Two Caltech historians associated with the Einstein Papers Project have gathered together what they consider to be the most important of Einstein's writings, scientific and otherwise, in a two-volume set titled The Essential Einstein, published by Princeton University Press.
Diana Kormos-Buchwald, the Robert M. Abbey Professor of History and director and general editor of the Einstein Papers Project teamed up with Tilman Sauer, a visiting associate in history at Caltech and professor for the history of mathematics and natural sciences at Johannes Gutenberg Universität in Mainz, Germany, to select and translate (as necessary) those writings that they feel give the fullest picture of the work and thoughts of perhaps the most acclaimed physicist of the modern era.
Since 1987, the Einstein Papers Project has been collecting, editing, translating, and releasing the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein in chronological order. In 2024, the project published volume 17, which includes his writings through November 1930. Kormos-Buchwald continues to oversee a comprehensive compendium of Einstein's writings.
But what of the individual who wants to read a meaningful selection of Einstein's prose? Princeton University Press and the Einstein Papers Project both felt that something more distilled was in order, and so together they embarked on what today is The Essential Einstein. "Prior to the publication of these two books, there really wasn't a standardized collection of Einstein's scientific papers in English translation," Kormos-Buchwald says. "It was very important, in our view, to create such a collection that could be held in one hand."
One of the two volumes of The Essential Einstein is subtitled "Scientific Writings," and contains 38 documents, while the other is subtitled "Public Writings," and contains 96 documents. Each volume has an introduction by the editors, and each document has a headnote to put that document into historical context. Kormos-Buchwald and Sauer worked cooperatively to select the writings that would be included in both volumes, but then each oversaw one volume: Sauer took the scientific writings while Kormos-Buchwald took the public writings.
The foremost challenge in selecting texts for the volumes was, of course, the over-abundance of writings: more than 14,000 documents composed of published papers, manuscripts, correspondence, speeches, and newspaper editorials, among others. For the scientific writings in particular, some choices were obvious, Sauer says: for example, the five papers of the so-called annus mirabilis in 1905 that espoused the special theory of relativity and provided the foundation for much of Einstein's work in the following decades, and indeed for much work in physics throughout the 20th century and beyond. But for others, the editors had to balance selecting those papers Einstein himself thought were most significant with those that were perceived as most significant by others, both at the time and since. "There are a number of these papers that are essential because of their reception and the fact that they have proven to provide real insights into nature. And there are others we deemed essential because even though these writings had less of an impact, Einstein worked hard on them for a long, long time," Sauer says.
"We wanted to document the entirety of his thinking, including, for example, his applied works, so we have included one of his patents," Sauer says. "Einstein is most famous for his relativity theories, of course, but he wrote in a number of other fields as well. In his later years, Einstein devoted significant time to mathematizing his theoretical physics."
"Reading Einstein's original works is not leisure reading," Sauer cautions. "But it is accessible if you have an adequate background in physics and if you read carefully. I think many scientists and students want to read Einstein in the original, but one of the obstacles has been language. Since English is now the scientific lingua franca, having the most important of Einstein's papers translated into English should serve a sizable community."
The public writings volume is composed entirely of writings that Einstein either published or approved for publication during his lifetime. Some of these public writings are about his scientific theories. Einstein spent a decade or more diligently attempting to explain the general theory of relativity for a nontechnical audience. "After Einstein became famous in 1919, 1920, he received many requests from newspapers, magazines, semiprofessional journals, and even the Encyclopedia Brittanica, to write popular articles about his scientific theories, and he responded to many of these requests," Kormos-Buchwald says. "The difference between his own physics and Newtonian physics, his own explanations of time and space and the curvature of space-time, the different geometries that he had introduced, the difference between Euclidean geometry and Riemannian geometry—he writes about all these topics in wonderful language with very few equations. I find these writings fascinating. I've read them repeatedly and retranslated many of them."
As to what motivated Einstein to speak to a general audience, Kormos-Buchwald explains, "Einstein realized very early on that his science contained what his critics called counterintuitive elements. He was also not happy that the theory of relativity, by its very title, could lead to confusion and misunderstanding among the general public. Einstein did not title his initial papers 'the theory of relativity' because his theory was, in fact, the opposite. It was the theory of invariance, because the essence of his argument was that the laws of physics are constant and do not depend on the frame of reference." By the mid-1920s, however, Einstein had sworn off giving popular lectures about his science. "The effort was taking too much out of him. It was too exhausting to speak to the general public, especially in foreign countries where he was working with simultaneous translators," Kormos-Buchwald explains. "He found that extremely unsatisfactory."
The public writings are presented chronologically in The Essential Einstein, though they are a mixture of scientific talks and appeals to pacifism, Zionism, and Jewish identity, among other topics. Kormos-Buchwald and Sauer wanted to show Einstein's ideas as they actually developed and not just retroactively. "We didn't want to impose themes on Einstein's work. We wanted to show his ideas as they actually developed alongside one another," Kormos-Buchwald says.
Both editors express admiration for Einstein's approach to science as well as the results he achieved. "Einstein's prescience, his farsightedness, are some of the most impressive things about him for me," Sauer says. "He was able to theoretically develop ideas that took years or decades or even a century to finally be proven by observation." Kormos-Buchwald explains that Einstein "was following an ideal of an ever better understanding of nature without necessarily believing that we would at some point arrive at a final theory and be done with it. He thought there would always be progress and improved understanding, and that it was important to not cultivate disparate or even inconsistent bits of theory but to ensure that there was an underlying compatibility."
In his "Recollections," a brief piece written just three weeks before his death in 1955 at the age of 76, Einstein closes by paraphrasing a remark by 18th century German philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing as follows: "The striving for truth is more delicious than its assured possession."