This week a handwritten manuscript by Albert Einstein is being donated to the Nobel Prize Museum. It was published in December 1922 and was thus the first Einstein work published after he received the Nobel Prize.  

 “There is always heavy interest in Albert Einstein among our Museum visitors. This manuscript will help us to tell about his research and about the twists and turns surrounding his Nobel Prize, which he in fact did not receive for the theory of relativity. We are very pleased at the opportunity to display it,” says Erik Lanner, Director of the Nobel Prize Museum.

The manuscript incorporates a variant of Einstein’s 1915 general theory of relativity, with comments by Nobel Laureate Max von Laue. It was the basis for a paper that was published on 21 December 1922 by the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences. The paper was a response to a paper published by mathematician Erich Trefftz in Annalen der Physikearlier in 1922.

Albert Einstein was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics “for his Services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect,” which was decided and announced in the autumn of 1922.

Until 1948 the manuscript was owned by Max von Laue, the 1914 Nobel Laureate in Physics. After 1948 it had various private owners. In the autumn of 2018 the manuscript was acquired by Åsa and Per Taube of Stockholm for the purpose of donating it to the collection of artefacts that are housed at the Nobel Prize Museum. 

“This is a unique document that we would like many people to enjoy, so we could not imagine a better home for it than the Museum,” says Per Taube. 

The manuscript will be on public display at the Museum after this summer.