Want to read Einstein’s letters and notes? They’re online now

Want to read Einstein’s letters and notes? They’re online now

Einstein was a prolific writer, detailing not only his scientific exploits, but also his personal thoughts and feelings.

Want to read the papers of Albert Einstein himself? Now you can, thanks to “Digital Einstein.”

Princeton University Press and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem — who Einstein gave his copyright to — have been studying the 80,000 documents he left behind since 1986. Today, anyone on the Internet can check out the genius’s papers, postcards, letters, notebooks, and diaries online that Einstein left in shoeboxes, attics, and elsewhere when he passed away back in 1955, according to the New York Times.

Known as the Einstein Papers Project, edited by a professor at the California Institute of Technology, a total of 13 volumes have been published already out of 30 projected. These volumes contain 5,000 documents up to 1923 — when he was 44 — in hard-bound books filled with essays and footnotes detailing his efforts and thoughts throughout the days. Other paperback volumes have his English translations. Digital copies of his papers are available on the “Einstein Archives” provided by the Hebrew University.

Digital Einstein will allow users to choose between English and his native German to read the texts. They can look at his love letters, his high school transcripts, notebooks he used for discovering the theory of relativity for which he is most known, letters to his best friend, and many, many other works that give insight into the mind of one of the most influential minds of the 20th century.

Besides giving insight into how his mind worked, the papers also show a personal side of Einstein, include a letter he once wrote as a 20-year-old college student to his sister, Maja, saying that his life was so dramatic that if everyone lived like him, “there would be no need for novels.”

The 1,000 documents of the 14th volume will be available in January. You can visit einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu for more information.

Albert Einstein, who was born March 14, 1879, in Germany, developed the general theory of relativity, which along with quantum mechanics is one of the two pillars of modern physics. He is famous for the equation “E=mc(2)”, which is often called the world’s most famous equation. He won the 1921 Nobel Price in Physics. In April 1955, he passed away in Princeton, New Jersey, at the age of 76.

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