BFF-28 Einstein’s relativity document gifted to Nobel museum

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Einstein’s relativity document gifted to Nobel museum

STOCKHOLM, June 20, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – The Nobel Museum in Stockholm has
been gifted Albert Einstein’s first paper published after he received the
Nobel Prize in 1922 and discussing his then still controversial relativity
theory.

Swedish businessman Per Taube bought the handwritten two-page document at
an auction for 1.2 million krona (110,000 euros) in December last year.

He has now made good on his promise to gift the manuscript to the Nobel
Museum, which will put it on display in a glass frame this autumn.

The paper, written in November 1922 while Einstein was attending
conferences in south-east Asia, was published a month later by the Prussian
Academy of Sciences.

Incomprehensible to many, the text is a rebuttal of an article by German
mathematician Erich Trefftz debating the “large-scale geometrical structure
of the universe” — notably the forces and masses separating and enveloping
celestial bodies.

Trefftz claimed he had found a “static” solution to Einstein’s theory of
general relativity.

However, Einstein rejected the hypothesis in a series of complex
equations, concluding: “It became apparent… that Trefftz’s solution does
not permit this physical interpretation at all.”

Significantly, the document contains a modified version of the relativity
theory and shows that Einstein was facing fierce resistance within the
scientific community.

“This letter shows that even though Albert Einstein had received the
Nobel prize, his physics was very much part of the debate among scientists at
that time and Albert Einstein himself was also part of this debate,” Gustav
Kallstrand, senior curator a the Nobel Prize museum, told AFP.

Moreover, Einstein received the Nobel Prize of Physics on November 10,
1922, for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect, not for the
relativity theory.

The paper also has handwritten editor’s annotations by German physicist
Max von Laue who won the Nobel Prize in 1914.

Von Laue owned the manuscript until 1948 before it passed into the hands
of private collectors.

For Kallstrand, Einstein — who was born in 1879 and died in 1955 —
remains “the archetypal image of a scientific genius”.

“If you say ‘scientist’, most people will get an image in their head of
Albert Einstein.”

BSS/AFP/ARS/1802 hrs