The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein 8. [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME 8 Referring mockingly to his call to Berlin as the recruitment of a "prize laying hen," who fears that it may never again produce eggs,t'J Albert Einstein makes his appearance in this volume and in the German capital only months before the outbreak of the First World War. When this volume ends, he has crowned his intellectual achievements with a powerful new theory of gravitation and is about to become a household name. At first glance, it might seem that Einstein's professional and personal isolation have ended when he receives his appointment as a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences and takes up that post in spring 1914. Yet one of the striking features of the correspondence that is presented in this volume is how Einstein succeeds in replicating for himself in bustling Berlin those conditions of self-absorbed isolation which had, while in Switzerland, thrust him into the limelight of the international physics community. On a personal plane, he acts on a visceral need to work without distraction by banishing wife and children from Berlin soon after his arrival there. A willingness to sacrifice his secondary goals to scientific ambition, coupled with a need for distance from the crush of politics, also underlie his fitful and tentative stance on public affairs throughout the war years. Einstein's ability to persevere in his singleminded ambition in the face of growing recognition within the European intellectual community and of demands on his time from Berlin society comes at a price. Just as he learns to shrug off the numerous unsolicited requests addressed to him after assuming the directorship of a research institute in autumn 1917, so he adopts a certain callousness in dealings with his closest circle of friends and family. Similarly, he is prepared to sacrifice consistency in his position on political issues during the period under discussion. The one constant is a fierce commitment to his work. This purposefulness on Einstein's part places a burden of responsibility on the editors of this volume. In order to match his predilection for dealing with selective clusters of correspondents, we have adopted a policy of prudent selectivity in the presentation of materials. We want to keep the focus on the significant range of professional and personal interactions that delineate Einstein's world from 1914 until 1918. Even this policy results in the inclusion as texts of 677 letters of a total of more than 820 written by or to Einstein in the early Berlin years that are known to