in arbitrary coordinates - in his celebrated 1915 papers he derived the equations in generally-covariant form but only in special 'unimodular' coordinates. . THE GRAVITATIONAL EQUATIONS FROM A VARIATIONAL PRINCIPLE. First editions extremely rare author's presentation offprint not to be confused with the much more common trade separate - see below from the library of the great German physicist Arnold Sommerfeld of Einstein's derivation of the field equations of gravitation from a variational principle. This was the first time Einstein had derived the field equations of gravitation in arbitrary coordinates - in his celebrated 1915 papers he derived the equations in generally-covariant form but only in special 'unimodular' coordinates. In the early 19th century William Rowan Hamilton 1805-65 showed that Newton's equations of motion for a classical mechanical system were equivalent to the statement that the 'action' of the system now called the Lagrangian has a stationary value generally a minimum. A first variational approach to the gravitational field equations of general relativity was unsuccessfully sketched by Einstein and Marcel Grossmann in 1913-1914 and subsequently by Einstein himself in 1914 the so-called Entwurf Theory. But Einstein's 1914 theory was invalidated by a misconception related to the physically unjustified requirement of restricting the covariance of the gravitational field equations and by some mathematical errors in a crucial proof in the theory. Between March and May 1915 the Italian mathematician Tullio Levi-Civita 1873-1941 in his private correspondence with Einstein singled out the mathematical flaws of the Entwurf theory setting Einstein back on the path of general covariance which eventually brought him in November 1915 to the correct formulation of the gravitational field equations. Also in November 1915 the great German mathematician David Hilbert 1862-1943 published an article in which he correctly showed that Einstein's gravitational field equations could be obtained from a variational principle at least in the presence of an electromagnetic field. Five days later independently of Hilbert Einstein obtained in the present paper the same results thus obtaining the definitive variational formulation of the field equations. Einstein considered his approach to be more general than Hilbert's as Hilbert had made some hypotheses about matter which Einstein dispensed with Einstein also refused to accept the electromagnetic origin of matter which Hilbert had assumed. In the course of this paper Einstein also proved a special case of Emmy Noether's second theorem on the relation between symmetry and conservation laws which she published in full generality two years later. The only author's presentation offprint listed on RBH is that is the collection of Einstein's son Hans Albert Christie's 2006; it was not in Einstein's own collection of his offprints Christie's 2008. Provenance: Arnold Sommerfeld 1868-1951 his characteristic numbering in red pencil '33' on front cover. "The son of a physician Sommerfeld was educated at the University of Königsberg. After teaching briefly at the universities of Göttingen Clausthal and Aachen he was appointed professor of physics at the University of Münich in 1906. Sommerfeld should have retired in 1936 in favour of his pupil Werner Heisenberg. Opposition from the Nazi party to Heisenberg's appointment prolonged Sommerfeld's tenure and it was not in fact until late 1939 that he finally retired to be succeeded not by Heisenberg but by Wilhelm Müller a Nazi aerodynamicist without a single publication in physics to his credit. Although Sommerfeld and Heisenberg were not Jewish they were regarded by the Nazis as Jewish sympathizers. Sommerfeld however survived the war and returned to his Münich chair in 1945 continuing to work at physics until he died in a car accident in 1951" Oxford Reference. "Arnold Sommerfeld was one of the most distinguished representatives of the transition period between classical and modern theoretical physics. The work of his youth was still firmly anchored in the conceptions of the nineteenth century; but when in the first decennium of the century the flood of new discoveries experimental and theoretical broke the dams of tradition he became a leader of the new movement and in combining the two ways of thinking he exerted a powerful influence on the younger generation. This combination of a classical mind to whom clarity of conception and mathematical rigour are essential with the adventurous spirit of a pioneer are the roots of his scientific success while his exceptional gift of communicating his ideas by spoken and written word made him a great teacher" Max Born p. 275. "Einstein's first paper on a metric theory of gravity co-authored with his mathematician friend Marcel Grossmann was published as a separatum in early 1913 and was reprinted the following year in Zeitschrift für Mathematik und Physik. Most of the formalism of general relativity as we know it today was already in place in this Einstein-Grossmann theory. Still missing were the generally-covariant Einstein field equations . "In the fall of 1915 Einstein came to the painful realization that the 'Entwurf' field equations are untenable. Casting about for new field equations he fortuitously found his way back to equations of broad covariance that he had reluctantly abandoned three years earlier . on November 4 1915 presented the rediscovered old equations to the Berlin Academy. He returned a week later with an important modification and two weeks after that with a further modification . "When it was all over Einstein commented with typical self-deprecation: 'unfortunately I have immortalized my final errors in the academy-papers;' and 'it's convenient with that fellow Einstein every year he retracts what he wrote the year before.' What excused Einstein's rushing into print was that he knew that the formidable Göttingen mathematician David Hilbert was hot on his trail. Nevertheless these hastily written communications to the Berlin Academy proved hard to follow even for Einstein's staunchest supporters such as the Leyden theorists H. A. Lorentz and Paul Ehrenfest . Ehrenfest's queries undoubtedly helped Einstein organize the material of November 1915 for an authoritative exposition of the new theory . "In March 1916 Einstein sent his new review article 'Die Grundlage der Relativitätstheorie' to Wilhelm Wien editor of the Annalen . In this paper the field equations and energy-momentum conservation are not developed in generally-covariant form but only in special coordinates. Einstein had found the Einstein field equation in terms of these coordinates in November 1915. This part of the review paper is basically a sanitized version of the argument that had led Einstein to these equations in the first place . "As he was writing his review article he was already considering redoing the discussion of the field equations and energy-momentum conservation in arbitrary coordinates. In November 1916 he published such a generally-covariant account in the Berlin Sitzungsberichte the offered paper. This paper is undoubtedly much more satisfactory mathematically than the corresponding part of the review article but it does not offer any insight into how Einstein actually found his theory. Reading the offered paper without having read the November 1915 papers and the 1916 review article one easily comes away with the impression that Einstein hit upon the Einstein field equations simply by picking the mathematically most obvious candidate for the gravitational part of the Lagrangian for the metric field namely the Riemann curvature scalar. This is essentially how Einstein himself came to remember his discovery of general relativity. He routinely trotted out this version of events to justify the purely mathematical speculation he resorted to in his work on unified field theory. "In this paper he derived the generally-covariant field equations from an action principle with the Riemann curvature scalar as the Lagrangian . The present paper fills two important gaps in the review article. First Einstein derived the generally-covariant version of the Bianchi identities which in conjunction with the field equations imply energy-momentum conservation . Second Einstein showed that the identities guaranteeing energy-momentum conservation are a direct consequence of the covariance of the action functional. Einstein had thus in a mathematically impeccable way found a special case of one of Noether's theorems published two years later. "From a purely mathematical point of view the discussion of the field equations and energy-momentum conservation in the present paper is far more elegant than in the review article. This more elegant treatment however obscures the way in which Einstein found the Einstein field equations. It makes it look as if it was a matter ofpicking the most obvious candidate for the Lagrangian the Riemann curvature scalar at which point everything else fell into place. Ironically this is exactly what Einstein in his later years came to believe himself in part no doubt because it made his successful search for the field equations of general relativity look so similar to his fruitless search for a unified field theory. The clumsier discussion in unimodular coordinates in the review article however may serve as a reminder that-whatever he believed said or wrote about it later on-Einstein only discovered the mathematical high road to the Einstein field equations after he had already found these equations at the end of a poorly paved road through physics. Serving as road signs were Newton's gravitational theory Maxwell's electrodynamics and such key results of special relativity as the law of energy-momentum conservation. Considerations of mathematical elegance played only a subsidiary role" Janssen. This author's presentation offprint is of extreme rarity and must be distinguished from other so-called 'offprints' of papers from the Berlin Sitzungsberichte many of which are commonly available on the market. The celebrated bookseller Ernst Weil 1919-1981 in the introduction to his Einstein bibliography wrote: "I have often been asked about the number of those offprints. It seems to be certain that there were few before 1914. They were given only to the author and mostly 'Überreicht vom Verfasser' Presented by the Author is printed on the wrapper. Later on I have no doubt many more offprints were made and also sold as such especially by the Berlin Academy." If the term 'offprint' means as we believe it should a separate printing of a journal article given only to the author for distribution to colleagues then 'offprints' were not commercially available. Although there is certainly some truth in Weil's remark in our view it requires clarification and explanation. Until about 1916 most of Einstein's papers were published in Annalen der Physik; from 1916 until he left Germany for the United States in 1933 most were published in the Berlin Sitzungsberichte. The Sitzungsberichte differed from other journals in which Einstein published in that it made separate printings of its papers commercially available. These separate printings have 'Sonderabdruck' printed on the front wrapper the usual German term for offprint but they are not offprints according to our definition. They were available to anyone; indeed a price list of these 'trade offprints' is printed on the rear wrapper. True author's presentation offprints can be distinguished from these trade separates by the presence of 'Überreicht vom Verfasser' on the front wrapper. In the period 1916 to 1919 or 1920 the Sitzungsberichte trade separates are themselves rare. After 1919 or 1920 however the trade separates become much more common although the author's presentation offprints are still very rare. The reason for this change is that it was only in 1919 that Einstein became famous among the general public. It might seem obvious that Einstein's fame dates from 1905 his 'annus mirabilis' in which he published his epoch-making papers on special relativity and the light quantum. However these works did not make him immediately well known even in the physics community - many physicists did not understand or accept his work and it was two or three years before his genius was fully accepted even by his colleagues. Einstein did not secure an academic position until 1908. Among the general public Einstein became well known only in late 1919 following the success of Eddington's expedition to observe the bending of light by the Sun which confirmed Einstein's general theory of relativity. This was front-page news and made Einstein universally famous. See Chapter 16 'The suddenly famous Doctor Einstein' in Pais Subtle is the Lord for an account of these events. Before 1919 the trade separates of Einstein's papers would probably only have been purchased by professional physicists; after 1919 everyone wanted a memento of the famous Dr. Einstein whether or not they understood anything of theoretical physics and the trade separates of his papers were printed and sold in far greater numbers than before to meet the demand. It is telling that when these post-1919 trade separates appear on the market they are often in mint condition - they were never read simply because their owners were unable to understand them. BRL 90; Weil 88. Born 'Arnold Johannes Wilhelm Sommerfeld 1868-1951' Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society 8 1952 pp. 275-296. Janssen 'Einstein's First Systematic Exposition of General Relativity' 2004 . 8vo 252 x 180 mm pp. 1111-1116. Original orange printed wrappers light vertical crease for posting. Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften unknown
1911réf. 6407Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth 1911. First edition. First edition an extremely rare author's presentation offprint with 'Überreicht vom Verfasser' - Presented by the Author from the library of the eminent German physicist Arnold Sommerfeld of Einstein's "first paper completely devoted to general relativity" Brandt Harvest of a Century. In this groundbreaking work Einstein applied the equivalence principle - the idea that acceleration and gravitation are physically indistinguishable - to predict two profound effects of gravity on light: the gravitational redshift and the bending of light by massive bodies. These predictions would later be spectacularly confirmed notably in the 1919 solar eclipse observations cementing Einstein's reputation worldwide. . GRAVITATIONAL RED-SHIFT AND THE BENDING OF LIGHT . First edition extremely rare author's presentation offprint with 'Überreicht vom Verfasser' Presented by the Author stamped on front wrapper from the library of the great German physicist Arnold Sommerfeld of Einstein's "first paper completely devoted to general relativity" Brandt p. 105. This epochal paper applies the equivalence principle that acceleration and gravitation are equivalent in their physical effects to demonstrate two effects of gravity on light: the gravitational bending of light and the gravitational redshift. "In 1911 Einstein proceeded to revise and improve his earlier presentation in 1907 making the principle of equivalence the central feature of his treatment. Einstein now included an elegant proof based on a cyclic process reminiscent of thermodynamics that the gravitational mass of a body as well as its inertial mass is increased by the amount E/c2 when the body absorbs energy E c being the speed of light" Collected Papers p. xxix. Einstein applies this result to show first that if light of frequency ν travels a distance d against a gravitational field which would exert an acceleration g on a gravitating body its frequency is reduced by Δν = νgd/c2 - this is the gravitational redshift. And second Einstein deduced the deflection of a light ray moving in the gravitational field of a spherical body - he finds that the light suffers a deflection toward the source given by 2Gm/dc2 where d is the distance of closest approach to the body of mass m and G is the gravitational constant. "The paper ends with a plea to the astronomers: 'It is urgently desirable that astronomers concern themselves with the question brought up here even if the foregoing considerations might seem insufficiently founded or even adventurous'" Pais p. 200. The bending of light was famously observed by Eddington and his team during a solar eclipse in 1919; the gravitational redshift was more difficult to measure but Einstein's prediction was confirmed by Pound & Rebka at Harvard in 1960 using a laboratory experiment not astronomical observations. "Thus in 1911 we discern the first glimpses of the new Einstein program: to derive the equivalence principle from a new theory of gravitation. This cannot be achieved within the framework of what he called the ordinary relativity theory the special theory. Therefore one must look for a new theory not only of gravitation but also of relativity. Another point made in this paper likewise bears on that new program. 'Of course one cannot replace an arbitrary gravitational field by a state of motion without gravitational field as little as one can transform to rest by means of a relativity transformation all points of an arbitrarily moving medium.' This statement would continue to be true in the ultimate general theory of relativity" Pais pp. 195-196. OCLC lists three copies: King's College London; Württembergische Landesbibliothek; Swiss National Library. RBH list only two other copies both sold by Christie's: the Plotnick copy in 2002 and that in Einstein's own collection of his offprints in 2008. Provenance: Arnold Sommerfeld 1868-1951 his characteristic numbering in red pencil '20' on front cover. "The son of a physician Sommerfeld was educated at the University of Königsberg. After teaching briefly at the universities of Göttingen Clausthal and Aachen he was appointed professor of physics at the University of Münich in 1906. Sommerfeld should have retired in 1936 in favour of his pupil Werner Heisenberg. Opposition from the Nazi party to Heisenberg's appointment prolonged Sommerfeld's tenure and it was not in fact until late 1939 that he finally retired to be succeeded not by Heisenberg but by Wilhelm Müller a Nazi aerodynamicist without a single publication in physics to his credit. Although Sommerfeld and Heisenberg were not Jewish they were regarded by the Nazis as Jewish sympathizers. Sommerfeld however survived the war and returned to his Münich chair in 1945 continuing to work at physics until he died in a car accident in 1951" Oxford Reference. "Arnold Sommerfeld was one of the most distinguished representatives of the transition period between classical and modern theoretical physics. The work of his youth was still firmly anchored in the conceptions of the nineteenth century; but when in the first decennium of the century the flood of new discoveries experimental and theoretical broke the dams of tradition he became a leader of the new movement and in combining the two ways of thinking he exerted a powerful influence on the younger generation. This combination of a classical mind to whom clarity of conception and mathematical rigour are essential with the adventurous spirit of a pioneer are the roots of his scientific success while his exceptional gift of communicating his ideas by spoken and written word made him a great teacher" Max Born p. 275. "In 1907 still working at the patent office in Bern Einstein began to study the laws of physics in reference frames with an accelerated relative motion. When he completed this work in 1915 he called it the General Theory of Relativity. At various occasions Einstein recalled his starting point in this project. It struck him that a man falling from the top of a roof he said did not feel his own weight. In the reference frame of the building it is the weight or gravitational force which make the man fall but in a reference frame moving with the man there is another force exactly counteracting the weight so that there is no net force. In that frame the man stays at rest. Einstein realized that acceleration and gravitation are equivalent to each other. That was later called the equivalence principle. If he would be able to extend his theory of relativity to accelerated reference frames he would be able to do for the theory of gravitation what he had done for electrodynamics with special relativity. He gave a first glimpse at his new topic in a review article on special relativity written in 1907 'Über das Relativitätprinzip und die aus demselben gezogenen Folgerungen' Jahrbuch der Radioaktivität und Elektronik Bd. 4 pp. 411-62" Brandt p. 105. "A few months before the Solvay Congress Einstein had returned to the questions concerning gravitation and accelerated frames of reference that he first raised in his 1907 review article on relativity. These subjects had gone unmentioned in his papers for four years and hardly ever appear in his correspondence during that time. But in June 1911 Einstein completed a short paper 'On the Influence of Gravitation on the Propagation of Light.' This was only a month after his letter to Besso announcing that he was abandoning his efforts to create a new theory of radiation. It looks as though his renunciation of that quest set him free to focus his attention once more on gravitation" Collected Papers p. xxix. "It is characteristic for Einstein that in the same paper he proposed a way to verify his predictions experimentally . From his formula for the gravitational redshift he computed that the frequency of a spectral line emitted by an atom on the surface of the sun would be reduced by two parts in a million when that light reached the earth. Thus a line spectrum originating from the sun is shifted to lower frequencies and therefore to longer wavelengths compared to a spectrum emitted in the laboratory. This redshift is difficult to measure because the surface of the sun is a nasty environment with high pressure storms and magnetic fields all influencing spectral lines. But with modern techniques it has been well established even in the laboratory with radiation climbing against the earth's gravitation for only a few meters. "Einstein also computed the bending of light by gravitation. If the light of a star passes near the surface of the sun and is then observed by an astronomer on the earth the star appears to be in a slightly different position because the light was attracted by the sun and thus the ray was bent on its way from star to the earth. Einstein found a bending angle of 0.83 seconds of an arc. This number was too small by a factor of two but nobody knew because the effect had not been measured. However Einstein himself realized that his theory had to be refined. For a homogeneous gravitational field a field that is constant everywhere he could replace gravitation by a single transformation to an accelerated coordinate system. For a more complicated field like that of the sun or that of all stars the transformation would have to be different for every point in space. That seemed a formidable problem" Brandt p. 106. The correct calculation of light bending was made only in 1915 when Einstein had the final version of general relativity. "His 1911 paper was specifically prompted by his new realization that it should be possible to observe the gravitational bending of light . One had to observe a star whose light would travel close by the sun on its way to the observer. This could be done during a total eclipse of the sun . "Einstein took the initiative in consulting experimental colleagues about the possibilities for checking these results. In August 1911 he began corresponding with W.H. Julius of Utrecht about the gravitational redshift among other matters. At about the same time he raised with Erwin Freundlich at Berlin the question of observing the deflecting of starlight by the gravitational field of the sun a subject on which he corresponded with George Ellery Hale at the Mount Wilson Observatory two years later. There would however be no reliable results on either of these subjects for years to come. But whether or not there were experimental results to help in guiding his work generalizing relativity and creating a new theory of gravitation became the problem that absorbed his attention for the next few years. 'I am just now lecturing on the foundations of that poor dead mechanics which is so beautiful' he wrote to Zangger a month after the Solvay Congress. 'What will its successor look like With that question I torment myself ceaselessly'" Collected Papers pp. xxix-xxx. "English interest in the bending of light developed soon after copies of Einstein's general relativity papers were sent from Holland by de Sitter to Arthur Stanley Eddington at Cambridge . a subsequent report by Eddington . stressed the importance of the deflection of light. In March 1917 the Astronomer Royal Sir Frank Watson Dyson drew attention to the excellence of the star configuration on May 29 1919 another eclipse date for measuring the alleged deflection . Two expeditions were mounted one to Sobral in Brazil led by Andrew Crommelin from the Greenwich Observatory and one to Principe Island off the coast of Spanish Guinea led by Eddington. Before departing Eddington wrote 'The present eclipse expeditions may for the first time demonstrate the weight of light i.e. the Newton value; or they may confirm Einstein's weird theory of non-Euclidean space which predicted twice the Newton value; or they may lead to a result of yet more far-reaching consequences - no deflection' . The expeditions returned. Data analysis began. According to a preliminary report by Eddington to the meeting of the British Association held in Bournemouth on September 9-13 the bending of light lay between 0.87 and double that value. Word reached Lorentz. Lorentz cabled Einstein . Then came November 6 1919 the day on which Einstein was canonized . the setting a joint meeting of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society resembled a Congregation of Rites. Dyson acted as postulator ably assisted by Crommelin and Eddington as advocate-procurators. Dyson speaking first concluded his remarks with the statement 'After a careful study of the plates I am prepared to say that they confirm Einstein's prediction. A very definite result has been obtained that light is deflected in accordance with Einstein's law of gravitation'" Pais pp. 304-305. The gravitational bending of light has recently found a new application - the search for extra-solar planets. ". the 'most curious effect' of the bending of starlight by the gravity of intervening foreground stars - now commonly referred to as 'gravitational microlensing' - has become one of the successfully applied techniques to detect planets orbiting stars other than the Sun while being quite unlike any other . Gravitational microlensing favours a range of orbital separations that covers planets whose orbital periods are too long to allow detection by other indirect techniques but which are still too close to their host star to be detected by means of their emitted or reflected light. Rather than being limited to the Solar neighbourhood a unique opportunity is provided for inferring a census of planets orbiting stars belonging to two distinct populations within the Milky Way with a sensitivity not only reaching down to Earth mass but even below with ground-based observations. The capabilities of gravitational microlensing extend even to obtaining evidence of a planet orbiting a star in another galaxy" Dominik. BRL 39; Parkinson p. 471; Weil 43. The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein vol. 3 The Swiss Years: Writings 1909-1911 Princeton: Princeton University Press 1994. Born 'Arnold Johannes Wilhelm Sommerfeld 1868-1951' Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society 8 1952 pp. 275-296. Brandt The Harvest of a Century Oxford: Oxford University Press 2009. Dominik 'Studying planet populations with Einstein's blip' Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical Physical and Engineering Sciences vol. 368 no. 1924 2010. Pais Subtle is the Lord Oxford: Clarendon Press 1982. 8vo 222 x 144 mm pp. 1 blank 898-908. Original printed orange wrappers light vertical crease for posting. Johann Ambrosius Barth unknown
1906réf. 6413Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth 1906. First edition. First edition a very rare author's presentation offprint with 'Überreicht vom Verfasser' from the library of the eminent German physicist Arnold Sommerfeld of this important sequel to Einstein's revolutionary 1905 paper introducing the light-quantum hypothesis - the foundation of quantum theory. In this follow- up work Einstein further develops the implications of his light-quantum hypothesis arguing that Max Planck's black-body radiation law implicitly relies on the same assumption: that light itself consists of discrete quanta of energy. . EINSTEIN ON HIS LIGHT-QUANTUM HYPOTHESIS . First edition very rare author's presentation offprint "Überreicht vom Verfasser" from the library of the great German physicist Arnold Sommerfeld of this brilliant follow-up to Einstein's landmark 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect for which he was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in physics. "Thomas Kuhn has argued that it is not to Planck in 1900 but to Einstein in 1905 that we owe the origins of quantum theory" Cassidy. In the 1905 paper 'On a heuristic point of view concerning the production and transformation of light' Einstein had explained the photoelectric effect-the emission of electrons from a metal when irradiated by light-by making the revolutionary proposal that light rather than consisting of continuous waves was instead made up of discrete particles of energy "light quanta" which transferred their entire payload of energy to an electron on impact. In the 1905 paper Einstein made use of Planck's formula for blackbody radiation which had introduced the concept of energy quantization. "In a companion paper published in 1906 offered here Einstein exposed appeal to the quantum as fundamentally counter to the ethos of classical physics: 'the theoretical bases on which Planck's radiation theory rests are different from those of Maxwell's theory'. Planck had not initially intended to quantify light-radiation itself but Einstein demonstrated that his own 'light-quantum hypothesis' was implicit in Planck's earlier work" Honner p. 31. "At first Einstein believed that the light-quantum hypothesis was merely 'heuristic': light behaved only as if it consisted of discontinuous quanta . In his 1906 paper Einstein used his statistical mechanics to demonstrate that when light interacts with matter Planck's entire formula can arise only from the existence of light quanta-not from waves" Cassidy. As Einstein stated when he published the 1905 paper "Planck's theory of radiation seemed to me in a certain respect the antithesis of my own. New considerations which are presented in section 1 of this paper demonstrated to me however that the theoretical bases on which Planck's radiation theory rests are different from those of Maxwell's theory and of electron theory. The difference furthermore is precisely that Planck's theory implicitly makes use of the light-quantum hypothesis" p. 199 of the present paper translation from Kuhn p. 182. Later in the paper p. 203 Einstein is forced to make the following assumption: "Although Maxwell's theory is not applicable to elementary resonators the average energy of such a resonator in a radiation field is the same as that which one would compute from Maxwell's theory". "That statement marks the emergence of the basic paradox of the old quantum theory. The theory has recourse to both Maxwell's equations and those of classical mechanics but its further formulation is incompatible with one or both of those classical theories. Other physicists were to exploit the resulting inconsistency as an argument against any form of quantum discontinuity and Einstein himself was deeply disturbed by it . But neither he nor anyone else was successful in finding a classical resolution of the quantum paradox. When two decades later Bohr and others found a way to resolve it Einstein was unable to accept their fundamentally non-classical interpretation" Kuhn pp. 184-185. RBH lists 4 other copies: in the offprint collections of Einstein himself Christie's June 17 2008 lot 100 Richard Green Christie's June 17 2008 lot 101 Hans Albert Einstein Christie's June 14 2006 lot 264 and Harvey Plotnick Christie's October 4 2002 lot 105. This copy was presented by Einstein to one of the leading physicists of the time surely hoping to make himself known in the scientific world when he was still a technical expert in the Swiss Patent Office. Provenance: Arnold Sommerfeld 1868-1951 his signature and characteristic numbering in red pencil '8' on front cover. "The son of a physician Sommerfeld was educated at the University of Königsberg. After teaching briefly at the universities of Göttingen Clausthal and Aachen he was appointed professor of physics at the University of Münich in 1906. Sommerfeld should have retired in 1936 in favour of his pupil Werner Heisenberg. Opposition from the Nazi party to Heisenberg's appointment prolonged Sommerfeld's tenure and it was not in fact until late 1939 that he finally retired to be succeeded not by Heisenberg but by Wilhelm Müller a Nazi aerodynamicist without a single publication in physics to his credit. Although Sommerfeld and Heisenberg were not Jewish they were regarded by the Nazis as Jewish sympathizers. Sommerfeld however survived the war and returned to his Münich chair in 1945 continuing to work at physics until he died in a car accident in 1951" Oxford Reference. "Arnold Sommerfeld was one of the most distinguished representatives of the transition period between classical and modern theoretical physics. The work of his youth was still firmly anchored in the conceptions of the nineteenth century; but when in the first decennium of the century the flood of new discoveries experimental and theoretical broke the dams of tradition he became a leader of the new movement and in combining the two ways of thinking he exerted a powerful influence on the younger generation. This combination of a classical mind to whom clarity of conception and mathematical rigour are essential with the adventurous spirit of a pioneer are the roots of his scientific success while his exceptional gift of communicating his ideas by spoken and written word made him a great teacher" Max Born p. 275. "Einstein started to study black-body radiation well before 1905. Mach's Wärmelehre which Einstein read in 1897 or shortly thereafter contains two chapters on thermal radiation culminating in a discussion of Kirchhoff's work. Kirchhoff showed that the energy emission spectrum of a perfectly black body defined as one absorbing all incident radiation at a given temperature is a universal function of the temperature and wavelength. He inferred that equilibrium thermal radiation in a cavity with walls maintained at a certain temperature behaves like radiation emitted by a black body at the same temperature. "H. F. Weber Einstein's physics professor at the ETH attempted to determine the universal black-body radiation function. He made measurements of the energy spectrum and proposed an empirical formula for the distribution function . anticipating Wien's formulation of the displacement law for black-body radiation. Weber described his work in a course at the ETH given during the winter semester of 1898-1899 for which Einstein registered. "By March 1899 Einstein had started to think seriously about the problem of radiation. In the spring of 1901 he was closely following Planck's work on black-body radiation. Originally Planck had hoped to explain irreversibility by studying electromagnetic radiation but came to recognize that this could not be done without introducing statistical elements into the argument. In a series of papers published between 1897 and 1900 Planck utilized Maxwell's electrodynamics to develop a theory of thermal radiation in interaction with one or more identical charged harmonic oscillators within a cavity. He was only able to account for the irreversible approach to thermal equilibrium by employing methods analogous to those Boltzmann used in kinetic theory. Planck introduced the notion of 'natural' that is maximally disordered radiation which he defined in analogy with Boltzmann's definition of molecular chaos . "Planck calculated the average energy of an oscillator by making assumptions about the entropy of the oscillators that enabled him to derive Wien's law for the blackbody spectrum which originally seemed well supported by the experimental evidence. But by the turn of the century new observations showed systematic deviations from Wien's law for large values of temperature. "Planck in 1900 presented a new energy density distribution formula that agreed closely with observations over the entire spectrum . this expression now known as Planck's law or Planck's formula involves a new constant h later called Planck's constant. To derive this formula Planck calculated the entropy of the oscillators using what Einstein later called 'the Boltzmann principle': S = k log W where S is the entropy of a macroscopic state of the system the probability of which is W and k is 'Boltzmann's constant'. Following Boltzmann Planck took W proportional to the number of 'complexions' or possible microconfigurations of the system corresponding to its state. He calculated this number by dividing the total energy of the state into a finite number of elements of equal magnitude and counting the number of possible ways of distributing these energy elements among the individual oscillators. If the size of the energy elements is set equal to hv where v is the frequency of the oscillators an expression for the entropy of an oscillator results that leads to Planck's formula . "In the 1905 paper Einstein showed that the expression for the volume dependence of the entropy of radiation at a given frequency is similar in form to that of the entropy of an ideal gas. He concluded that 'monochromatic radiation of low density behaves thermodynamically as though it consisted of quanta of energy which are independent of one another' . Einstein opened the paper by pointing out the 'fundamental formal distinction' between current theories of matter in which the energy of a body is represented as a sum over a finite number of degrees of freedom and Maxwell's theory in which the energy is a continuous spatial function having an infinite number of degrees of freedom. He suggested that the inability of Maxwell's theory to give an adequate account of radiation might be remedied by a theory in which radiant energy is distributed discontinuously in space. Einstein formulated 'the light quantum hypothesis' that the energy of a light ray emitted from a point is not continuously distributed over an ever increasing space but consists of a finite number of energy quanta which are localized at points in space which move without dividing and which can only be produced and absorbed as complete units . Einstein asserted that Planck's derivation implicitly assumes quantization of the energies of charged oscillators" Papers pp. 134-142. "In 1905 Einstein could not make sense of Planck's derivation of Planck's law. In fact he seems to have deliberately avoided any reference to Planck's law in his reasoning . The following year Einstein ceased to avoid Planck's law as he discovered a new way to justify Planck's formal steps toward this law. If a resonator of frequency ν can only emit or absorb full light quanta Einstein reasoned then its energy can only be an integral multiple of hν and Planck's characterization of the complexions for a set of resonators receives a dynamical justification. The only remaining difficulty is that Planck's derivation of the relation between the average energy of a resonator and the spectral density of radiation becomes void. Einstein expressed the need of a new derivation based on some quantized dynamics for the interaction between matter and radiation. Ten years elapsed however before he filled the gap" Janssen & Lehner p. 126. In the final section of this paper Einstein gives a new application of his 'heuristic principle' to the explanation of the 'Volta effect' - that when two different metals are placed in contact a potential difference between them is observed. BRL 12; Weil 12. Shields "Writings of Albert Einstein" in Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist 1948 pp. 689-758 no. 13; also included in Shields' "Chronological list of principal works" on p. 757. The Cambridge Companion to Einstein Janssen & Lehner eds. 2014. The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein Vol. 2: The Swiss Years: Writings 1900-1909. Born 'Arnold Johannes Wilhelm Sommerfeld 1868-1951' Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society 8 1952 pp. 275-296. Cassidy "Einstein on the Photoelectric Effect." Einstein: Image and Impact. American Institute of Physics n.d. Honner The Description of Nature 1988. Kuhn Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity 1894-1912 1978. Pais Subtle is the Lord 1982. 8vo 222 x 144 mm pp. 199-206. Original printed wrappers small chip from upper edge of front wrapper. Johann Ambrosius Barth unknown
1915réf. 6406Berlin: Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften 1915. First edition. First editions very rare offprint issue of the first two papers published in November 1915 that document Einstein's final formulation of the general theory of relativity - the culmination of nearly a decade of theoretical work. These papers represent a turning point not only in Einstein's career but in the history of modern physics. Delivered to the Prussian Academy on 4 and 11 November 1915 they contain the essential framework and mathematical formalism of the completed theory preceding the famous final paper of 25 November by just days. Collectively the November papers form the core of Einstein's definitive breakthrough. "In the half century and more of Einstein's work in science one discovery stands above all as his greatest achievement. It is his general theory of relativity" Norton. . EINSTEIN'S COMPLETION OF THE GENERAL THEORY OF RELATIVITY . First editions extremely rare author's presentation offprint not to be confused with the much more common trade separate - see below from the library of the great German physicist Arnold Sommerfeld of the first two of the papers published in November 1915 that document Einstein's final version of the general theory of relativity. "In the half century and more of Einstein's work in science one discovery stands above all as his greatest achievement. It is his general theory of relativity" Norton. "There was difficulty reconciling the Newtonian theory of gravitation with its instantaneous propagation of forces with the requirements of special relativity; and Einstein working on this difficulty was led to a generalization of relativity - which was probably the greatest scientific discovery that was ever made" Dirac quoted in Chandrasekhar p. 3. Einstein's special theory of relativity 1905 showed that the laws of physics are the same in all inertial i.e. non-accelerating frames of reference. It was then natural to ask whether it was possible to extend this principle of relativity to the more general case of frames of reference in arbitrary states of motion. This problem became linked to a theory of gravitation with Einstein's 'equivalence principle' of 1907 according to which the effects of gravity are locally equivalent to those of accelerated motion. Einstein's first steps towards a geometrical theory of gravitation were taken in August 1912 when his friend Marcel Grossmann provided the necessary mathematical tools. "Some time between August 10 and August 16 it became clear to Einstein that Riemannian geometry is the correct mathematical tool for what we now call general relativity theory. The impact of this abrupt realization was to change his outlook on physics and physical theory for the rest of his life" Pais p. 210. The resulting 'Entwurf' theory 1913 had much in common with the final theory of 1915 but based on a fallacious argument Einstein abandoned the requirement that the theory should be 'generally-covariant' i.e. that arbitrary frames of reference should be allowed. "After three years of fruitless peregrinations the revelation came to Einstein that he had been constantly on the wrong track although in 1913 he had been so near to the right solution" Lanczos p. 211. On November 4 1915 he presented to a plenary session of the Prussian Academy a new version of general relativity 'Zur allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie' "based on the postulate of covariance with respect to transformations with determinant 1" and stated that he had "completely lost confidence" in the 'Entwurf' equations. On November 18 he published his calculation of the precession of the perihelion of Mercury based on the new theory: its agreement with observation confirmed that the theory was correct the Entwurf theory predicted half the observed value of the precession. Provenance: Arnold Sommerfeld 1868-1951 his characteristic numbering in red pencil '30' on front cover. "The son of a physician Sommerfeld was educated at the University of Königsberg. After teaching briefly at the universities of Göttingen Clausthal and Aachen he was appointed professor of physics at the University of Münich in 1906. Sommerfeld should have retired in 1936 in favour of his pupil Werner Heisenberg. Opposition from the Nazi party to Heisenberg's appointment prolonged Sommerfeld's tenure and it was not in fact until late 1939 that he finally retired to be succeeded not by Heisenberg but by Wilhelm Müller a Nazi aerodynamicist without a single publication in physics to his credit. Although Sommerfeld and Heisenberg were not Jewish they were regarded by the Nazis as Jewish sympathizers. Sommerfeld however survived the war and returned to his Münich chair in 1945 continuing to work at physics until he died in a car accident in 1951" Oxford Reference. "Arnold Sommerfeld was one of the most distinguished representatives of the transition period between classical and modern theoretical physics. The work of his youth was still firmly anchored in the conceptions of the nineteenth century; but when in the first decennium of the century the flood of new discoveries experimental and theoretical broke the dams of tradition he became a leader of the new movement and in combining the two ways of thinking he exerted a powerful influence on the younger generation. This combination of a classical mind to whom clarity of conception and mathematical rigour are essential with the adventurous spirit of a pioneer are the roots of his scientific success while his exceptional gift of communicating his ideas by spoken and written word made him a great teacher" Max Born p. 275. "In June 1905 while still a patent examiner in Bern Einstein submitted his famous work on the electrodynamics of moving bodies to the Annalen der Physik. This work contained his special theory of relativity in which he asserted the equivalence of all inertial frames of reference as a fundamental postulate of physics. The question which then naturally arose was whether it was possible to extend this principle of relativity to the more general case of frames of reference in arbitrary states of motion. But he could find no workable basis for such an extension until he tried to incorporate gravitation into his new special theory of relativity for a review article in 1907 'Uber das Relativitätsprinzip und die ausdemselben gezogenen Folgerungen' Jahrbuch der Radioaktivitat und Elektronik 4 1907 411-62. The difficulties of this task led him to a new principle later to be called the 'principle of equivalence.' "On the basis of the fact that all bodies fall alike in a gravitational field Einstein postulated the complete physical equivalence of a homogeneous gravitational field and a uniform acceleration of the frame of reference. This extended the principle of relativity to the case of uniform acceleration. It also foreshadowed the problem whose complete solution would lead him to his general theory of relativity: the construction of a relativistically acceptable theory of gravitation based on the principle of equivalence" Norton p. 258. One application of the equivalence principle proved crucial to the subsequent development of his ideas on general relativity. Einstein considered an observer standing on a rotating disc - a non-inertial accelerating reference frame. According to special relativity measuring rods aligned with the circumference of the disc will contract due to their motion whereas measuring rods positioned along the radius of the disc will not. Hence the ratio of the circumference of the disc to its diameter will be less than π. "The spatial geometry for the rotating observer is therefore non-euclidean. Invoking the equivalence principle Einstein concluded that this will be true for an observer in a gravitational field as well. This then is what first suggested to Einstein that gravity should be represented by curved space-time. "To describe curved space-time Einstein turned to Gauss's theory of curved surfaces a subject he vaguely remembered from his student days at the ETH in Zürich. He had learned it from the notes of his classmate Marcel Grossmann. Upon his return to his alma mater as a full professor of physics in 1912 Einstein learned from Grossmann now a colleague in the mathematics department of the ETH about the extension of Gauss's theory to spaces of higher dimension by Riemann and others. Riemann's theory provided Einstein with the mathematical object with which he could unify the effects of gravity and acceleration: the metric field" Janssen p. 65. The first product of this collaboration was the Entwurf einer verallgemeinerten Relativitätstheorie und einer Theorie der Gravitation published before the end of June 1913 which contained many of the essential features of the final general theory of relativity; most importantly it introduced the 'metric' of space-time. In Minkowski's formulation of special relativity 1908 the most important quantity is the 'world function' of two events which determines the metric and causal structure of space-time. If these events have coordinates x y z t and x' y' z' t' in some inertial reference frame the world function is: c2t' - t2 - x' - x2 - y' - y2 - z' - z2 where c is the speed of light. Its crucial property is that it depends only on the two events and not on the choice of inertial reference frame - in other words it is unchanged 'invariant' when x y z t and x' y' z' t' are both subjected to any Lorentz transformation. Einstein and Grossmann began with the world function in differential form: ds2 = c2dt2 - dx2 - dy2 - dz2 If we now subject x y z t to an arbitrary coordinate transformation not necessarily a Lorentz transformation this takes the general form ds2 = g11dx12 g12dx1dx2 . ; the collection of quantities gμν which in general depend on the coordinates x1 x2 x3 x4 is called the metric. Based on analogy with Newton's theory Einstein expected that the gravitational equations should be of the form Gμν = Tμν where Gμν is a purely geometric quantity constructed solely from the metric gμν and its derivatives up to the second order and the 'stress-energy tensor' Tμν contains the information about the matter that is producing the gravitational field including energy density momentum fluxes and stresses. The question was: what exactly should Gμνbe Einstein and Grossmann found that generally covariant equations did not seem to be compatible with energy-momentum conservation or reduce to the equations of Newtonian gravitational theory for weak static fields both essential requirements of the correct theory. Einstein therefore decided to settle in the 'Entwurf' for equations with very limited covariance - instead of arbitrary changes in coordinates only linear ones were allowed. The restricted covariance of the 'Entwurf' field equations continued to bother him until in late August 1913 he convinced himself that such restrictions are unavoidable by means of the infamous "hole argument" first published as an addendum to the reprint of the 'Entwurf' article in Zeitschrift für Physik in January 1914. This ingenious argument showed correctly that if the gravitational equations were generally covariant the metric gμν would not be uniquely determined by the matter distribution i.e. by Tμν. He concluded incorrectly that this implied that general covariance must be ruled out the hole argument does not work if only linear coordinate transformations are allowed. The appropriate analogy is with electromagnetism: the metric is analogous to the scalar and vector potentials of electromagnetism and it was well known certainly to Einstein that these potentials are not uniquely determined by the charges and currents producing the electromagnetic field. That the 'Entwurf' theory was incorrect was made clear by Einstein's attempt in collaboration with Michele Besso another former classmate to explain the motion of the perihelion of Mercury. In 1859 Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier had observed the 'precession' of Mercury's orbit: this orbit is an ellipse but the ellipse is not fixed in space but slowly rotates. From early on in his search for a new relativistic theory of gravitation Einstein had been interested in the problem of Mercury's perihelion. In a letter to his friend Conrad Habicht in 1907 Einstein had already expressed his hope that such a theory would explain the anomalous advance of Mercury's perihelion. Besso visited Einstein in Zürich in June 1913 and the two men calculated the precession expected on the basis of the 'Entwurf' theory. Disappointingly it was only about half the observed anomaly. Einstein left Zürich in March 1914 to take up a professorship in Berlin which was to be his home until December 1932. He made no further progress on the gravitational equations until the summer of 1915 although a detailed exposition of the 'Entwurf' theory was published in October 1914 in which Einstein maintained the need for restricted covariance and even claimed that this determined the gravitational Lagrangian uniquely. "Einstein still believed in the 'old' theory as late as July 1915 between July and October he found objections to that theory and his final version was conceived and worked out between late October and November 25 . What made Einstein change his mind between July and October Letters to Sommerfeld and Lorentz show that he had found at least three objections against the old theory: 1 its restricted covariance did not include uniform rotations 2 the precession of the perihelion of Mercury came out too small by a factor of about 2 and 3 his proof of October 1914 of the uniqueness of the gravitational Lagrangian was incorrect. Einstein got rid of all these shortcomings in a series of four brief articles offered here . "On November 4 Einstein presented to the plenary session of the Prussian Academy a new version of general relativity 'based on the postulate of covariance with respect to transformations with determinant 1'. He began this paper by stating that he had 'completely lost confidence' in the equations proposed in October 1914. At that time he had given a proof of the uniqueness of the gravitational Lagrangian. He had realized meanwhile that this proof 'rested on misconception' and so he continued 'I was led back to a more general covariance of the field equations a requirement which I had abandoned only with a heavy heart in the course of my collaboration with my friend Grossmann three years earlier' . "Einstein and Grossmann had concluded that the gravitational equations could be invariant under linear transformations only and Einstein's justification for this restriction was based on the belief that the gravitational equations ought to determine the gμν uniquely a point he continued to stress in October 1914. In his new paper he finally liberated himself from this three-year-old prejudice. That is the main advance on November 4. His answers were still not entirely right. There was still one flaw a much smaller one which he eliminated three weeks later. But the road lay open. He was lyrical. 'No one who has really grasped it can escape the magic of this new theory.' "The remaining flaw was of course Einstein's unnecessary restriction to unimodular transformations. The reasons which led him to introduce this constraint were not deep I believe. He simply noted that this restricted class of transformations permits simplifications of the tensor calculus . The new equations are a vast improvement over the Einstein-Grossmann equations and cure one of the ailments he had diagnosed only recently: unimodular transformations do include rotations with arbitrarily varying angular velocities. In addition he proved that the new equations can be derived from a variational principle and that the conservation laws are satisfied" Pais pp. 250-252. On November 11 he submitted a 'Nachtrag' to his paper of a week earlier. "Einstein proposes a scheme that is even tighter than the one of a week earlier. Not only shall the theory be invariant with respect to unimodular transformations . but more strongly it shall satisfy the condition that the determinant of the matrix gμν is equal to minus one . During the next two weeks Einstein believed that this new condition had brought him closer to general covariance . One week later he remarked that 'no objections of principle' can be raised against it" ibid. pp. 252-253. Norton p. 309 points out that Einstein had in fact made a significant advance in this paper: namely he had finally found generally covariant field equations that reduced to the Newtonian equations in the weak field limit" ibid. p. 253. On November 18 still retaining the restrictions of his paper of a week earlier Einstein presented in 'Erklarung der Perihelbewegung des Merkur aus der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie'"two of his greatest discoveries. Each of these changed his life. The first result was that his theory explains . quantitatively . the secular rotation of the orbit of Mercury discovered by Le Verrier . without the need of any special hypothesis. This discovery was I believe by far the strongest emotional experience in Einstein's scientific life perhaps in all his life. Nature had spoken to him. He had to be right. 'For a few days I was beside myself with joyous excitement'. Later he told Fokker that his discovery had given him palpitations of the heart. What he told de Haas is even more profoundly significant: when he saw that his calculations agreed with the unexplained astronomical observations he had the feeling that something actually snapped in him . "Einstein's discovery resolved a difficulty that was known for more than sixty years. Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier had been the first to find evidence for an anomaly in the orbit of Mercury and also the first to attempt to explain this effect . In 1859 he found that the perihelion of Mercury advances by thirty-eight seconds per century due to 'some as yet unknown action on which no light has been thrown . a grave difficulty worthy of attention by astronomers'" ibid. pp. 253-254. A more accurate measurement of 43 seconds was made by Simon Newcomb in 1882 and this was precisely the value predicted by the new theory. The prediction of the bending of light in a gravitational field was treated only briefly in 'Erklarung der Perihelbewegung des Merkur aus der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie' probably because no accurate measurement of it had been made so this prediction could not be confirmed at the time. Einstein had realised in 1907 based on the equivalence principle that some bending of light should occur but he believed that the effect was too small to be observed. In 1911 he realized that the effect could be detected for starlight grazing the sun during a total eclipse and found that the amount of bending in that case is 0''.87 - this value could in fact have been computed by Newton from his law of gravitation and his corpuscular theory of light. In 3 Einstein discovered that general relativity implies a bending of light by the sun equal to 1".74 twice the Newtonian value. This factor of 2 set the stage for a confrontation between Newton and Einstein. "It was not until May 1919 that two British expeditions obtained the first useful photographs and not until November 1919 that their results were formally announced . In March 1917 the Astronomer Royal Sir Frank Watson Dyson drew attention to the excellence of the star configuration on May 29 1919 an eclipse date for measuring the alleged deflection . Two expeditions were mounted one to Sobral in Brazil led by Andrew Crommelin from the Greenwich Observatory and one to Principe Island off the coast of Spanish Guinea led by Eddington. Before departing Eddington wrote 'The present eclipse expeditions may for the first time demonstrate the weight of light i.e. the Newton value; or they may confirm Einstein's weird theory of non-Euclidean space; or they may lead to a result of yet more far-reaching consequences - no deflection' . The expeditions returned. Data analysis began. According to a preliminary report by Eddington to the meeting of the British Association held in Bournemouth on September 9-13 the bending of light lay between 0''.87 and double that value. Word reached Lorentz. Lorentz cabled Einstein . Then came November 6 1919 the day on which Einstein was canonized" Pais 304-305. At a joint meeting of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society on that date Dyson concluded his remarks with the statement "'After a careful study of the plates I am prepared to say that they confirm Einstein's prediction. A very definite result has been obtained that light is deflected in accordance with Einstein's law of gravitation'" ibid. p. 305. Three remarks may be made on the speed with which after eight years of struggle Einstein completed these final papers on his theory. The first is that Einstein had come very close to the correct gravitational equations in the second half of 1912 - they are recorded in his 'Zurich notebook' - but he discarded them because of his arguments against general covariance as we have seen. Once he no longer believed in these arguments he could return to the work carried out in the Zurich notebook and complete it. The second is that the detailed calculations in 3 relating to Mercury's perihelion were in fact very similar to those he had carried out with Besso in 1913 and so required relatively little extra effort. The final point is that Einstein was in competition with the great Göttingen mathematician David Hilbert. This author's presentation offprint is of extreme rarity and must be distinguished from other so-called 'offprints' of papers from the Berlin Sitzungsberichte many of which are commonly available on the market. The celebrated bookseller Ernst Weil 1919-1981 in the introduction to his Einstein bibliography wrote: "I have often been asked about the number of those offprints. It seems to be certain that there were few before 1914. They were given only to the author and mostly 'Überreicht vom Verfasser' Presented by the Author is printed on the wrapper. Later on I have no doubt many more offprints were made and also sold as such especially by the Berlin Academy." If the term 'offprint' means as we believe it should a separate printing of a journal article given only to the author for distribution to colleagues then 'offprints' were not commercially available. Although there is certainly some truth in Weil's remark in our view it requires clarification and explanation. Until about 1916 most of Einstein's papers were published in Annalen der Physik; from 1916 until he left Germany for the United States in 1933 most were published in the Berlin Sitzungsberichte. The Sitzungsberichte differed from other journals in which Einstein published in that it made separate printings of its papers commercially available. These separate printings have 'Sonderabdruck' printed on the front wrapper the usual German term for offprint but they are not offprints according to our definition. They were available to anyone; indeed a price list of these 'trade offprints' is printed on the rear wrapper. True author's presentation offprints can be distinguished from these trade offprints by the presence of 'Überreicht vom Verfasser' on the front wrapper as in the present offprint. In the period 1916 to 1919 or 1920 the Sitzungsberichte trade offprints are themselves rare: for example RBH list only three 'offprints' of Einstein's famous 1917 Sitzungsberichte paper 'Kosmologische Betrachtungen zur allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie' the auction records do not distinguish between trade and author's presentation offprints. After 1919 or 1920 however the trade offprints become much more common although the author's presentation offprints are still very rare. The reason for this change is that it was only in 1919 that Einstein became famous among the general public. It might seem obvious that Einstein's fame dates from 1905 his 'annus mirabilis' in which he published his epoch-making papers on special relativity and the light quantum. However these works did not make him immediately well known even in the physics community - many physicists did not understand or accept his work and it was two or three years before his genius was fully accepted even by his colleagues. Among the general public Einstein became well known only in late 1919 following the success of Eddington's expedition to observe the bending of light by the Sun which confirmed Einstein's general theory of relativity. This was front-page news and made Einstein universally famous. See Chapter 16 'The suddenly famous Doctor Einstein' in Pais Subtle is the Lord for an account of these events. Before 1919 the trade offprints of Einstein's papers would probably only have been purchased by professional physicists; after 1919 everyone wanted a memento of the famous Dr. Einstein whether or not they understood anything of theoretical physics and the trade offprints of his papers were printed and sold in far greater numbers than before to meet the demand. It is telling that when these post-1919 trade offprints appear on the market they are often in mint condition - they were never read simply because their owners were unable to understand them. In our view Einstein's author's presentation offprints are rare from any journal and any period though of course some are rarer than others. Before 1919 or 1920 the Sitzungsberichte trade offprints are also rare although not are rare as the author's presentation offprints; after 1919 or 1920 the trade offprints are much more common. BRL 74; Weil 75; Born 'Arnold Johannes Wilhelm Sommerfeld 1868-1951' Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society 8 1952 pp. 275-296. Chandrasekhra 'The general theory of relativity: Why "It is probably the most beautiful of all existing theories" Journal of Astrophysics 5 1984 pp. 3-11; Eisenstaedt The Curious History of Relativity 2006; Janssen 'Of pots and holes: Einstein's bumpy road to general relativity' Annalen der Physik 14 Supplement 2005 pp. 58-85; Lanczos Einstein Decade: 1905-1915 1974; Norton 'How Einstein found his field equations: 1912-1915' Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 14 1984 pp. 253-316; Pais Subtle is the Lord 1982. Large 8vo 252 x 180mm pp. 778-786; 799-801. Original printed wrappers light vertical crease from posting. Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften unknown
1925réf. 6417Berlin: Königlich Akademie der Wissenschaften 1925. First edition. First edition very rare author's presentation offprint from the library of the great German physicist Arnold Sommerfeld with his signature and annotations of Einstein's third paper on his quantum theory of the ideal gas of 1924-1925 Einstein's "last major innovative contribution to physics" Pais Subtle is the Lord. "The arguments advanced in this third paper do not make use of the new Bose-Einstein statistics. Instead Einstein invokes arguments involving dimensional analysis and adiabatic compression" Papers Vol. 14. . BOSE-EINSTEIN STATISTICS - WITHOUT THE STATISTICS. First edition very rare author's presentation offprint not to be confused with the more common trade separate - see below from the library of the great German physicist Arnold Sommerfeld with his signature and annotations of Einstein's third paper on his quantum theory of the ideal gas of 1924-1925 Einstein's "last major innovative contribution to physics" Pais Subtle is the Lord p. 343. In 1924 Einstein received a copy of the Indian physicist S. N. Bose's paper 'Planck's law and the hypothesis of light quanta.' Einstein immediately recognized its importance and had it published shortly followed by a paper of his own applying Bose's ideas to ideal gases rather than radiation molecules rather than light quanta. These two papers laid the foundations of 'Bose-Einstein statistics.' Einstein published a second paper in which he showed that the new statistics led to the prediction of a new state of matter the 'Bose-Einstein condensate' the creation of which in the laboratory was the topic of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics. At the time however many of Einstein's colleagues in particular his close friend Paul Ehrenfest were sceptical of the new statistics. Einstein therefore attempted in the present paper to justify his quantum theory of the ideal gas by more traditional methods rather than the novel statistics he had used in his two previous papers. "It contains an attempt to extend and exhaust the characterization of the monatomic ideal gas without appealing to combinatorics. Its ambiguities illustrate Einstein's confusion with his initial success in extending Bose's results and in realizing the consequences of what later came to be called Bose-Einstein statistics . Its arguments are based on Einstein's belief in the complete analogy between the thermodynamics of light quanta and of material particles and invoke considerations of adiabatic transformations as well as of dimensional analysis. These techniques were well known to Einstein from earlier work on Wien's displacement law Planck's radiation theory and the specific heat of solids" Pérez & Sauer. "In a letter to Ehrenfest he writes that on his next visit in Leyden 'I shall then convince you completely of the gas-degeneracy-equation. I found another safe though not entirely complete approach to it free of the incriminating statistics'. The arguments advanced in this third paper indeed do not make use of the new statistics. Instead Einstein invokes arguments involving dimensional analysis and adiabatic compression" Papers p. lxx. The only other copy of this offprint listed on RBH is that in Einstein's own collection Christie's 2008. Provenance: Arnold Sommerfeld 1868-1951 his signature and characteristic numbering in red pencil '44' on front cover and three annotations in the text. The annotations consist of corrections to formulas 5 on p. 20 11 and 12 on p. 21 16a on p. 23 and 19 on p. 24 to the equation on the last line of p. 22 and to two mathematical symbolson lines 2 and 3 of p. 25. "The son of a physician Sommerfeld was educated at the University of Königsberg. After teaching briefly at the universities of Göttingen Clausthal and Aachen he was appointed professor of physics at the University of Münich in 1906. Sommerfeld should have retired in 1936 in favour of his pupil Werner Heisenberg. Opposition from the Nazi party to Heisenberg's appointment prolonged Sommerfeld's tenure and it was not in fact until late 1939 that he finally retired to be succeeded not by Heisenberg but by Wilhelm Müller a Nazi aerodynamicist without a single publication in physics to his credit. Although Sommerfeld and Heisenberg were not Jewish they were regarded by the Nazis as Jewish sympathizers. Sommerfeld however survived the war and returned to his Münich chair in 1945 continuing to work at physics until he died in a car accident in 1951" Oxford Reference. "Arnold Sommerfeld was one of the most distinguished representatives of the transition period between classical and modern theoretical physics. The work of his youth was still firmly anchored in the conceptions of the nineteenth century; but when in the first decennium of the century the flood of new discoveries experimental and theoretical broke the dams of tradition he became a leader of the new movement and in combining the two ways of thinking he exerted a powerful influence on the younger generation. This combination of a classical mind to whom clarity of conception and mathematical rigour are essential with the adventurous spirit of a pioneer are the roots of his scientific success while his exceptional gift of communicating his ideas by spoken and written word made him a great teacher" Max Born p. 275. The motivation for the publication of this paper is given by Einstein in the opening paragraph translation from Papers Vol. 14 English Translation Supplement: 'Stimulated by a derivation of Planck's radiation formula originating from Bose which consistently supports itself on the light-quantum hypothesis I recently postulated a quantum theory for ideal gas. This theory seems legitimate when one starts out from the conviction that a light quantum disregarding its polarization property differs from a monatomic molecule essentially only in that the quantum's mass at rest is vanishingly small. But because the presupposition of this analogy is certainly not accepted by all researchers and furthermore because the statistical method used by Mr. Bose and me is certainly not beyond doubt but rather just seems justified a posteriori by its success in the case of radiation I looked for other considerations on the quantum theory of ideal gas that are as free of arbitrary hypotheses as possible. These considerations shall be communicated in the following. They provide an effective support for the theory postulated earlier even though the results attained do not yield a full substitute for that theory. Here it is a matter of establishing considerations in the field of gas theory by a method and with results largely analogous to those in the field of radiation theory leading to Wien's displacement law.' "Einstein followed an approach in this paper that was not based only on statistical considerations and that was closer to thermodynamics. He tried to find general conditions that any theory of the ideal gas would have to satisfy mainly by establishing and exploiting analogies with radiation where the displacement law at least provided some hints as to what the radiation law should look like" Pérez & Sauer. The problem Einstein wished to solve was to find the distribution function Ï = ÏL κT V m where L is the kinetic energy κ the Boltzmann constant T the temperature V the volume and m the mass of the molecules. The distribution law will be of the form dn = ÏL κT V mVdp1dp2dp3 / h3 where dn is the number of molecules whose Cartesian components of the momenta are in the range p1 p2 p3 to p1 dp1 p2 dp2 p3 dp3 h is Planck's constant. Einstein did not assume that collisions between molecules are governed by the laws of mechanics. He asserted that if that were the case one would arrive at the classical Maxwell's distribution law. He neglected interactions among molecules this being essentially the definition of an ideal gas. Einstein first used dimensional analysis to place a restriction on the possible forms of the distribution function. He had used similar arguments in his 1909 paper 'Zum gegenwärtigen Stand des Strahlungsproblems' Physikalische Zeitschrift 10 185-193 to deduce Wien's displacement law and in his 1911 paper on the quantum theory of solids 'Elementare Betrachtungen über die thermische Molekularbewegung in festen Körpern' Annalen der Physik 35 679-694. Since Ï is dimensionless a pure number it had to be a function only of dimensionless combinations of L κT V m and h. There are two independent such combinations which means that Ï is reduced to a function of two variables rather than five: A = L/κT and B = mV/N2/3κT/h2. To reduce Ï to a function of a single variable Einstein needed further restrictions. "Einstein proposed two of those: The entropy of an ideal gas does not change in an 'infinitely slow adiabatic' sic compression. The required velocity distribution is valid for an ideal gas also in an external field of conservative forces. Einstein argued that these two properties should be valid disregarding collisions. But the neglect of intermolecular collisions made their assumption unprovable even if they would be 'very natural.' In support of both he announced they would lead not only to the same result but also to a result according to which Maxwell's distribution law is valid in the region where quantum effects can be neglected" Pérez & Sauer. Einstein deduced from these assumptions that Ï = ΨA χB where Ψ and χ are universal functions of dimensionless variables. Einstein then looked at the case in which the constant h disappears from the expression for dn i.e. at the classical limit. He found that Ï = Be-A i.e. the Maxwell-Boltzmann law. In contrast Einstein's statistical theory had produced the expression Ï = B/eA - 1. "Summarizing Einstein pointed out that two aims have been achieved: 'First we found a general condition equation which has to be satisfied by any theory of the ideal gas. Second it follows from the above that the equation of state which I derived will not be changed by either adiabatic compression or by the existence of conservative force fields'" Pérez & Sauer. Why was this paper little noticed by Einstein's colleagues "The practically immediate appearance of the revolutionary contributions of 1925 to quantum theory eclipsed any possible interest of Einstein's paper. The arguments it contains only concern the ideal gas from a thermodynamic perspective. But what is more important it includes hypotheses that were in open contradiction with the course quantum researches had taken. Many physicists had rejected already the laws of mechanics and Einstein assumed their validity for describing the motions of the gas molecules. "The papers of the twenties that refer to Einstein's theory usually mention all three instalments. This indicates that in spite of the almost complete lack of comments on it its existence was known. We are inclined to think that it simply was not of any interest to Einstein's colleagues. Einstein justified the considerations of the non-statistical paper with the deep dissatisfaction over the statistical route by which he had arrived at the new distribution function. However the problem was not whether his colleagues saw Bose's statistics favourably but that in the following months the physicists' ideas around the quantum issues changed substantially. Bose's statistics in spite of implying a way of counting that was incompatible with classical statistics led to an already accepted result. This was much more than could be said of other attempts of explaining for example the Zeeman effect or multielectronic spectra . "In retrospect Einstein's initial suspicion about Bose's statistics will turn into one of the first symptoms of his later distancing himself from quantum mechanics. For this reason we find no justification for the neglect of Einstein's paper by historians of physics. Perhaps we are dealing here with Einstein's last attempt to contribute positively to the construction of the quantum theory for which he had done so much. In addition this paper closed the circle he initiated in 1905 with the hypothesis of energy quanta. First the analogy was going one way now finally it was also going the other way. The statistical dependence among light quanta which had limited the analogy with an ideal gas now was found also among molecules. Hence for the first time the analogy was complete . "The last 'positive contribution' of Einstein to statistical physics includes a paper in which he offered arguments independent of the 'incriminated statistics' because what nowadays is called Bose-Einstein's statistics was not more according to its creator than a calculatory artifice absolutely devoid of any physical meaning. It was simply a consequence of using the wrong mechanics or of not considering some kind of interaction. As Einstein explained to Halpern it 'cannot be considered as giving a true theoretical basis to Planck's law'" Pérez & Sauer. This author's presentation offprint is very rare and must be distinguished from other so-called 'offprints' of papers from the Berlin Sitzungsberichte many of which are commonly available on the market. The celebrated bookseller Ernst Weil 1919-1981 in the introduction to his Einstein bibliography wrote: "I have often been asked about the number of those offprints. It seems to be certain that there were few before 1914. They were given only to the author and mostly 'Überreicht vom Verfasser' Presented by the Author is printed on the wrapper. Later on I have no doubt many more offprints were made and also sold as such especially by the Berlin Academy." If the term 'offprint' means as we believe it should a separate printing of a journal article given only to the author for distribution to colleagues then 'offprints' were not commercially available. Although there is certainly some truth in Weil's remark in our view it requires clarification and explanation. Until about 1916 most of Einstein's papers were published in Annalen der Physik; from 1916 until he left Germany for the United States in 1933 most were published in the Berlin Sitzungsberichte. The Sitzungsberichte differed from other journals in which Einstein published in that it made separate printings of its papers commercially available. These separate printings have 'Sonderabdruck' printed on the front wrapper the usual German term for offprint but they are not offprints according to our definition. They were available to anyone; indeed a price list of these 'trade offprints' is printed on the rear wrapper. True author's presentation offprints can be distinguished from these trade offprints by the presence of 'Überreicht vom Verfasser' on the front wrapper as in the present offprint. In the period 1916 to 1919 or 1920 the Sitzungsberichte trade offprints are themselves rare: for example RBH list only three 'offprints' of Einstein's famous 1917 Sitzungsberichte paper 'Kosmologische Betrachtungen zur allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie' the auction records do not distinguish between trade and author's presentation offprints. After 1919 or 1920 however the trade offprints become much more common although the author's presentation offprints are still very rare. The reason for this change is that it was only in 1919 that Einstein became famous among the general public. Weil 145. Shields "Writings of Albert Einstein" in Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist 1948 pp. 689-758 no. 195. Born 'Arnold Johannes Wilhelm Sommerfeld 1868-1951' Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society 8 1952 pp. 275-296. The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein digital Vol. 14: The Berlin Years: Writings & Correspondence April 1923-May 1925. Pais Subtle is the Lord 1982. Pérez & Sauer 'Einstein's quantum theory of the monatomic ideal gas: non-statistical arguments for a new statistics' Archive for History of Exact Sciences 64 2010 pp. 561-612. 8vo 255 x 183 mm pp. 18-25. Original orange printed wrappers. Königlich Akademie der Wissenschaften unknown
1907réf. 6410Leipzig: S. Hirzel 1907. First edition. First edition an extremely rare offprint from the library of the renowned German physicist Arnold Sommerfeld of one of the most important transitional papers in Einstein's scientific career. In this landmark work Einstein first articulated the equivalence principle - the insight that uniform acceleration and gravitation are physically indistinguishable - a profound realization he later described as "the happiest thought of my life." This concept became the foundation of general relativity marking a pivotal departure from special relativity and setting Einstein on the path toward a relativistic theory of gravitation. . THE EQUIVALENCE PRINCIPLE 'THE HAPPIEST THOUGHT OF MY LIFE' . First edition extremely rare author's presentation offprint with 'Überreicht vom Verfasser' Presented by the Author stamped on front wrapper from the library of the great German physicist Arnold Sommerfeld of this crucially important transitional paper in which Einstein introduced the equivalence principle that uniform acceleration and gravitation are equivalent in their physical effects which launched him on his path to general relativity. "Einstein's efforts to incorporate gravitation into the theory of relativity led him in 1907 to formulate a new formal principle later named the principle of equivalence. He stressed that when gravitational effects are taken into account it is impossible to maintain the privileged role that inertial frames of reference still have in the original relativity theory. He concluded that if gravitation is to be included it is necessary to extend the relativity principle. The search for a group of transformations wider than the Lorentz group under which the laws of physics remain invariant when gravitation is included lasted from 1907 until the end of 1915 leading finally to what Einstein considered his greatest achievement the general theory of relativity" Collected Papers 2 p. xxix. "On p. 443 are probably the first explicit statements both of the equivalence of inertial and gravitational mass and of the equation for mass in terms of energy E = mc2 now regarded as the theoretical basis for the release of atomic energy" Weil. In 1905 "Einstein said that all energy of whatever sort has mass. It took even him two years more to come to the stupendous realization that the reverse must also hold: that all mass of whatever sort must have energy. . With mass and energy thus wholly equivalent Einstein was able in 1907 in a long and mainly expository paper published in the Jahrbuch der Radioactivität the offered paper to write his famous equation E = mc2 . In presenting his equation in 1907 Einstein spoke of it as the most important consequence of his theory of relativity" Hoffmann Albert Einstein p. 81. "Of greatest importance is the last part of the paper which generalizes the principle of relativity from uniformly moving systems to uniformly 'accelerated' systems. . He introduces the principle of equivalence which claims that the problem of a uniform and stationary gravitational field on the one hand and the system moving with a constant acceleration without any gravitation on the other hand are physically indistinguishable situations. This principle put him in a position to find out what effect gravitation has on an arbitrary physical phenomenon because all he had to do was to observe that phenomenon from an accelerated reference system. He thus obtains the speeding up of clocks in a field of increased gravitational potential which must lead to a universal red shift of the spectral lines coming from the Sun and likewise to a bending of light rays near to the limb of the Sun. Furthermore this hypothesis at once makes it clear why inertial mass and gravitational mass must be under all circumstances strictly proportional to one another. . Hence the principle of the energy value of inertial mass must be extended to the gravitational mass" Lanczos The Einstein Decade p. 153. Later Einstein wrote that when he was working on this paper "There occurred to me the happiest thought of my life in the following form. The gravitational field has only a relative existence in a way similar to the electric field generated by magnetoelectric induction. Because for an observer falling freely from the roof of a house there exists - at least in his immediate surroundings - no gravitational field" Einstein's emphasis Pais Subtle is the Lord p. 178. Although Einstein submitted the paper on 4 December 1907; it was published in the January 22 issue of the Jahrbuch. This is one of Einstein's rarest major papers in offprint form. RBH lists three copies: Plotnick Christie's 2002; Einstein's own collection of his offprints Christie's 2008; and Richard Green Christie's 2008. OCLC lists 6 copies worldwide Morgan; Princeton; Stanford; Trinity College Cambridge; Queen's University Kingston ON; Thomas Fisher. This copy was presented by Einstein to one of the leading physicists of the time surely hoping to make himself known in the scientific world when he was still a technical expert in the Swiss Patent Office. Provenance: Arnold Sommerfeld 1868-1951 his signature and characteristic numbering in red pencil '11' on front cover. "The son of a physician Sommerfeld was educated at the University of Königsberg. After teaching briefly at the universities of Göttingen Clausthal and Aachen he was appointed professor of physics at the University of Münich in 1906. Sommerfeld should have retired in 1936 in favour of his pupil Werner Heisenberg. Opposition from the Nazi party to Heisenberg's appointment prolonged Sommerfeld's tenure and it was not in fact until late 1939 that he finally retired to be succeeded not by Heisenberg but by Wilhelm Müller a Nazi aerodynamicist without a single publication in physics to his credit. Although Sommerfeld and Heisenberg were not Jewish they were regarded by the Nazis as Jewish sympathizers. Sommerfeld however survived the war and returned to his Münich chair in 1945 continuing to work at physics until he died in a car accident in 1951" Oxford Reference. "Arnold Sommerfeld was one of the most distinguished representatives of the transition period between classical and modern theoretical physics. The work of his youth was still firmly anchored in the conceptions of the nineteenth century; but when in the first decennium of the century the flood of new discoveries experimental and theoretical broke the dams of tradition he became a leader of the new movement and in combining the two ways of thinking he exerted a powerful influence on the younger generation. This combination of a classical mind to whom clarity of conception and mathematical rigour are essential with the adventurous spirit of a pioneer are the roots of his scientific success while his exceptional gift of communicating his ideas by spoken and written word made him a great teacher" Max Born p. 275. "His first important paper on relativity theory after 1905 is the 1907 review. This article was written at the request of Johannes Stark the editor of the Jahrbuch. On September 25 1907 Einstein had accepted this invitation. On November 1 Einstein further wrote to Stark: 'I am now ready with the first part of the work for your Jahrbuch. I am working zealously on the second part in my unfortunately scarce spare time.' Since this second part contains the remarks on gravitation it seems probable that Einstein's 'happiest thought' came to him sometime in November 1907. We certainly know where he was when he had this idea. In his Kyoto lecture he told the story: 'I was sitting in a chair in the patent office at Bern when all of a sudden a thought occurred to me. 'If a person falls freely he will not feel his own weight!' I was startled. This simple thought made a deep impression on me. It impelled me toward a theory of gravitation' . "Three main issues are raised in Section V of the Jahrbuch article. The Equivalence Principle. 'Is it conceivable that the principle of relativity also holds for systems which are accelerated relative to each other' That is Einstein's starting question. Then he gives the standard argument. A reference frame Σ1 is accelerated in the x direction with a constant acceleration γ. A second frame Σ2 is at rest in a homogeneous gravitational field which imparts an acceleration -γ in the x direction to all objects. 'In the present state of experience we have no reason to assume that . Σ1 and Σ2 are distinct in any respect and in what follows we shall therefore assume the complete physical equivalence of a gravitational field and the corresponding acceleration of the reference frame. This assumption extends the principle of relativity to the case of uniformly accelerated motion of the reference frame . he began by applying his new postulate to the Maxwell equations always for uniform acceleration. He did not raise the question of the further extension to nonuniform acceleration until 1912 the year he first referred to his hypothesis as the 'equivalence principle.' The Gravitational Red Shift. Many textbooks on relativity ascribe to Einstein the method of calculating the red shift by means of the Doppler effect of light falling from the top to the bottom of an upwardly accelerating elevator. That is indeed the derivation he gave in 1911. However he was already aware of the red shift in 1907. The derivation he gave at that time is less general more tortured and yet oddly more sophisticated. It deserves particular mention because it contains the germ of two ideas that were to become cornerstones of his final theory: the existence of local Lorenz frames and the constancy of the velocity of light for infinitesimally small paths . Maxwell's Equations; Bending of Light; Gravitational Energy = mc2. Indomitably Einstein goes on. He tackles the Maxwell equations next. He concludes that Maxwell's equations have the same form in a uniformly accelerated reference frame as in a non-accelerated frame but with a modified velocity of light. 'It follows that the light rays . are bent by the gravitational field.' Second he examines the energy conservation law in the accelerated frame and finds 'a very notable result . In a gravitational field one must associate with every energy E an additional position-dependent energy which equals the position-dependent energy of a 'ponderable' mass of magnitude E/mc2. The law E = mc2 therefore holds not only for inertial but also for gravitational mass' . "This review does not have the perfection of the 1905 paper on special relativity. The approximations are clumsy and mask the generality of the conclusions. Einstein was the first to say so in 1911. The conclusion about the bending of light is qualitatively correct quantitatively wrong - though in 1907 not yet logically wrong. Einstein was the first to realize this in 1915. Despite all this I admire this article at least as much as the perfect relativity paper on 1905 not as much for its details as for its courage" Pais pp. 179-182. "In 1920 Einstein recalled how he first arrived at the ideas behind the equivalence principle: 'While I was occupied in 1907 with a comprehensive survey of the special theory for the 'Yearbook for Radioactivity and Electronics' I also had to attempt to modify Newton's theory of gravitation in such a way that its laws fitted into the theory. Attempts along these lines showed the feasibility of this enterprise but did not satisfy me because they had to be based on physical hypotheses that were not well-founded. Then there came to me the most fortunate thought of my life in the following form: 'Like the electric field generated by electromagnetic induction . the gravitational field only has a relative existence. Because for an observer freely falling from the roof of a house during his fall there exists-at least in his immediate neighborhood-no gravitation field. Indeed if the observer lets go of any objects relative to him they remain in a state of rest or uniform motion independently of their particular chemical or physical composition note by AE: air resistance is naturally ignored in this argument. The observer is thus justified in interpreting his state as being at rest. 'Through these considerations the unusually extraordinary experimental law that all bodies fall with equal acceleration in the same gravitational field immediately obtains a deep physical significance. For if there were just one single thing that fell differently from the others in the gravitational field then with its help the observer could recognize that he was falling in a gravitational field. If such a thing does not exist-which experiment has shown with great precision-then there is no objective basis for the observer to regard himself as falling in a gravitational field. Rather he has the right to regard his state as one of rest and with respect to a gravitational field his neighborhood as field free. The experimental fact of the material-independence of the acceleration due to gravity is thus a powerful argument for the extension of the relativity postulate to coordinate systems in non-uniform relative motion with respect to each other . The generalization of the relativity principle thus indicates a speculative path towards the investigation of the properties of the gravitational field.' "Einstein alludes here to his initial attempts to set up a special-relativistic theory of gravitation but gives no details. In 1933 he gave the fullest account of how he 'arrived at the equivalence principle by a detour Umweg' through such attempts. After mentioning his doubts after 1905 about the privileged dynamical role of inertial systems and his early fascination by Mach's idea that the acceleration of a body is not absolute but relative to the rest of the bodies in the universe he turns to the events of 1907: 'I first came a step closer to the solution of the problem when I attempted to treat the law of gravitation within the framework of special relativity. Like most authors at the time I attempted to establish a field law for gravitation since the introduction of an unmediated action at a distance was no longer possible at least in any sort of natural way on account of the abolition of the concept of absolute simultaneity. 'The simplest thing naturally was to preserve the Laplacian scalar gravitational potential and to supplement Poisson's equation in the obvious way by a term involving time derivatives so that the special theory of relativity was satisfactorily taken into account. The equation of motion of a particle also had to be modified to accord with the special theory. The way to do so was less uniquely prescribed since the inertial mass of a body might well depend on its gravitational potential. This was even to be expected on the basis of the law of the inertia of energy. 'However such investigations led to a result that made me highly suspicious. For according to classical mechanics the vertical acceleration of a body in a vertical gravitational field is independent of the horizontal component of its velocity. This is connected with the fact that the vertical acceleration of a mechanical system or rather of its center of mass in such a gravitational field turns out to be independent of its internal kinetic energy. According to the theory I was pursuing however such an independence of the gravitational acceleration from the horizontal velocity or from the internal energy of a system did not occur. 'This did not accord with an old fact of experience that all bodies experience the same acceleration in a gravitational field. This law which can also be formulated as the law of equality of inertial and gravitational mass now appeared to me in its deep significance. I was most highly amazed by it and guessed that in it must lie the key to the deeper under- standing of inertia and gravitation.' "Turning from later reminiscences let us see how Einstein presented his approach to gravitation in 1907: 'Up to now we have only applied the principle of relativity i.e. the presupposition that the laws of nature are independent of the state of motion of the reference system to acceleration-free reference systems. Is it conceivable that the principle of relativity also holds for systems that are accelerated relative to each other 'This is not the place for an exhaustive treatment of this question. Since however it is bound to occur to anyone who has followed the previous applications of the relativity principle I shall not avoid taking a position on the question here. Consider two systems in motion Σ1 and Σ2. Let Σ1 be accelerated in the direction of its X -axis and let γ be the magnitude constant in time of this acceleration. Let Σ2 be at rest but in a homogeneous gravitational field that imparts an acceleration -γ in the direction of the X -axis to all objects. As far as we know the laws of physics with respect to Σ1do not differ from those with respect to Σ2; this is due to the circumstance that all bodies in a gravitational field are equally accelerated. So we have no basis in the current state of our experience for the assumption that the systems Σ1and Σ2differ from each other in any respect; and therefore in what follows shall assume the complete physical equivalence of a gravitational field and the corresponding acceleration of a reference system. 'This assumption extends the principle of relativity to the case of uniformly-accelerated translational motion of the reference system. The heuristic value of this assumption lies in the circumstance that it allows the replacement of a homogeneous gravitational field by a uniformly accelerated reference system which to a certain extent is amenable to theoretical treatment.' "Some further comments on this equivalence in his next paper on gravitation in 1911 are illuminating. He notes that in both systems objects subject to no other forces fall with constant acceleration: 'For the accelerated system K′ corresponding to the 1907 Σ1 this follows directly from the Galileian principle of inertia; for the system K at rest in a homogeneous gravitational field corresponding to the 1907 Σ2 however it follows from the experimental fact that in such a field all bodies are equally strongly uniformly accelerated. This experience of the equal falling of all bodies in a gravitational field is the most universal with which the observation of nature has provided us; in spite of that this law has not found any place in the foundations of our physical picture of the world . From this standpoint one can as little speak of the absolute acceleration of a reference system as one can of the absolute velocity of a system according to the usual special theory of relativity. Naturally one cannot replace an arbitrary gravitational field by a state of motion of the system without a gravitational field; just as little as one can trans- form all points of an arbitrarily moving medium to rest by a relativity transformation. From this standpoint the equal falling of all bodies in a gravitational field is obvious. 'As long as we confine ourselves to purely mechanical processes within the realm of validity of Newtonian mechanics we are certain of the equivalence of the systems K and K′. Our point of view will only have a deeper significance however if the systems K and K′ are equivalent with respect to all physical processes i.e. if the laws of nature with respect to K agree completely with those with respect to K′. By assuming this we obtain a principle that if it really is correct possesses a great heuristic significance. For by means of theoretical consideration of processes that take place relative to a uniformly accelerated reference system we obtain conclusions about the course of processes in a homogeneous gravitational field.' "With hindsight one can see that Einstein's attempt to find the best way to implement mathematically the physical insights about gravitation incorporated in the equivalence principle was hampered significantly by the absence of the appropriate mathematical concepts. His insight as he put is a few years later that gravitation and inertia are "essentially the same" wesensgleich cries out for implementation by their incorporation into a single inertio-gravitational field represented mathematically by a non-flat affine connection on a four-dimensional manifold. But the concept of such a connection was only developed after and largely in response to the formulation of the general theory. So Einstein had to make do with what was available: Riemannian geometry and the tensor calculus as developed by the turn of the century i.e. based on the concept of the metric tensor without a geometrical interpretation of the covariant derivative" Stachel pp. 83-86. BRL 20; Stanitz 94; Weil 21. Born 'Arnold Johannes Wilhelm Sommerfeld 1868-1951' Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society 8 1952 pp. 275-296. Stachel 'The first two acts' pp. 81-112 in: Gravitation in the Twilight of Classical Physics. The Promise of Mathematics Renn & Schemmel eds. 2007. 8vo 231 x 157 mm pp. 411-462. Original printed wrappers upper cover a bit soiled lower part of spine worn light vertical crease for posting faint ink stain to page 418 spine strip with wear and tear. S. Hirzel unknown
1905réf. 6412Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth 1905. First edition. First edition rare author's presentation offprint 'Überreicht vom Verfasser' from the library of Arnold Sommerfeld - carrying his ink signature the red-pencil accession number '4' of his Einstein-offprint collection and his autograph pencil calculations on two pages - of the paper on light quanta and the photoelectric effect for which Einstein was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize and the only one of his four annus mirabilis papers that he called sehr revolutionär. From Wien's radiation law he shows that the entropy of high-frequency radiation has the thermodynamic form of an ideal gas of independent quanta of energy hv and applies it to Stokes's rule photoionisation and the photoelectric effect. Sommerfeld's pencil decodes Einstein's β as h/k on p. 136 using the refined constants of Planck's 1906 Vorlesungen and on p. 146 computes Rβ/E the predicted slope h/e of the photoelectric line that Millikan would measure 1912-1916. Sommerfeld with Debye in 1913 argued the equation could be recovered without the light quantum; Compton's 1923 scattering results won him over. . Einstein's Nobel Prize Paper. First edition rare author's presentation offprint 'Überreicht vom Verfasser' from the library of Arnold Sommerfeld - carrying his ink signature the red-pencil accession number '4' of his Einstein-offprint collection beneath Einstein's printed name and his autograph pencil calculations in the margins of two crucial pages - of the paper on light quanta and the photoelectric effect for which Einstein was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics. Of the four epochal papers Einstein produced during his annus mirabilis this is the only one he himself described as revolutionary and the one that most squarely broke with the nineteenth-century physics in which he had been trained. It is also the paper on which Thomas Kuhn built his argument that the origin of quantum theory belongs not to Planck in 1900 but to Einstein in 1905. Provenance: Arnold Sommerfeld 1868-1951 with his ink signature the red-pencil accession number '4' of his Einstein-offprint collection beneath Einstein's printed name on the front wrapper and his pencil calculations in the margins of pp. 136 and 146 with a pencilled mark on p. 145. Appointed to the chair of theoretical physics at Munich in 1906 the year after the present paper appeared he held it for more than three decades. Trained at Königsberg under Hurwitz and Lindemann he came to theoretical physics through mathematics and remained one of its greatest teachers. His Munich institute became the most important training ground in the discipline: Heisenberg Pauli Debye Bethe Ewald Landé Laporte and Morse were among his doctoral students and the institute's seminar room served as the workshop in which the old quantum theory took shape. Sommerfeld's own contributions to that theory - the quantisation of elliptical orbits the fine-structure formula the introduction of the fine-structure constant the systematics of selection rules and later the free-electron theory of metals - place him among the founders of modern atomic physics. His textbook Atombau und Spektrallinien first published in 1919 and repeatedly revised was for a generation the standard exposition of the subject. When the ageing professor was due to retire in 1936 in favour of Heisenberg the National Socialist authorities blocked the succession on the grounds that Sommerfeld and his nominee were insufficiently aligned with party science; the chair remained vacant until 1939 and passed in the end to a political appointment. Sommerfeld returned to his institute after the war and continued working until his death in a road accident in Munich in 1951. Max Born in his Royal Society obituary described him as combining classical clarity with the pioneering instinct. The red-pencil '4' on the front wrapper is one entry in a systematic accession numbering that runs in red chinagraph across Sommerfeld's collection of Einstein offprints. Thirteen numbered copies have so far been documented and their numbers are strictly chronological in the papers' publication dates: 4 on the present 1905 paper; 20 on the 1911 paper on gravitation and the propagation of light; 30 on the November 1915 'Zur allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie' with its Nachtrag; 33 and 34 on two duplicate copies of the 1916 'Hamiltonsches Prinzip' taking consecutive numbers; 36 on the 1917 'Kosmologische Betrachtungen'; and 40 44 45 46 47 48 and 49 on papers of 1923-1929 ending with the unified-field-theory series - the sequence resolved to the month even within a single year 44 on a January 1925 paper 45 on a July 1925 paper. The scheme is thus a running ledger of the collection in order of publication and the '4' identifies the present offprint as the fourth Einstein item in it implying just three earlier papers - necessarily drawn from Einstein's handful of Annalen papers of 1901-1904 - ahead of it. One of the documented copies also bears the pre-1918 stamp of Sommerfeld's Munich institute where his papers and library are recorded as having remained for decades after his death in 1951 consistent with the collection surviving intact long into the twentieth century. No published account of the Sommerfeld offprint collection exists; the reconstruction of the scheme rests on the documented copies themselves of which the present one is the earliest. Completed in Bern on 17 March 1905 and dispatched to Annalen der Physik the following day the paper was the first of Einstein's great 1905 contributions - the others being the doctoral dissertation on molecular dimensions the paper on Brownian motion and the two papers founding the special theory of relativity. Einstein was at the time a twenty-six-year-old technical expert third class at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern without academic affiliation without institutional laboratory with his doctorate not yet conferred and with a circle of scientific correspondents that ran to little more than his old Olympia Academy companions Conrad Habicht and Maurice Solovine. The regular correspondence with Planck Laue Stark Sommerfeld Wien and Lorentz that would bring him into the German-speaking academic world lay still in the future; his first surviving letter to Sommerfeld is dated 5 January 1908. The printed presentation formula on the wrapper marks the present copy as one of the small stock of author's offprints Einstein had in hand by the spring of 1905; how and when it reached Sommerfeld is not documented. Their acquaintance in fact opens over relativity rather than light quanta - the 1908 letter discusses the velocity of signals and the two men first met in person at the Salzburg Naturforscherversammlung of September 1909 - but the pencil annotations described below place the close study of this copy in precisely those years as Sommerfeld newly installed in the Munich chair of theoretical physics was turning himself and his school toward the quantum theory of radiation. Writing to Habicht in May 1905 Einstein sketched the four papers that were about to appear and reserved a particular adjective for this one alone. The first he explained concerned radiation and the energetic properties of light and was sehr revolutionär. The second determined the true sizes of atoms from the viscosity of dilute solutions. The third derived the irregular motion of small bodies suspended in a liquid from the molecular-kinetic theory of heat. The fourth still in draft would treat the electrodynamics of moving bodies and would alter as Einstein promised the theory of space and time. In that taxonomy only the light-quantum paper is singled out as revolutionary and Einstein's self-assessment has proved durable. Relativity consummated a line of nineteenth-century thought extending from Maxwell through Lorentz and Poincaré; the light-quantum hypothesis set itself against that entire line. The paper opens from a formal asymmetry that physicists had tolerated without remark. The state of a gas or any ponderable body is described by the positions and velocities of a finite if very large number of atoms and electrons so that the energy of such a body is a sum over a discrete basis. The state of an electromagnetic field by contrast is given by continuous functions in space so that in Maxwell's theory the energy of radiation is an integral over an infinite number of degrees of freedom. Einstein proposes that this asymmetry is not merely formal but physical - that radiation energy like matter may in certain circumstances behave as if it were concentrated into a finite number of localised packets. The wave theory he grants is magnificent where it applies but its predictions refer to time-averaged field values so that nothing in the experimental record rules out a granular structure on short timescales or at low densities of the radiation. The positive case for light quanta rests on a thermodynamic analogy that Einstein develops with remarkable economy. Using Wien's radiation law valid in the high-frequency tail of the black-body spectrum he writes down the entropy of monochromatic radiation of fixed frequency as a function of its volume. The resulting expression has exactly the form of the entropy of an ideal gas whose particle number equals the radiation energy divided by hv. In the Wien region in other words radiation behaves thermodynamically as a collection of independent energy quanta of magnitude hv. This simple audacious conclusion - that the entropy-volume relation of radiation is that of a gas of particles - is the paper's load-bearing result and it arrives without any appeal to detailed mechanical models of emission or absorption. From this thermodynamic footing Einstein advances to three predictions. Stokes's rule stating that fluorescent light has a lower frequency than the exciting light follows directly on the hypothesis that one absorbed quantum of energy hv can re-emit at most one quantum of no greater energy: the emitted frequency cannot exceed the absorbed frequency because the emitted quantum cannot exceed hv in energy. Photoionisation of gases by ultraviolet light follows from the condition that the ionisation energy of a molecule cannot be greater than the energy of the absorbed quantum. And the photoelectric effect in which metallic surfaces release electrons under illumination is reformulated into what became known as Einstein's photoelectric equation: the maximum kinetic energy of the ejected electron equals hv minus the work function of the metal. The linearity of electron energy in frequency and the independence of the slope from the material are predictions derived from the quantum hypothesis. It is on precisely these last two sections of the paper that the Sommerfeld copy speaks most directly. At the foot of p. 136 beside Einstein's statement of Planck's formula with the constants α = 6.10 × 10−56 and β = 4.866 × 10−11 Sommerfeld has written in pencil β = h/κ = 6.548 × 10−27 / 1.346 × 10−16 grad·sec. Einstein throughout his paper uses Planck's 1901 constants α and β without explicitly connecting them back to Planck's action quantum h and to what would later be called Boltzmann's constant k. Sommerfeld's pencil step reconstructs the bridge - Einstein's β is nothing other than the ratio h/k and 'grad·sec' is that ratio's correct unit - and the numbers he inserts identify the very book he was working from. The pair h = 6.548 × 10−27 erg·sec and k = 1.346 × 10−16 erg/grad appears in exactly this form as equation 252 of Planck's Vorlesungen über die Theorie der Wärmestrahlung Leipzig 1906 p. 162 - Planck's own refinement of the rounder values of his 1901 paper - and so far as can be established nowhere else: Planck's second edition of 1913 revised the figure to 6.415 and the later determinations of Millikan 1916 and Birge 1919 differ again. Planck's 1906 text even cites Einstein's paper by page in the passage immediately preceding that equation. The annotation thus records a reader checking Einstein's constants against Planck's newest determination with the textbook open beside the offprint at some point between 1906 and about 1912 - the very years in which Sommerfeld entered the quantum theory of radiation. On p. 146 the second pencil annotation sits beside Einstein's derivation of the photoelectric equation ΠE = Rβv − P′ where E = 9.6 × 103 is the charge of a gram-equivalent of a monovalent ion and Π is the stopping potential required to arrest the photoelectrons. Sommerfeld has written out Rβ/E = 8.31 × 107 · 4.866 × 10−11 / 9.6 × 103 - that is the slope dΠ/dv of the stopping potential against frequency. Because Rβ = Rh/k = Nh and the Faraday E = Ne this ratio reduces algebraically to h/e. What Sommerfeld is pencilling in the margin is therefore the predicted slope of Einstein's photoelectric line - the very constant that Robert Andrews Millikan would spend the years 1912-1916 measuring and whose accurate determination by the straight-line fit of electron energy against frequency delivered in 1916 both the most stringent early confirmation of Einstein's equation and a precise new value of Planck's h. On p. 145 a small pencilled '2' and two double dashes in the outer margin bracket a single sentence of §8 - Einstein's caveat that it should not be excluded 'daß Elektronen die Energie von Lichtquanten nur teilweise aufnehmen' that electrons might take up the energy of light quanta only partially. That is precisely the loophole on which the semi-classical readings of the photoelectric equation would later be built Sommerfeld's own among them. That Sommerfeld should have traced those calculations on his own copy is more than incidental. In January 1910 he told Lorentz that he was 'old-fashioned enough to resist for now the light quanta in Einstein's conception' and through the 1910s he was himself among the physicists who argued that Einstein's photoelectric equation could be recovered on semi-classical non-Einsteinian grounds - that is that the equation stood while the light-quantum hypothesis from which Einstein had derived it need not be accepted. Planck Debye Lorentz and O. W. Richardson held variants of the same position; the fullest contemporaneous statement of this approach is Debye and Sommerfeld 'Theorie des lichtelektrischen Effektes vom Standpunkt des Wirkungsquantums' Annalen der Physik 346 1913 pp. 873-930. It would take the Compton experiments of 1922-1923 to change Sommerfeld's mind - at which point he declared with characteristic decisiveness that Compton's scattering results sounded the death knell of the classical wave theory of radiation a position he made public in the preface to the fourth edition of Atombau und Spektrallinien Vieweg 1924 pp. vii-viii where he wrote that he had clung to the wave theory as long as possible before being 'impelled to adopt more and more the position of the extreme light quantum theory'. The two pencil derivations on this copy then are the working-notes precursors to nearly twenty years of sustained theoretical engagement by one of the foremost teachers of modern physics with the very pages marked. The audacity of Einstein's argument was not lost on his contemporaries and neither was its precariousness. The light-quantum hypothesis demanded that a century of evidence for the wave theory - diffraction interference polarisation the entire edifice of physical optics - be folded into a picture in which radiation also travelled as discrete packets. Einstein himself acknowledged the strain and used the word heuristisch in his title to temper it. For nearly two decades after 1905 his contemporaries resisted the hypothesis even as they accepted the equation. When Planck Nernst Rubens and Warburg proposed Einstein for election to the Prussian Academy in 1913 they prefaced their glowing recommendation by asking that he not be held too severely to account for those of his speculations that had missed their mark - their example being precisely the hypothesis of light quanta. Millikan reporting the decisive experimental confirmation of Einstein's photoelectric equation in 1916 went out of his way to describe the underlying quantum hypothesis as untenable and reached instead for classical interpretations. Only with Compton's scattering experiments in 1923 did the physics community at large concede that light itself and not merely its interaction with matter demanded the quantum. The prehistory of the paper runs back to Einstein's undergraduate years. Mach's Wärmelehre which he read in Aarau or shortly thereafter devoted two chapters to thermal radiation and closed with an account of Kirchhoff's universal black-body law. H. F. Weber's physics course at the ETH in the winter of 1898-1899 for which Einstein registered presented measurements of the energy spectrum of thermal radiation and an empirical distribution function that anticipated Wien's displacement law. By March 1899 Einstein had begun thinking seriously about radiation and by the spring of 1901 he was reading Planck with care and scepticism. Planck had derived the black-body formula of 1900 by dividing the energy of a collection of charged oscillators into discrete elements of size hv and counting the ways these elements could be distributed - a procedure that as Einstein would later show is only consistent if one admits that the oscillators themselves can hold only energies that are integer multiples of hv. Planck himself had been unwilling to draw that conclusion. Einstein in 1905 draws it without apology and goes further: if oscillators can hold only quantised energies then the radiation field with which they are in equilibrium must also at least in some regimes be granular. Einstein prepared himself for this step with a long study of the foundations of statistical physics conducted between 1902 and 1904. That work yielded three tools that became indispensable to his quantum argument. The first was the canonical ensemble which gave him a general framework for calculating mean values in thermal equilibrium. The second was a careful reinterpretation of the Boltzmann principle S = k log W in which the probability W is counted over the accessible microstates of the system. The third was a method for computing mean-square fluctuations of state variables at equilibrium. Applied to radiation in thermal equilibrium the fluctuation method reproduced Wien's displacement law and more tellingly suggested that radiation behaved as if its phase space had a finite dimension - an intimation of the quantum granularity the 1905 paper would go on to assert. Two features make the 1905 quantum paper unique even within Einstein's own subsequent work on the subject. It does not rely on Planck's radiation law; it uses only the Wien limit. And it does not rely on the apparatus of the canonical ensemble that Einstein had developed; the argument proceeds through a thermodynamic analogy between radiation entropy and gas entropy. This austerity is part of its power: by leaning on nothing but thermodynamics and the Wien law Einstein removes every interpretive crutch that might soften the conclusion. The radiation is behaving as a gas of particles because the thermodynamic form of its entropy says so. Einstein submitted the paper to Annalen der Physik on 18 March 1905. It appeared in the first issue of Band 17 distributed on 9 June 1905. By April 1905 however - and therefore weeks before the journal issue was bound up and circulated - Einstein had already received his allotment of offprints: his letter to Habicht announcing the four forthcoming papers indicates that he had separates in hand. On the priority of issue then the offprint precedes the journal printing and the printed presentation statement 'Überreicht vom Verfasser' on the wrapper of copies such as the present one marks them as part of the small stock that passed through Einstein's own hands. That circle was small. Weil in the standard bibliography of Einstein's writings notes that the number of offprints produced of papers before 1914 appears to have been very modest that they were given to the author only and that the wrappers usually carry the printed presentation formula. Later trade-attributed testimony from Hans Albert Einstein's copy of the Brownian-motion offprint puts the typical print run for Einstein's early offprints at twenty-five to thirty copies. Of the light-quantum paper in particular offprints in any condition are now encountered only very occasionally in commerce and copies preserved in their original wrappers are rarer still. References: Norman 689 - Weil Einstein Bibliography 6 - Boni Russ & Laurence Bibliographical Checklist 7 - Pais Subtle Is the Lord pp. 364-368 - Planck Vorlesungen über die Theorie der Wärmestrahlung Leipzig: Barth 1906 p. 162 the source of the annotated constants - Eckert Arnold Sommerfeld: Science Life and Turbulent Times Springer 2013 - Born 'Sommerfeld 1868-1951' Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society 8 1952 pp. 275-296 - Cassidy 'Einstein on the Photoelectric Effect' in Einstein: Image and Impact American Institute of Physics - Stachel et al. eds The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein vol. 2 pp. 134-142 and vol. 5 doc. 72 Einstein to Sommerfeld 5 January 1908 - Eckert & Märker eds Arnold Sommerfeld: Wissenschaftlicher Briefwechsel Band 1: 1892-1918 GNT-Verlag 2000 - Stuewer 'Einstein's Revolutionary Light-Quantum Hypothesis' Acta Physica Polonica B 37 2006 pp. 543-558 - Printing and the Mind of Man 391 Planck's precursor quantum papers. Offprint from Annalen der Physik 4. Folge 17. Band 1905. 8vo 222 × 144 mm pp. 1 132-148. Original printed wrappers with 'A. Einstein. Überreicht vom Verfasser' printed in bold type on the front cover upper outer corner of rear wrapper with loss well clear of the printed area; small chips to the lower outer corner of the front wrapper and to the foot of the spine; faint vertical creases to the front wrapper. . Johann Ambrosius Barth unknown
1931réf. 021909New York: Covici Friede 1931. First Edition. hardcover. Some pencil markings in text title page and endpapers darkened not really affecting Einstein's inscription; covers a little soiled. Good to Very Good and quite scarce. With a long biographical note and an appreciation by George Bernard Shaw. Subjects include Disarmament Pacifism the Jewish Homeland and more. This copy INSCRIBED and SIGNED by the author with his scarcer full signature on the front endpaper: "To little Pauline/Albert Einstein/1933." An uncommon title to find signed by the man of the century. With a letter of authenticity from James Spence if you need that kind of security blanket. Covici Friede hardcover
réf. 10361210-6Taylor & Francis Group. Used - Very Good. Former library copy. Pages intact with possible writing/highlighting. Binding strong with minor wear. Dust jackets/supplements may not be included. Includes library markings. Stock photo provided. Product includes identifying sticker. Better World Books: Buy Books. Do Good. Taylor & Francis Group unknown
réf. A9780691246161Paperback / softback. New. paperback
réf. A9780393097337Hardback. New. An illustrated history of musical thought in the nineteenth century and its relationship to the Romantic movement. hardcover
1919réf. 6166Berlin: Verlag der Akademie der Wissenschaften In Kommission bei Walter de Gruyter Reichsdruckerei 1919. First edition. First edition extremely rare author's presentation offprint 'Überreicht vom Verfasser' and the copy of Einstein's son Hans Albert of "Einstein's first attempt at a unified field theory" Pais Subtle is the Lord. Once Einstein completed work on the general theory of relativity at the end of 1915 "his attention shifted to the search for a unified theory of the electromagnetic and gravitational fields out of which he hoped to be able to explain the structure of matter. Quantum effects were to be derived from such a theory rather than postulated ad hoc. This remained his approach for the rest of his life" Cao Conceptual foundations of quantum field theory. . EINSTEIN'S FIRST ATTEMPT AT A UNIFIED FIELD THEORY" PAIS HANS ALBERT EINSTEIN'S COPY OF THE PRESENTATION OFFPRINT. First edition extremely rare author's presentation offprint 'Überreicht vom Verfasser' and the copy of Einstein's son Hans Albert of "Einstein's first attempt at a unified field theory" Pais Subtle is the Lord p. 287. Once Einstein completed work on the general theory of relativity at the end of 1915 "his attention shifted to the search for a unified theory of the electromagnetic and gravitational fields out of which he hoped to be able to explain the structure of matter. Quantum effects were to be derived from such a theory rather than postulated ad hoc. This remained his approach for the rest of his life" Cao Conceptual foundations of quantum field theory pp. 166-167. "As so often the case in relativity the story of quantum gravity begins with Einstein himself. Soon after the final formulation of general relativity he pointed out the need for a quantum modification of the theory. In his first paper on gravitational radiation the 1916 paper 'Näherungsweise Integration der Feldgleichungen der Gravitation' 'Approximate Integration of the Field Equations of Gravitation' Einstein argued that quantum effects must modify the general theory of relativity. Two years later he reiterated this conclusion the 1918 paper 'Über Gravitationswellen' 'On Gravitational Waves': 'As already emphasized in my previous paper the final result of this argument which demands a gravitational energy loss by a body due to its thermal agitation must arouse doubts about the universal validity of the theory. It appears that a fully developed quantum theory must also bring about a modification of the theory of gravitation.' Einstein writing in the 1919 paper offered here soon began to speculate whether gravitation plays a role in the atomistic structure of matter: 'There are reasons for thinking that the elementary formations which go to make up the atom are held together by gravitational forces. The above reflections show the possibility of a theoretical construction of matter out of the gravitational field and the electromagnetic field alone' In order to construct such a model of an 'elementary particle' Einstein shows that it is necessary to modify the original gravitational field equations .The major interest of this paper is that his attention now shifted from possible quantum modifications of general relativity to the search for a unified theory of the electromagnetic and gravitational fields on the basis of which he hoped to explain the structure of matter. Quantum effects are to be derived from such a theory rather than postulated ad hoc. Einstein remained committed to this approach for the rest of his life: the search for a 'natural' mathematical extension of the general theory in the hope that such a theory would somehow explain the quantization of matter and energy" Iyer and Bhawal Black Holes Gravitational Radiation and the Universe pp. 525-526. Einstein's work on unified field theory was inspired by James Clerk Maxwell's success in finding a unified theory of electricity and magnetism one of the greatest achievements of nineteenth century physics which showed that light was a form of electromagnetic wave and made possible modern inventios such as radio television and the telephone. Einstein continued his attempts to devise a unified theory of gravitation and electromagnetism for the rest of his life; his contributions in this area represent about a quarter of his entire research output and half his scientific production after 1920. Although he was ultimately unsuccessful a similar vision was realized in the decades after his death in the construction of the 'standard model' a unified theory of electromagnetism with the weak and strong nuclear forces which were unknown in Einstein's time and efforts to incorporate gravity into the model continue to this day. RBH lists three copies. OCLC lists only one copy none in US. Provenance: Hans Albert Einstein 1904-73 ink stamp and pencil notes on front wrapper. Hans Albert Einstein was a Swiss-American engineer and educator the second child and first son of physicists Albert Einstein and Mileva Marić. He was a long-time professor of hydraulic engineering at the University of California Berkeley. "As early as 1909 in his fundamental paper 'Zum gegenwärtigen Stand des Strahlungsproblems' 'On the current status of the radiation problem' which resulted from a discussion with Walter Ritz Einstein remarks 'dass des elektrische Elementarquantum e ein Fremdling ist in der Maxwell-Lorentzschen Elektrodynamik' 'that the electrical elementary quantum e is alien to Maxwell-Lorentz electrodynamics'. Einstein expressed the hope that 'die gleiche Modifikation der Theorie welche das Elementarquantum e als Konsequenz enthält auch die Quantenstruktur der Strahlung als Konsequenz enthalten wird' 'the same modification of the theory which contains the elementary quantum e as a consequence will also contain the quantum structure of radiation as a consequence'. Pauli 1949 in his review about 'Einstein's Contribution to Quantum theory' pointed out that though quantum theory later on deduced the quantum structure of radiation it has not solved Einstein's first problem and the elementary charge 'auch in der Quantenmechanik ein Fremdling geblieben ist' 'has also remained alien to quantum mechanics'. He emphasized that just this fact had been one of the strongest arguments to Einstein against the finality of the steps leading to quantum mechanics. "So during his Berlin years Einstein made it his task to find a synthesis of his general theory of relativity GRT and the then nascent quantum physics. In this connection he attributed logical primacy to the relevant relativistic field theory because it had reached a high degree of maturity in the GRT. After all Einstein's general-relativistic gravitation theory is the first theory on the fundamentals of physics working with genuinely non-linear equations and Einstein observed that such a nonlinearity is necessary for understanding the existence of the 'discrete field-quanta.' A linear theory allowing arbitrary superposition of fields would without further restrictions in the form of boundary and uniqueness conditions never lead to a discrete spectrum of solutions. But recourse to such restrictions means that the fields are held together by the operation of entities outside the scope of the theory . "In Einstein's view the problem of incorporating the elementary particles into field physics involved the question of finding field-theoretical models of electrons and protons which were the only known particles at that time. Einstein searched for solutions or general-relativistic field equations for the combined gravitational and electromagnetic fields representing mass and charge distributions with central symmetry and he hoped there would emerge self-consistent solutions only for discrete values of the mass and charge parameters i.e. for a 'particle spectrum.' "This 'Einstein particle problem' pursued ideas that had been developed already in the framework of the special theory of relativity and the Maxwell-Lorentz electrodynamics for instance in the nonlinear theory of the electromagnetic field by G. Mie and D. Hilbert. As an essential progress by the general-relativistic treatment Einstein regarded the genuine nonlinearity of the field equations which Mie and Hilbert had to introduce ad hoc and full consideration of the particle dynamics in the sense of the general-relativistic problem of motion. The generalizations of the Maxwell equations considered by Mie and Hilbert contain a too small number of components for the integrability conditions to determine the particle dynamics whereas the Einstein problem of motion in the GRT furnishers just this dynamics as a consequence of the integrability conditions for the field equations of gravitation. It is the GRT that with its metric field for the first time embraces inertia and gravity that is just those properties which are characteristic of all particles. "Einstein in fact succeeded in driving self-consistent gravitational and electromagnetic fields which can be interpreted as particle models of that kind. But his success depended on a weakening of his own equations of gravitation which physically amounts to the introduction of an additional hypothetical cosmical field of the 'Poincaré pressure.' By this weakening it becomes possible to set up self-consistent particle models with spherical symmetry for arbitrary centrosymmetric mass and charge distributions. In 1919 Einstein presented his result to the academy in his paper 'Spielen Gravitationsfelder im Aufbau der materiellen Elementarteilchen eine wesentliche Rolle' His answer to the question says that in his particle models the electrical field energy contributes ¾ and the gravitational energy ¼ of the total energy. "Einstein's first discourses on the particle problem in the GRT were closely related to the 1917/18 papers in which he laid the foundations of relativistic cosmology. In his Academy report 'Kosmologische Betrachtungen zur allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie' 'Cosmological considerations on the general theory of relativity' 1917 Einstein had by introducing the term λgμν with the 'cosmological constant' λ extended his equations of gravitation to his cosmological equations of gravitation Rμν - ½ gμνR λgμν = - κ Tμν . He could show that these equations permit as a particular solution with λ > 0 and constant positive mass density a statical model of the universe representing a closed spheric or elliptic three devotional Riemannian space . "In his paper of 1919 about the role of gravitation in the structure of elementary particles Einstein also interpreted the cosmological constant λ as the universal 'Poincaré' pressure' which according to a hypothesis of H. Poincaré is to guarantee the stability of Lorentz's electrons against their own repulsion forces. Einstein's ideas concerning this matter partly resulted from a controversial discussion with E. Schrödinger 1918 about the gravitational energy in the GRT and the structure of the energy tensor" Treder pp. 149-151. Indeed Schrödinger had pointed out another way of treating the cosmological constant: moving it from the left-hand side of equation where it represents a contribution to space-time curvature to the right-hand side where it represents a contribution to the energy-matter distribution. Then it would correspond physically to a kind of cosmic pressure. Schrödinger believed this might be the pressure postulated by Poincaré to maintain the stability of charged particles: an electric charge on the surface of a sphere creates a force pushing outwards so without any opposing force the charged sphere would explode outwards. Einstein never liked the cosmological constant. In the present paper he acknowledged that his introduction of the cosmological constant was "gravely detrimental to the formal beauty of the theory" Cambridge Companion to Einstein p. 257. Boni-Russ-L. 111; Schilpp 123; Weil 106. Treder 'Antimatter and the particle problem in Einstein's cosmology and field theory of elementary particles A historical essay on Einstein's work at the Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin' Astronomische Nachrichten 296 1975 pp. 149-161. Large 8vo 254 x 182 mm pp. 349-356. Original printed wrappers. A very fine copy. Verlag der Akademie der Wissenschaften, In Kommission bei Walter de Gruyter [Reichsdruckerei] unknown
1916réf. 6164Braunschweig: Druck und Verlag von Friedr. Vieweg and Son 1916. First edition. First edition complete journal issue in original printed wrappers inscribed by Einstein to fellow Nobel Laureate Walther Bothe. "This work represents a major step forward in quantum theory" Calaprice p. 297. It introduced the concept of stimulated emission of radiation the theoretical basis for the laser; it also contained a new derivation of Planck's radiation law which provided as a by-product a justification of the frequency rule forming the basis of Bohr's theory of atomic spectra. . DISCOVERY OF STIMULATED EMISSION OF RADIATION THE PRINCIPLE OF THE LASER INSCRIBED BY EINSTEIN TO A FELLOW NOBEL LAUREATE. First edition complete journal issue in original printed wrappers inscribed by Einstein to fellow Nobel Laureate Walther Bothe. "This work represents a major step forward in quantum theory" Calaprice p. 297. It introduced the concept of stimulated emission of radiation the theoretical basis for the laser; it also contained a new derivation of Planck's radiation law which provided as a by-product a justification of the frequency rule forming the basis of Bohr's theory of atomic spectra. "According to Albert Einstein when more atoms occupy a higher energy state than a lower one under normal temperature equilibrium it is possible to force atoms to return to an unexcited state by stimulating them with the same energy as would be emitted naturally" Britannica. This is 'stimulated emission.' "To claim that Einstein almost invented the laser would be an exaggeration but the laser's underlying mechanism stimulated emission of radiation was a creation of his radiation theory" Kleppner pp. 32-33. "During the summer of 1916 less than a year after he had completed the general theory of relativity Einstein made a new major contribution to the quantum theory. The two papers he wrote then deal with the quantum theory of radiation by arguments that do not depend on the classical electromagnetic theory as had all earlier treatments of Planck's radiation law . When Einstein returned to the radiation problem in 1916 the quantum theory had undergone a major change. Niels Bohr's papers had opened a new and fertile domain for the application of quantum concepts - the explanation of atomic structure and atomic spectra. In addition Bohr's work and its generalizations by Arnold Sommerfeld and others constituted a fresh approach to the foundations of the quantum theory of matter" DSB. In this paper "Einstein considers a system of atoms in equilibrium with an external radiation field. An atom can change its internal energy state by absorbing or emitting radiation. Einstein introduces three basic assumptions about these exchanges of energy between matter and field. First the probability of absorption of radiation is proportional to the radiation density. Second there are two kinds of emission processes: one - spontaneous - following a law like that of radioactive decay; the other - stimulated - induced by the radiation field and with probability proportional to the radiation density. Third at equilibrium the atoms are distributed among their internal states according to the Boltzmann distribution law. From these assumptions Planck's law follows in a simple way. Einstein was very pleased with his derivation which he characterized in a letter to Besso: 'An amazingly simple derivation of Planck's formula I should like to say the derivation.' As a bonus from his derivation Einstein found that the energy difference between two internal energy states of the atom had to be equal to hv with v the frequency of the radiation absorbed or emitted in transitions between these two states thus confirming one of the postulates of Niels Bohr's theory of spectra" Papers 6 xxiii-xxiv. "Einstein meant the second part of this study a proof of the oriented character of the emission process to be his most essential contribution to quantum radiation theory this second paper was published later in 1916 as 'Zür Quantentheorie der Strahlung'. Instead Bohr gave more importance to the new deduction of the blackbody law; for this deduction reinforced the basic assumptions of his atomic theory and completed them with a statistical description of radiation processes" Darrigol p. 120. Provenance: Inscribed by Einstein on front wrapper "für. Dr Bothe" i.e. Walther Bothe 1891-1957. "In 1929 in collaboration with W. Kolhörster Bothe introduced a new method for the study of cosmic and ultraviolet rays by passing them through suitably arranged Geiger counters and by this method demonstrated the presence of penetrating charged particles in the rays and defined the paths of individual rays. For his discovery of the 'method of coincidence' and the discoveries subsequently made by it which laid the foundations of nuclear spectroscopy Bothe was awarded jointly with Max Born the Nobel Prize in Physics 1954" . While Einstein commended Planck's epoch-making derivation of his radiation law in 1900 which ushered in the quantum era he had also noted its limitations. Einstein also saw inconsistencies in Planck's derivation of his law. For Einstein this inconsistency was no reason to reject Planck's quantum theory but it was a reason to study the foundations of traditional radiation theory and if needed revise them. "As Einstein had noted in 1906 Planck's derivation of the Rayleigh-Jeans law uν = 8πν2/c3 kT between average resonator energy uν and radiation spectrum ν only applied to classical resonators T is the temperature k is Boltzmann's constant. A new quantum-theoretical picture of the interaction between matter and radiation was needed. Einstein found it in the summer of 1916 after the completion of his general theory of gravitation left him more time for quantum meditation. "The new picture presumably emerged from a combination of three elements: Einstein's derivation of the law of photochemical equivalence his analogy between quantum states and chemical species and Niels Bohr's theory of atomic spectra. According to Bohr atoms and molecules can only exist in a series of quantum states S0 S1 . . . Sn . . . with well-defined energies E0 E1 . . . En . . . Their interaction with radiation occurs through quantum jumps with characteristic values of the frequency of the emitted or absorbed radiation. Regarding the quantum states as chemical species and remembering his photochemical reasoning Einstein knew that he could derive Wien's law by balancing the absorption process Sn hν → Sn1 with the emission process Sn1 → Sn hν and by making the probability of the first reaction proportional to the density of radiation at frequency ν. Something in this reasoning needed to be altered in order to get Planck's law instead of Wien's. "At this point Einstein appealed to an analogy between classical and quantum theory. According to classical theory an oscillating dipole spontaneously emits radiation whether or not radiation is initially present in its surroundings. When external radiation encounters this dipole it may either be absorbed if the phase of the incoming wave agrees with that of the oscillator or it may be amplified in the contrary case. In the quantum theory of radiation Einstein similarly admitted the existence of three kinds of processes: spontaneous emission Ausstrahlung absorption negative Einstrahlung and stimulated emission positive Einstrahlung. The modern terminology is Bohr's. For the probability per time unit of the respective sorts of quantum jump Einstein assumed the forms Anm ÏνBnm ÏνBmn where n is the upper quantum state m the lower one and Ïν is the density of radiation at the frequency ν. "Einstein did not say much on the nature of the probabilities he thus introduced. He only commented that his theory had the weakness to leave to chance the instant and direction of the spontaneous emission of light. He also noted the similarity between spontaneous emission and radioactive decay. Undoubtedly he would have preferred a theory in which the emission and absorption probabilities were deduced from an underlying deterministic theory. He nonetheless expressed his 'full trust in the present way of reasoning'. The probabilistic description of the interaction was a natural counterpart of the discrete character of quantum states: if a quantum system evolves mostly through quantum jumps then the probability of a quantum jump obviously is the main quantity of physical interest. Instead of speculating on the precise timing and fine structure of the jumps Einstein proceeded to show what could be done by means of the new probability coefficients. "At thermal equilibrium Einstein reasoned statistical mechanics requires the number of atoms in a quantum state n to be proportional to exp−En /kT. The kinetic equilibrium between the atoms and surrounding radiation further requires that the number of quantum jumps from m to n should be equal to the number of reverse jumps: ÏνBnm exp−Em /kT = ÏνBnm Anm exp−En /kT. In the high temperature limit for which Ïν → ∞ this condition gives Bnm = Bmn. Therefore the equilibrium value uν of the density Ïν is given by uνexpEn − Em/kT - 1 = Anm / Bnm. According to a thermodynamic theorem by Wien uν/ν3 must be a function of ν/T only. Hence En − Em must be proportional to ν. Einstein thus derived Bohr's strange frequency rule ΔE = hν with complete generality and without recourse to any of the empirical laws of spectra. He then required the expression of uν to agree with the Rayleigh-Jeans law in the low-frequency limit. The outcome was Planck's law as well as the relation Anm / Bnm = 8πhν3/c3 between Einstein's two probability coefficients . "Einstein's new theory of radiation is now remembered for the introduction of stimulated emission which famously permitted the conception of masers and lasers. For Einstein and for his contemporaries the importance of these memoirs lay elsewhere. First Einstein filled an important gap in the derivation of Planck's law by means of a simple statistical description of radiation processes. Second he corroborated two basic assumptions of Bohr's atomic theory: the existence of stationary states and the frequency rule. In this regard it should be emphasized that before Einstein's and Sommerfeld's contributions of 1916 Bohr believed that his frequency rule only applied to strictly periodic systems. For instance he regarded the Zeeman effect as a violation of this rule. Einstein's new considerations established its complete generality" Darrigol in Cambridge Companion to Einstein pp. 134-136. "The implication of Einstein's theory of stimulated emission was that if one arranges for a large number of atoms to be in identical excited states a stray photon of the right energy can stimulate one atom to emit another photon which stimulates another. and all the atoms release their excess energy in a sudden cascade. What's more the photon released by stimulated emission will be in phase - coherent - with the one that stimulated it and so all the light produced in the cascade will be coherent. "In 1955 American physicist Charles Townes of Columbia University in New York an expert in molecular spectroscopy and his co-workers showed how stimulated emission could be used to make a device for generating or amplifying microwaves which they called a maser microwave amplified stimulated emission of radiation. Three years later Townes and Arthur Schawlow explained how to extend the idea to visible and infrared frequencies to make an 'optical maser' - in effect the laser. "They proposed using ordinary incoherent light to pump atoms into an excited state setting up the 'population inversion' in which the atoms are primed to return to their ground state by emitting photons. And their design used an optical cavity - basically two mirrors between which photons would bounce - to trap the emitted photons while they stimulated more emission. The device they explained would generate 'extremely monochromatic single-wavelength and coherent light'. Theodore Maiman of the Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu California described such a device using a ruby crystal already used for masers as the lasing medium in 1960" 'A century ago Einstein sparked the notion of the laser' Physics World History Blog 31 August 2017. Weil 85. Calaprice An Einstein Encyclopedia 2015. Darrigol From c-numbers to q-numbers 1992. Kleppner 'Rereading Einstein on radiation' Physics Today 58 2005 pp. 30-33. Pais Subtle is the Lord 1982. 8vo 228 x 154 mm pp. 315-332. Original printed wrappers. A fine copy. Druck und Verlag von Friedr. Vieweg and Son unknown
1931réf. 60051931. First edition. An important group of photographs documenting Einstein's visit to Caltech. The main purpose of the visit was to discuss Edwin Hubble's observations made in 1929 with the 100-inch telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory which showed that light from distant nebulae galaxies was red-shifted indicating that the universe was expanding. Einstein had believed that the universe is static and had introduced his 'cosmological constant' into his equations of general relativity to allow for a static solution. When Einstein met Hubble at the Mount Wilson Observatory in January and February 1931 he was visibly moved with Hubble's discovery and reportedly said with tears in his eyes that "It was the most beautiful and satisfying interpretation of astronomical science." In light of the new evidence Einstein published a paper two months later renouncing the concept of a cosmological constant whose invention Einstein denounced as "the greatest blunder of my life." . 'the greatest blunder of my life'. An important group of photographs documenting Einstein's second visit to America and his first to the California Institute of Technology which began at the end of December 1930. The main purpose of the visit was to discuss Edwin Hubble's observations made in 1929 with the 100-inch telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory then the largest telescope in the world which showed that light from distant nebulae galaxies was red-shifted indicating that the universe was expanding. Einstein had believed that the universe is static and had introduced his 'cosmological constant' into his equations of general relativity to allow for a static solution. When Einstein met Hubble at the Mount Wilson Observatory in January and February 1931 he was visibly moved with Hubble's discovery and reportedly said with tears in his eyes that "It was the most beautiful and satisfying interpretation of astronomical science." In light of the new evidence Einstein published a paper two months later renouncing the concept of a cosmological constant whose invention Einstein denounced as "the greatest blunder of my life." Einstein was accompanied on his visit by Walther Mayer 1887-1948 who had been appointed as his mathematical assistant in 1929. Mayer and Einstein worked together on several approaches towards a unified field theory. "On the way over Einstein and his mathematical calculator Walther Mayer holed up working on revisions to his unified field theory in an upper-deck suite with a sailor guarding the door" Isaacson p. 368. Two of the photographs are of Einstein at Mount Wilson one with Mayer and the observatory's director Walter Adams 1876-1956 who had confirmed Einstein's prediction of the gravitational red-shift although his observations were later shown to be faulty; the other with Mayer and solar physicist Charles St. John 1857-1935 who had assisted Hubble with his red-shift observations. Another photograph shows Einstein between fellow Nobel Laureates Albert Michelson 1852-1931 and Robert Millikan 1868-1953 Caltech's "chairman of the executive council" effectively its president. Together with Edward Morley Michelson had in 1887 carried out the famous Michelson-Morley experiment which failed to detect evidence of the existence of the luminiferous ether; this provided crucial evidence for the early acceptance of special relativity. On this trip Einstein "paid tribute to the aging Michelson carefully praising his famous experiments that detected no ether drift without explicitly saying that they were a basis for his special theory of relativity" Isaacson p. 372. "In the early 1930s Einstein came to California specifically to consult with scientists at the California Institute of Technology. Few members of the general public understood the nature of his visits but they idolized him all the same. From the moment his boat docked in San Diego on December 31 1930 the reception accorded him by Californians was one part show business one part hero worship and one part genuine affection. Groups of children dressed in blue and white middies serenaded him and thrust wreaths of flowers into his hands two bands struck up tunes and in Los Angeles a theatrical group the Yale Puppeteers opened a play called Mr. Noah in which the ark landed on Mt. Wilson instead of on Mt. Ararat . "As early as 1913 Einstein was looking for experimental verification for the correctness of his theory of general relativity and he had been in correspondence with Caltech's George Ellery Hale asking him to make an astronomical measurement. He was anxious to know if Hale could detect the influence of the sun's gravitation field upon a light ray. Hale replied that in order to try he needed a solar eclipse. The experiment was finally carried out in 1919 by two British expedition teams and again in 1922 by an American team of astronomers - and it did confirm the theory of general relativity. "There were cosmological implications in this theory and they attracted a lot of attention in the 1920s and 1930s - nowhere more than at Caltech. Millikan had been urging Einstein to visit the campus for some time and in the fall of 1930 he agreed to spend the winter quarter in Pasadena. Not only would he be able to discuss his theory and its interpretation with distinguished scientists; he would also be meeting old friends again - Richard Tolman the cosmologist; Paul Epstein the theoretical physicist; and Theodore von Karman the aerodynamicist . "The new Athenaeum at Caltech was the setting for many dinners to honor Einstein. At the first on January 15 1931 the guests included the physicist and Nobel Laureate A. A. Michelson and 200 members of the California Institute Associates. Several weeks later a second dinner was held at which all the astronomers from the Institute and the Mt. Wilson Observatory were present. Edwin Hubble was there as was Charles E. St. John who verified the third prediction of the theory of general relativity the gravitational red-shift. Colleagues came from Berkeley including Tolman's close friend and co-author G. N. Lewis who wrote to say he was coming with a friend - though not without some mildly humorous trepidation. As he put it in his letter to Tolman: 'I have just accepted an invitation from Oppenheimer to drive me down. Do you think I should take out accident insurance' "Einstein was not without a sense of humor himself. At a farewell luncheon in his honor on February 24 1931 which was sponsored by the Pasadena Chamber of Commerce he said: "I want to thank the extraordinary group of scholars in the fields of physics and astronomy who have afforded me glimpses of their work. They have conducted me not only into the world of atoms and crystals but also to the surface of the sun and into the outermost depths of space. There I saw worlds which are flying away from us with incomprehensible rapidity in spite of the fact that their inhabitants do not know us well enough to justify any such action'" Goodstein. "Millikan was a physicist who had won the Nobel Prize in 1923 for having 'verified experimentally Einstein's all-important photoelectric equation.' He likewise verified Einstein's interpretation of Brownian motion. So it was understandable that as he was building Caltech into one of the world's pre-eminent scientific institutions he worked diligently to bring Einstein there. "Despite al they had in common Millikan and Einstein were different enough in their personal outlooks that they were destined to have an awkward relationship. Millikan was so conservative scientifically that he resisted Einstein's interpretation of the photoelectric effect and his dismissal of the ether even after they were apparently verified by his own experiments. And he was even more conservative politically. A robust and athletic son of an Iowa preacher he had a penchant for patriotic militarism that was as pronounced as Einstein's aversion to it" Isaacson p. 373. "To physics posterity Viennese mathematician Walther Mayer is mostly known as 'Einstein's calculator'. He had apparently been called that at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena which Einstein and Mayer visited together in the winter of 1930/31. It is true that in order to advance in his studies to construct a unified field theory Einstein relied on the expertise of mathematicians. With his unified field theory Einstein attempted to formally join his own theory of general relativity with Maxwell's electromagnetism. "When Einstein was looking for a new mathematics assistant in 1929 Mayer was hired on the recommendation of eminent mathematician Richard von Mises. Like Einstein von Mises at that time held a professorship in Berlin. Walther Mayer then served as private lecturer at the University of Vienna finishing the second volume of a very well received textbook series on differential geometry which he co-authored with fellow Viennese mathematician Adalbert Duschek. Subsequently Mayer and Einstein worked together on several approaches towards a unified field theory consisting of 1 the analysis of solutions to Einstein's so-called distant teleparallelism approach 2 the invention of a variant of the Kaluza-Klein theory in which not space-time but attached vector spaces are 5-dimensional and finally 3 the construction of a formalism they referred to as "semi-vectors" for interpreting Dirac-spinors in simpler classical field-theoretical terms and reformulating the Dirac equation accordingly. Their joint work was published in 7 papers over a period of roughly four years 1930-1934 . "While being humbly appreciative of the vital improvement that Einstein brought to his career Mayer was at the same time also quite unhappy about his role as Einstein's 'appendage'. Einstein however was aware of and respected this sentiment of Mayer's: When he bargained his Princeton position with Abraham Flexner a founding director of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study he insisted on an independent professorship for Mayer as well. After some back and forth this was indeed granted at the last minute. However the question of Mayer's legitimacy as an independent professor at Princeton surfaced again after their arrival. Feeling unwelcomed and not sufficiently supported by Einstein Mayer finally ended their collaboration after just one further joint paper in 1934. He felt that his career would be advanced best if from now on he would focus entirely on his own studies in pure mathematics. In the end Mayer was able to retain his tenure at Princeton for the rest of his life but he subsequently appeared to have wished to no longer be associated with work on unified field theory. On the outside Einstein and Mayer remained in friendly contact while Einstein found new collaborators. The ones immediately succeeding Walther Mayer at Princeton were Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen" Lessel. The photographs are accompanied by a number of letters from Mayer to his brother Arthur in Austria discussing Einstein's work Hitler and the Nazis. Mayer was Jewish and it was only through Einstein's intervention that he was given the title of professor at the University of Vienna. Mayer immediately took a leave of absence from this position to continue his collaboration with Einstein when he had returned to Berlin. At a press conference on his arrival in New York Einstein was asked "'What do you think of Adolf Hitler' Einstein replied 'He is living on the empty stomach of Germany. As soon as economic conditions improve he will no longer be important'" Isaacson p. 369. "On the day he left New York Einstein revised slightly one of the statements he had made on his arrival. Asked again about Hitler he declared that if the Nazis were ever able to gain control he would consider leaving Germany" ibid. p. 371. In April 1933 Einstein discovered that the new German government had passed laws barring Jews from holding any official positions including teaching at universities. He left Germany in summer 1933 and took up a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton despite Millikan's efforts to lure him to Caltech. He remained at the Institute until his death in 1955. Goodstein 'Albert Einstein in California' Engineering and Science May-June 1979 pp. 17-19 - Isaacson Einstein. His Life and Universe 2007. Lessel 'Walther Mayer - more than 'Einstein's calculator'' - ;/span> . unknown
réf. A9781032378428Hardback. New. There’s religion in my marketing! There’s marketing in my religion! Selling the Sacred explores the religio-cultural and media implications of a two-sided phenomenon: marketing religion as a product and marketing products as religion. hardcover
réf. A9781138171190Hardback. New. hardcover
1915réf. 5863Berlin: Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften 1915. First edition. First editions very rare offprint of the first two of the papers published in November 1915 that document his final version of the general theory of relativity. "In the half century and more of Einstein's work in science one discovery stands above all as his greatest achievement. It is his general theory of relativity" Norton. . EINSTEIN'S COMPLETION OF THE GENERAL THEORY OF RELATIVITY. First editions very rare offprint of the first two of the papers published in November 1915 that document Einstein's final version of the general theory of relativity. "In the half century and more of Einstein's work in science one discovery stands above all as his greatest achievement. It is his general theory of relativity" Norton. "There was difficulty reconciling the Newtonian theory of gravitation with its instantaneous propagation of forces with the requirements of special relativity; and Einstein working on this difficulty was led to a generalization of relativity - which was probably the greatest scientific discovery that was ever made" Dirac quoted in Chandrasekhar p. 3. Einstein's special theory of relativity 1905 showed that the laws of physics are the same in all inertial i.e. non-accelerating frames of reference. It was then natural to ask whether it was possible to extend this principle of relativity to the more general case of frames of reference in arbitrary states of motion. This problem became linked to a theory of gravitation with Einstein's 'equivalence principle' of 1907 according to which the effects of gravity are locally equivalent to those of accelerated motion. Einstein's first steps towards a geometrical theory of gravitation were taken in August 1912 when his friend Marcel Grossmann provided the necessary mathematical tools. "Some time between August 10 and August 16 it became clear to Einstein that Riemannian geometry is the correct mathematical tool for what we now call general relativity theory. The impact of this abrupt realization was to change his outlook on physics and physical theory for the rest of his life" Pais p. 210. The resulting 'Entwurf' theory 1913 had much in common with the final theory of 1915 but based on a fallacious argument Einstein abandoned the requirement that the theory should be 'generally-covariant' i.e. that arbitrary frames of reference should be allowed. "After three years of fruitless peregrinations the revelation came to Einstein that he had been constantly on the wrong track although in 1913 he had been so near to the right solution" Lanczos p. 211. On November 4 1915 he presented to a plenary session of the Prussian Academy a new version of general relativity 'Zur allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie' "based on the postulate of covariance with respect to transformations with determinant 1" and stated that he had "completely lost confidence" in the 'Entwurf' equations. On November 18 he published his calculation of the precession of the perihelion of Mercury based on the new theory: its agreement with observation confirmed that the theory was correct the Entwurf theory predicted half the observed value of the precession. "In June 1905 while still a patent examiner in Bern Einstein submitted his famous work on the electrodynamics of moving bodies to the Annalen der Physik. This work contained his special theory of relativity in which he asserted the equivalence of all inertial frames of reference as a fundamental postulate of physics. The question which then naturally arose was whether it was possible to extend this principle of relativity to the more general case of frames of reference in arbitrary states of motion. But he could find no workable basis for such an extension until he tried to incorporate gravitation into his new special theory of relativity for a review article in 1907 'Uber das Relativitätsprinzip und die ausdemselben gezogenen Folgerungen' Jahrbuch der Radioaktivitat und Elektronik 4 1907 411-62. The difficulties of this task led him to a new principle later to be called the 'principle of equivalence.' "On the basis of the fact that all bodies fall alike in a gravitational field Einstein postulated the complete physical equivalence of a homogeneous gravitational field and a uniform acceleration of the frame of reference. This extended the principle of relativity to the case of uniform acceleration. It also foreshadowed the problem whose complete solution would lead him to his general theory of relativity: the construction of a relativistically acceptable theory of gravitation based on the principle of equivalence" Norton p. 258. One application of the equivalence principle proved crucial to the subsequent development of his ideas on general relativity. Einstein considered an observer standing on a rotating disc - a non-inertial accelerating reference frame. According to special relativity measuring rods aligned with the circumference of the disc will contract due to their motion whereas measuring rods positioned along the radius of the disc will not. Hence the ratio of the circumference of the disc to its diameter will be less than π. "The spatial geometry for the rotating observer is therefore non-euclidean. Invoking the equivalence principle Einstein concluded that this will be true for an observer in a gravitational field as well. This then is what first suggested to Einstein that gravity should be represented by curved space-time. "To describe curved space-time Einstein turned to Gauss's theory of curved surfaces a subject he vaguely remembered from his student days at the ETH in Zürich. He had learned it from the notes of his classmate Marcel Grossmann. Upon his return to his alma mater as a full professor of physics in 1912 Einstein learned from Grossmann now a colleague in the mathematics department of the ETH about the extension of Gauss's theory to spaces of higher dimension by Riemann and others. Riemann's theory provided Einstein with the mathematical object with which he could unify the effects of gravity and acceleration: the metric field" Janssen p. 65. The first product of this collaboration was the Entwurf einer verallgemeinerten Relativitätstheorie und einer Theorie der Gravitation published before the end of June 1913 which contained many of the essential features of the final general theory of relativity; most importantly it introduced the 'metric' of space-time. In Minkowski's formulation of special relativity 1908 the most important quantity is the 'world function' of two events which determines the metric and causal structure of space-time. If these events have coordinates x y z t and x' y' z' t' in some inertial reference frame the world function is: c2t' - t2 - x' - x2 - y' - y2 - z' - z2 where c is the speed of light. Its crucial property is that it depends only on the two events and not on the choice of inertial reference frame - in other words it is unchanged 'invariant' when x y z t and x' y' z' t' are both subjected to any Lorentz transformation. Einstein and Grossmann began with the world function in differential form: ds2 = c2dt2 - dx2 - dy2 - dz2 If we now subject x y z t to an arbitrary coordinate transformation not necessarily a Lorentz transformation this takes the general form ds2 = g11dx12 g12dx1dx2 . ; the collection of quantities gμν which in general depend on the coordinates x1 x2 x3 x4 is called the metric. Based on analogy with Newton's theory Einstein expected that the gravitational equations should be of the form Gμν = Tμν where Gμν is a purely geometric quantity constructed solely from the metric gμν and its derivatives up to the second order and the 'stress-energy tensor' Tμν contains the information about the matter that is producing the gravitational field including energy density momentum fluxes and stresses. The question was: what exactly should Gμνbe Einstein and Grossmann found that generally covariant equations did not seem to be compatible with energy-momentum conservation or reduce to the equations of Newtonian gravitational theory for weak static fields both essential requirements of the correct theory. Einstein therefore decided to settle in the 'Entwurf' for equations with very limited covariance - instead of arbitrary changes in coordinates only linear ones were allowed. The restricted covariance of the 'Entwurf' field equations continued to bother him until in late August 1913 he convinced himself that such restrictions are unavoidable by means of the infamous "hole argument" first published as an addendum to the reprint of the 'Entwurf' article in Zeitschrift für Physik in January 1914. This ingenious argument showed correctly that if the gravitational equations were generally covariant the metric gμν would not be uniquely determined by the matter distribution i.e. by Tμν. He concluded incorrectly that this implied that general covariance must be ruled out the hole argument does not work if only linear coordinate transformations are allowed. The appropriate analogy is with electromagnetism: the metric is analogous to the scalar and vector potentials of electromagnetism and it was well known certainly to Einstein that these potentials are not uniquely determined by the charges and currents producing the electromagnetic field. That the 'Entwurf' theory was incorrect was made clear by Einstein's attempt in collaboration with Michele Besso another former classmate to explain the motion of the perihelion of Mercury. In 1859 Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier had observed the 'precession' of Mercury's orbit: this orbit is an ellipse but the ellipse is not fixed in space but slowly rotates. From early on in his search for a new relativistic theory of gravitation Einstein had been interested in the problem of Mercury's perihelion. In a letter to his friend Conrad Habicht in 1907 Einstein had already expressed his hope that such a theory would explain the anomalous advance of Mercury's perihelion. Besso visited Einstein in Zürich in June 1913 and the two men calculated the precession expected on the basis of the 'Entwurf' theory. Disappointingly it was only about half the observed anomaly. Einstein left Zürich in March 1914 to take up a professorship in Berlin which was to be his home until December 1932. He made no further progress on the gravitational equations until the summer of 1915 although a detailed exposition of the 'Entwurf' theory was published in October 1914 in which Einstein maintained the need for restricted covariance and even claimed that this determined the gravitational Lagrangian uniquely. "Einstein still believed in the 'old' theory as late as July 1915 between July and October he found objections to that theory and his final version was conceived and worked out between late October and November 25 . What made Einstein change his mind between July and October Letters to Sommerfeld and Lorentz show that he had found at least three objections against the old theory: 1 its restricted covariance did not include uniform rotations 2 the precession of the perihelion of Mercury came out too small by a factor of about 2 and 3 his proof of October 1914 of the uniqueness of the gravitational Lagrangian was incorrect. Einstein got rid of all these shortcomings in a series of four brief articles offered here . "On November 4 Einstein presented to the plenary session of the Prussian Academy a new version of general relativity 'based on the postulate of covariance with respect to transformations with determinant 1'. He began this paper by stating that he had 'completely lost confidence' in the equations proposed in October 1914. At that time he had given a proof of the uniqueness of the gravitational Lagrangian. He had realized meanwhile that this proof 'rested on misconception' and so he continued 'I was led back to a more general covariance of the field equations a requirement which I had abandoned only with a heavy heart in the course of my collaboration with my friend Grossmann three years earlier' . "Einstein and Grossmann had concluded that the gravitational equations could be invariant under linear transformations only and Einstein's justification for this restriction was based on the belief that the gravitational equations ought to determine the gμν uniquely a point he continued to stress in October 1914. In his new paper he finally liberated himself from this three-year-old prejudice. That is the main advance on November 4. His answers were still not entirely right. There was still one flaw a much smaller one which he eliminated three weeks later. But the road lay open. He was lyrical. 'No one who has really grasped it can escape the magic of this new theory.' "The remaining flaw was of course Einstein's unnecessary restriction to unimodular transformations. The reasons which led him to introduce this constraint were not deep I believe. He simply noted that this restricted class of transformations permits simplifications of the tensor calculus . The new equations are a vast improvement over the Einstein-Grossmann equations and cure one of the ailments he had diagnosed only recently: unimodular transformations do include rotations with arbitrarily varying angular velocities. In addition he proved that the new equations can be derived from a variational principle and that the conservation laws are satisfied" Pais pp. 250-252. On November 11 he submitted a 'Nachtrag' to his paper of a week earlier. "Einstein proposes a scheme that is even tighter than the one of a week earlier. Not only shall the theory be invariant with respect to unimodular transformations . but more strongly it shall satisfy the condition that the determinant of the matrix gμν is equal to minus one . During the next two weeks Einstein believed that this new condition had brought him closer to general covariance . One week later he remarked that 'no objections of principle' can be raised against it" ibid. pp. 252-253. Norton p. 309 points out that Einstein had in fact made a significant advance in this paper: namely he had finally found generally covariant field equations that reduced to the Newtonian equations in the weak field limit" ibid. p. 253. On November 18 still retaining the restrictions of his paper of a week earlier Einstein presented in 'Erklarung der Perihelbewegung des Merkur aus der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie'"two of his greatest discoveries. Each of these changed his life. The first result was that his theory explains . quantitatively . the secular rotation of the orbit of Mercury discovered by Le Verrier . without the need of any special hypothesis. This discovery was I believe by far the strongest emotional experience in Einstein's scientific life perhaps in all his life. Nature had spoken to him. He had to be right. 'For a few days I was beside myself with joyous excitement'. Later he told Fokker that his discovery had given him palpitations of the heart. What he told de Haas is even more profoundly significant: when he saw that his calculations agreed with the unexplained astronomical observations he had the feeling that something actually snapped in him . "Einstein's discovery resolved a difficulty that was known for more than sixty years. Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier had been the first to find evidence for an anomaly in the orbit of Mercury and also the first to attempt to explain this effect . In 1859 he found that the perihelion of Mercury advances by thirty-eight seconds per century due to 'some as yet unknown action on which no light has been thrown . a grave difficulty worthy of attention by astronomers'" ibid. pp. 253-254. A more accurate measurement of 43 seconds was made by Simon Newcomb in 1882 and this was precisely the value predicted by the new theory. The prediction of the bending of light in a gravitational field was treated only briefly in 'Erklarung der Perihelbewegung des Merkur aus der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie' probably because no accurate measurement of it had been made so this prediction could not be confirmed at the time. Einstein had realised in 1907 based on the equivalence principle that some bending of light should occur but he believed that the effect was too small to be observed. In 1911 he realized that the effect could be detected for starlight grazing the sun during a total eclipse and found that the amount of bending in that case is 0''.87 - this value could in fact have been computed by Newton from his law of gravitation and his corpuscular theory of light. In 3 Einstein discovered that general relativity implies a bending of light by the sun equal to 1".74 twice the Newtonian value. This factor of 2 set the stage for a confrontation between Newton and Einstein. "It was not until May 1919 that two British expeditions obtained the first useful photographs and not until November 1919 that their results were formally announced . In March 1917 the Astronomer Royal Sir Frank Watson Dyson drew attention to the excellence of the star configuration on May 29 1919 an eclipse date for measuring the alleged deflection . Two expeditions were mounted one to Sobral in Brazil led by Andrew Crommelin from the Greenwich Observatory and one to Principe Island off the coast of Spanish Guinea led by Eddington. Before departing Eddington wrote 'The present eclipse expeditions may for the first time demonstrate the weight of light i.e. the Newton value; or they may confirm Einstein's weird theory of non-Euclidean space; or they may lead to a result of yet more far-reaching consequences - no deflection' . The expeditions returned. Data analysis began. According to a preliminary report by Eddington to the meeting of the British Association held in Bournemouth on September 9-13 the bending of light lay between 0''.87 and double that value. Word reached Lorentz. Lorentz cabled Einstein . Then came November 6 1919 the day on which Einstein was canonized" Pais 304-305. At a joint meeting of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society on that date Dyson concluded his remarks with the statement "'After a careful study of the plates I am prepared to say that they confirm Einstein's prediction. A very definite result has been obtained that light is deflected in accordance with Einstein's law of gravitation'" ibid. p. 305. Three remarks may be made on the speed with which after eight years of struggle Einstein completed these final papers on his theory. The first is that Einstein had come very close to the correct gravitational equations in the second half of 1912 - they are recorded in his 'Zurich notebook' - but he discarded them because of his arguments against general covariance as we have seen. Once he no longer believed in these arguments he could return to the work carried out in the Zurich notebook and complete it. The second is that the detailed calculations in 3 relating to Mercury's perihelion were in fact very similar to those he had carried out with Besso in 1913 and so required relatively little extra effort. The final point is that Einstein was in competition with the great Göttingen mathematician David Hilbert. Weil 75 76 77; Chandrasekhra 'The general theory of relativity: Why "It is probably the most beautiful of all existing theories" Journal of Astrophysics 5 1984 pp. 3-11; Eisenstaedt The Curious History of Relativity 2006; Janssen 'Of pots and holes: Einstein's bumpy road to general relativity' Annalen der Physik 14 Supplement 2005 pp. 58-85; Lanczos Einstein Decade: 1905-1915 1974; Norton 'How Einstein found his field equations: 1912-1915' Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 14 1984 pp. 253-316; Pais Subtle is the Lord 1982. Large 8vo 253 x 180 mm pp. 778-786 & 799-801. Original printed wrappers. Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften unknown
