The Challenge of Editing Einstein's Scientific Manuscripts

Einstein’s research manuscripts provide important insights into his exceptional creativity. At the same time, they can present difficulties for a publication in the documentary edition of the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein (CPAE). The problems are illustrated by discussing how some important examples of Einstein’s research manuscripts have been included in previous volumes of the CPAE series: his Scratch Notebook from the years 1910–1914, his so-called Zurich Notebook from 1912, documenting his early search for a generally covariant theory of gravitation, and the Einstein-Besso manuscript from 1913, containing calculations of Mercury’s perihelion advance on the basis of the Einstein-Grossmann equations. Another category of research notes are small and disconnected “back-of-an-envelope” calculations. A major challenge for future volumes of the CPAE series are Einstein’s Berlin and Princeton research manuscripts on a unified field theory. This batch of some 1700 undated manuscript pages presents a formidable challenge also for historians of science. Although the web provides new possibilities for the editorial task, such as the publication of facsimiles on the Einstein Archives Online website, it is argued that a satisfactory solution of the editorial problems posed by these manuscripts depends on scholarly efforts to reconstruct and understand the content of Einstein’s manuscripts. 1 The Einstein Papers Project The Einstein Papers Project is a long-term editorial project devoted to publishing the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein (CPAE). The first volume was published by Princeton University Press in 1987 [CPAE1], followed by eight Paper presented at the 25th Anniversary Annual Meeting of the Association for Documentary Editing, Chicago, November 14–16, 2003; to appear in Documentary Editing. Facsimiles of Einstein’s manuscripts are reproduced by kind permission of the Albert Einstein Archives, Jerusalem. For general information about the Einstein Papers Project, see the “Publisher’s Foreword” and the “General Introduction” in Volume 1 of the series [CPAE1], as well as [Bailey 1989, Stachel 1987, Buchwald 2004]. The project’s website is at www.einstein.caltech.edu.