I was reading about this “Theory” on a site I googled. Are the actual notes he took, writings and other ideas he put in (his self proclaimed) “chicken scratch” published anywhere. You know, similar to what preservationists did ith Leonardo DaVinci’s works?
He threw out his notes and original manuscript for Relativity (I’m not sure if he meant General or Special), so unless it’s in some buried trash pile in Zurich, it’s gone.
If you mean his Unified Field Theory, I’d guess the notes are at Princeton somewhere.
I’ve just had an email from Bonzer, who’s seen this thread at work, but unfortunately can’t respond due to his home computer being down. But, according to him:
There’s a major ongoing project to produce a vast multivolume definitive edition of everything that survives of Einstein’s writing, public or private: the Einstein Papers Project. But this is the sort of endeavour that takes many decades to complete and so far they’ve only published the material up to 1920. That thus includes what survives from the periods where he was developing the Special and General Theories of Relativity, but they’ve yet to reach the years when he was working on Unified Field Theory. However, the associated Einstein Archives Online has digitised versions of some of the later notebooks and drafts (the physical copies of which are mainly in Jerusalem). For instance, this document was related to his Unified Field investigations.
Einstein also occasionally published scientific papers about his current speculations concerning a Unified Field Theory, so much of his thinking on the subject can be followed in the physics journals of the period. Most of these papers will be listed in the likes of Pais’s biography Subtle is the Lord (itself possibly the best overview of the Unified Field work). Contemporary interest in his research was sufficiently great that some of those
papers got reprinted elsewhere. Thus one of them is included in his The Meaning of Relativity, which is still in print.
I hope this is helpful, and Bonzer says he should be back online soon!
Einstein didn’t have a Theory of Everything. He tried very hard to develop one, but he wasn’t successful. He did develop General Relativity, a very good theory of gravity, and he was one of the folks behind the development of Quantum Mechanics (though not the biggest contributor by far, there), but his work on the two theories was basically separate.
Angua, very, very helpful. Thansk so much for the links.
Chronos, I could’ve sworn that I heard on The History Channel once that Einstein mocked Quantum Mechanics. was his work in that field accidental or something? Because I heard that he sorta shunned it. Maybe I heard wrong or am thinking of something else.
No, that’s pretty much the case. His paper on the photoelectric effect in 1905 postulated that light could behave like little discrete packets called “quanta” (singular “quantum”, of course), instead of always acting like a wave. The idea that what was previously thought of as a wave could behave like a particle under some circumstances and like a wave under others was instrumental in the further development of quantum mechanics. However, as quantum mechanics was developed further in the '20s and '30s, it became evident that probability and chance played an inherent role in what can actually be observed in the Universe. Einstein was deeply uncomfortable with this (hence his famous “God does not play dice with the Universe” comment), and as far as I know never fully accepted the interpretation of quantum mechanics that most physicists think is correct today.
Lee Smolin’s new book The Trouble with Physics has a nice layman’s summary of Einstein’s attempt to develop a unified field theory and what exactly he found wrong with quantum mechanics.