Albert Einstein (1879-1955) - photo 1
Albert Einstein (1879-1955) - photo 2

Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

Starting price
£ 100
Auction dateClassic
15.12.2023 11:00UTC +01:00
Auctioneer
CHRISTIE'S
Event location
United Kingdom, London
Archive
The auction is completed. No bids can be placed anymore.
Archive
ID 1109131
Lot 329 | Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Autograph manuscript of scientific calculations, n.d. [March 1950 - early April 1951]
1½ pages, 280 x 216mm, dated in pencil at upper right and at lower left, likely in the hand of Helen Dukas (partial watermark of Whitings mutual bond rag content). Provenance: Sotheby’s, 30 May 1979, lot 49 (part).

Einstein deep in mathematical contemplation. The manuscript comprises approximately 31 lines of mathematical workings.

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
Preview
09.12.2023 12:00 – 17:00
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