Sharing a great man's intellect

To this day — Albert Einstein's 124th birthday — his altruism and genius still hold a ubiquitous presence in the realm of physics, Zionism, pacifism and even in certain offices of Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study. The Einstein Papers Project is aimed at preserving the legacy of Einstein through publishing The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein.

The papers will comprise 25 volumes of Einstein's personal writings and his research in theoretical physics, according to the California Institute of Technology's EPP website.

In his will, Einstein left his papers and estate in the care of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Today, most of Einstein's original documents are located at the Jewish National and University Library at Hebrew University. As of yet, eight volumes have been published by Princeton University Press. Two other volumes are being prepared, and it is expected that they will be published within the next three years.

The project is sponsored by Princeton University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and located at Caltech.

The volumes will be a consolidation of more than 40,000 documents contained in Einstein's personal collection and 15,000 documents related to Einstein. The project will be the first complete assemblage of what Caltech's EPP website calls Einstein's "written legacy."

After the first volume, the papers divide into two series, with the documents in each volume published in chronological order.

The first volume begins with the birth of the genius and ends as he begins his first full-time job in the Swiss Patent Office. Most of the documents in this section — never before published — were discovered by the editors involved in the EPP.

The reader is drawn into Einstein's youth through his letters to his schoolmate and future wife Mileva Maric. The volume also contains a set of lecture notes Einstein wrote while a student at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich.

The fifth volume has Einstein's correspondence, shedding light on his close relations with his contemporaries in physics. The letters describe his academic life after he left the Patent Office in 1909 and serve as evidence for the important roles of scientists including Fritz Haber and Walther Nernst.

The eighth volume describes Einstein's scientific pursuit to generalize the theory of relativity to include gravitation and accelerated frames of reference.

A considerably large portion of the documentation includes 675 letters which have only recently been discovered by the editor of EPP. For the first time, the breakup of Einstein's first marriage and the subsequent divorce are presented in great detail. The new material brings to the surface Einstein's strong moral rectitude in the face of eminent war, elucidating the lesser known side of Einstein's life.

Though The Collected Papers do cover Einstein's scientific documents, the EPP also attempts to paint a picture of a multifaceted individual who acknowledged world concerns and experienced the same mundane struggles of the common man — not just a genius whose name is synonymous with certain physics formulae.