Albert Einstein (1879-1955) - photo 1

Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

Lot 325
15.12.2023 11:00UTC +00:00
Classic
Starting price
£ 100
AuctioneerCHRISTIE'S
Event locationUnited Kingdom, London
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ID 1109126
Lot 325 | Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Estimate value
£ 15 000 – 20 000
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Autograph manuscript of scientific calculations, n.d. [c.1950]
One page, 280 x 216mm, including doodles or pen trials at lower left (watermark of Whitings mutual bond rag content). Provenance: Sotheby’s, 30 May 1979, lot 49 (part).

Workings towards unified field theory. The manuscript comprises 34 lines of calculations, part set out (unusually) in a tabular form, a few lines of equations numbered ‘1-4’ and again ‘2-4’. A few notes in German including the words ‘Mit 1 und 3 bleibt nur …’, ‘würde Φ bestimmen’, ‘Probieren’, ‘Erste Gl[ied] erfüllt durch …‘.

Einstein devoted the last thirty years of his life to the quest to combine general relativity and Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism into a single physical and mathematical framework which would account for all of the then-known fundamental forces of nature – a ‘unified field theory’. Although his early attempts in the 1920s focused on ‘distant parallelism’, he later concentrated on an approach treating both the metric tensor and the affine connection as fundamental fields, often introducing an element of asymmetry (in variance to the theory of general relativity). Einstein often complained of the heavy mathematical burden imposed by this approach, as demonstrated in the present manuscript.
Address of auction CHRISTIE'S
8 King Street, St. James's
SW1Y 6QT London
United Kingdom
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