Einstein’s manuscript notes from his early work on relativity are vanishingly rare—and those that survive are, as in this case, often the result of sheer accident. Prior to 1928, when Helen Dukas began safeguarding his papers, Einstein made little effort to preserve his working material. What remains offers an extraordinary window into the actual process of discovery.

This manuscript dates from the critical years between 1912 and 1915, when Einstein was consumed with extending his special theory of relativity to accelerated frames of reference. These calculations—dealing with the equation of motion for a material particle and involving the ponderomotive forces arising from pressure gradients and stresses—are executed in the compact four-dimensional tensor notation Einstein first adopted in 1912, following Minkowski’s groundbreaking 1908 reformulation of space and time into a single non-Euclidean geometry. Einstein had initially resisted Minkowski’s abstract formulations, but later acknowledged that they greatly eased his transition from special to general relativity.

The visual structure of the manuscript—mathematical formulas punctuated by hand-drawn diagrams—offers a glimpse of Einstein in full creative flow, thinking not only in symbols but in shapes and fields. It is the rare example of Einstein’s scientific handwriting captured mid-process: a moment of raw theorizing rather than polished publication.

Dating to the Berlin period, likely between October 1914 and March 1915, these notes align thematically with material in The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Vol. 6.

Only two such manuscript records of Einstein directly working on relativity theory are known in private hands: this example, and the Einstein–Besso correspondence. (Rare Book Hub.)

We are grateful to Professor Peter West and Dr. Andreas Recknagel (Theoretical Physics Group, King’s College London) and Dr. Tilman Sauer (Einstein Papers Project, Caltech) for their insight into the manuscript’s context and relevance.

PROVENANCE

• Unrecorded before Sotheby’s sale of June 26, 1998



• Subsequently acquired by physicist and historian Jagdish Mehra (1931–2008), noted for his definitive six-volume The Historical Development of Quantum Theory

• Jeremy Norman & Co., Inc.



• Private collection



• A singular scientific artifact from the dawn of general relativity—Einstein not as icon, but as working theorist, in the act of invention.

A singular scientific artifact from the dawn of general relativity—Einstein not as icon, but as working theorist, in the act of invention.