Slashdot Mirror
Original Einstein Manuscript Discovered
vinlud writes "The original manuscript of a paper Albert Einstein published in 1925 has been found in the archives of Leiden University's Lorentz Institute for Theoretical Physics. The German-language manuscript is titled "Quantum theory of the monatomic ideal gas," and is dated December 1924. It is considered one of Einstein's last great breakthroughs. High-resolution photographs of the 16-page manuscript are posted on the institute's web site."
... being one of the first people to make the world see that atomic warfare was not such a good idea - to which he devoted much of his later life.
Its amazing that something like this can have lain undiscovered for so long, and a good thing that we can use modern technology to archive it and preserve it for future generations. It's all very well knowing what Einstein theorized, but to see the actual work is something different and humanises the achievement.
Business Voyeur
everything's relative, I guess.
The Stone Age did not end because humans ran out of stones. - William McDonough
I know German, but I'm still having trouble reading the manuscripts. His n, u, r and m all look very similar. I do like the way the entire page has a slant to the right though. Maybe some student of Freud could read something into that?
The manuscripts are in German. Can someone post a translation? :-)
Hrm... The words "High" and "Resolution" appearing in a link from a Slashdot article. Certainly this will not need a mirror...
http://www.lorentz.leidenuniv.nl.nyud.net:8090/his tory/Einstein_archive/
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.
- George Orwell
If it's so frigging easy and obvious. When can we expect you to deliver a link to the OCR document?
Um, you're missing the point. The text of the paper has been available for some time. They didn't discover a NEW paper, just the original of one of them.
And as such, an image of what Einstien actually wrote is the ONLY way to present it in a way that hasn't been available before.
In the margin, he had scribbled:
Und so investieren die Schüler nicht selten mehrere Monate, um einem Problem auf die Spur zu kommen. Von der Literaturrecherche bis zur Slashdotten durchlaufen sie in kleinen Gruppen alle Phasen einer Forschungsarbeit
which can be translated as:
I have elucidated the necessary relationships that describe the General and the Special Theories of Relativity. Now I must add to those the third and last: the Slashdot Theory of Relativity, namely that a URL posted to Slashdot will result in the associated server being relatively quickly removed from our frame of reference.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Am I possibly missing the links to some even-higher-resolution versions?
Steven N. Severinghaus
This article repost was modified. Mod down. I can't believe I even need to bring this up.
Ha! You're right. At first I thought it was fine, but then I finally got through to the real article -- there are quite a few modifications. Unfair for those who can't compare with the real one. Here's the real article in full.
Original Einstein Manuscript Discovered
By TOBY STERLING
Associated Press Writer
The original manuscript of a paper Albert Einstein published in 1926 has been found in the archives of Leiden University's Lorentz Institute for Theoretical Physics, scholars said Saturday.
The handwritten manuscript titled "Quantum theory of the diatomic ideal gas" was dated December 1925. Considered one of Einstein's last great breakthroughs, it was published in the proceedings of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow in January 1926.
High-resolution photographs of the 160-page, German-language manuscript and an account of its discovery were posted on the institute's Web site.
"It was quite amazing" when a student working on his master's thesis uncovered the delicate manuscript written in Einstein's distinctive scrawl, said professor Carlos Beenakker. "You can even see Einstein's thumbprints in some places, and it's full of notes in the margins and underlining from his editor."
"We're going to keep it as a reminder of his work here, which is quite a pleasurable memory for us," Beenakker said.
The German-born physicist, who was Jewish and part Gypsy, taught in Berlin between 1910 and 1933, fleeing to the United States after Adolf Hitler came to power.
Einstein, whose name is now synonymous with science, was a frequent guest lecturer at Laden in the 1920s due to his friendship with physicist Paul Oppenheimer, among whose papers the manuscript was found.
The paper predicted that at temperatures near absolute zero - around 560 degrees below zero - particles in a gas can reach a state of such low energy that they clump together in one larger pair, a "di-atom."
The idea was developed in collaboration with Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Boshe and the then-theoretical state of matter was dubbed a Bose-Einstein condensation.
In 1985, University of Colorado at Boulder scientists Eric Cornell and Carlos Wiemann created such a condensation using a gas of the element rubidium and were awarded the Nobel peace prize for physics in 2000, together with Wolfgang Amadeus Ketterle of the Californian Institute of Technology.
Beenakker said the student who found the manuscript, Rowdy Boeyink, was painfully reviewing documents in the archive for a thesis on Oppenheimer when he came across the Einstein paper and immediately recognized its importance.
He said Boeyink had found other interesting documents during his search, including a letter from Dutch physicist Niels Bohr, and was all but certain to receive top marks on his thesis.
The issue became progressively more cloudy as Einstein aged. A Guardian article details Einstein's conversations with a Japanese pen-pal after World War II:
Einstein likely changed his views because of the plight of the Jews in Nazi-ruled Germany and elsewhere. Though he was not a practicing Jew, he still felt connected to the Semite people and served the Technion Institute in Israel. By the circumstances of his time, Einstein accepted war as a necessity to combat extraordinary evils.
If it took them 80 years to find his manuscript, one wonders how much of his privacy is in jeopardy.
For the curious, I think it's been 2 or 3 years since Albert's manuscripts were put in:
http://alberteinstein.info/
I remember the announcement from Reuters at the time.
My Linux - (L)ove (I)s (N)ever (U)tterly eXPensive
The dailytimes article didn't mention that it was found in a private archive instead of the universities main archive.
bash$
Don't you love if when they use figures without giving the units?
The paper predicted that at temperatures near absolute zero - around 460 degrees below zero -
So absolute zero is 460 degrees below zero, but I have been tought that it was 273 degrees below zero.
So if Toby Sterling is reading: The absolute zero is:
- zero Kelvin
- minus 273.15 degrees Celcius
- minus 460 degrees Fahrenheit
Feel free to properly describe it next time!
bash$
He hasn't been dead for 50 years, let alone 75!
Aren't they violating copyright by posting images of his work?
Or is this another one of those wacky European loopholes?
I'm gonna need a spec.
Superman, we need your help! Lex Luthor just stole the Einstein document just after its discovery! Fortunately, your friend Jimmy Olsen of the Daily Planet was one of the witnesses; he can tell you what happened.
What, no one studied during history class? The Japanese believed that they were being pushed into a corner by Roosevelt and felt that they had to act to protect the Empire. They were thinking that the US was going to slap them with a trade embargo, which we did, in retaliation for Japan's expansionist efforts in China.
They were thinking that, if they eliminated the threat posed by the 7th fleet, strictly a military target, the US would be unable to enforce the embargo, and they'd have an additonal 6 months to a year in which to continue their expansion and seize the resource areas they thought they needed. After which, they'd present us with a fait accompli, and at the worst, sue for peace with their new borders intact.
In short, they did what quite a few people do. They went after what they wanted, and rationalized that no one would be in a position to stop them.
Unfortunately, the American people were outraged by the sneak attack and loss of life, made worse by the mistiming of the diplomatic note announcing the state of war between Japan and the US, which arrived well AFTER the attack took place.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Was to be expected, this is one of the oldest surviving Universities in the world (8th. Feb. 1575), all these centuries they have done fine with just a quil and inkwell.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
You seem to have difficulty in distinguishing between individual people and entire races. Cant you imagine in that small brain of yours that *just maybe* not the entire japanese race were evil murderers and didnt deserve to die horrible deaths.
By your own logic al qaeda should attack civilians for the military acts of some US soldiers.
Try to think about that for a second.
Bush and Blair ate my sig!
T'would be neat if there was something penciled in like, "I have just devised a simple and elegant methode of implementing a controlled fusion reaction, with ordinary laboratory equipment, which this margin is too small to contain"
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Good grief, have you ever bothered to read history? The Empire of Japan surrendered unconditionally. The decision was made to retain the Emperor as a figurehead, to allow the smoother transition of Japanese society from an essentially militaristic, fascist government to a peaceful one. Considering the success of Japan in the post-war years, I'd have to say that of all the American foreign policy initiatives (such idiotic things Cuba and the Phillipines) the fashioning of modern Japan surely must stand out as an enormous success that turned a determined enemy into an industrious ally. I wish the Americans could do that more often.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Sigh... OK, so this article is complete crap, as a cursory read will show (another poster has pointed out a nonsense passage about neutrinos, for example).
It is true, however, that a lot of the ideas we commonly attribute to Einstein were thought of by others. Poincare and Lorentz, for example, did think a lot about the synchronization of moving clocks and come up with ideas later used in relativity (e.g. Lorentz transforms). Einstein did not attribute all of these sources in his paper, and I believe there was some debate over to what extent he was aware of that work (or of the result of the Michelson-Morley experiment which cast doubt on the idea of the ether). Einstein might even be in some trouble today if he published a paper without references to such things.
Einstein's original contribution was to some extent his way of looking at these problems. Earlier thinkers had noticed practical problems of clock synchronization, but by and large they believed that these were just experimental issues (due to the wind of the ether, for example) that you needed to correct for to obtain the true, absolute time. It was Einstein who declared that different people's clocks actually run differently, and that there is no absolute time (or ether)! His radical idea was that space and time were not absolutes that every observer could agree upon, not that clock synchronization was hard.
I recommend Galison's book "Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps" for a discussion of the lead-up to these sorts of ideas.
Huh? No, it's not. It's titled "Quantentheorie des einatomigen idealen Gases", and considering that it's written in German, that shouldn't be much of a surprise, either. What you gave above is the translation of the title, not the title itself.
Sheesh. Slashdot editors. :)
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
I think it is a mix of both: most letters are Latin (script) but some are Sütterlin.
For example, his small type 'z' and the capital 'E' look like Sütterlin.
I think it was quite common to use a mix of both at that time;
I looked into an inherited "Poesiealbum"(*) from that time and it contained very different writing styles:
Completely Sütterlin, completly Latin and very often mixtures of both - some very similar to Einstein's (using Sütterlin 'z' and 'E').
(*autograph book with little poems/remembrances by your friends and relatives)