PREFACE
This
volume
contains the
translations of all
documents
in
Volume
2
of
The
Collected
Papers of
Albert
Einstein, all of
which
were
originally written
in
German.
It is
not
self-contained
and
should
be
read in
conjunction
with
the
documentary
edition
and
its editorial apparatus.
All
editorial
headnotes
and
footnotes
have been
omitted,
as
have
the
introductory
materials
and
the
bibliography. However,
we
used
the bibliography to check
the references cited
in the
documents and, especially, to correct and
complete
the
titles
and
bibliographic
data
given
by
Einstein in his reviews of
books and
articles.
In
this
volume
we
have
included
the editorial footnote
numbers,
which
appear
in
brackets in the
margin
and correspond to
the footnotes in the
documentary
edition.
We
have not
corrected
any
misprints
or
other
errors
(including
those
in the
formulas)
if the editors
have
commented
on
them. Misspellings
of
names
of
persons
have been
routinely
corrected.
Although some
of
the
documents have
been
translated before,
we
have
provided
new
translations here rather than
attempt to
use any
"best"
existing
translation.
The purpose
of
the translation
project, in accordance with the
agreement
between
Princeton
University
Press
and
the National Science Foundation, is
to
provide "
a
careful,
accurate
translation that is
as
close
to
the
German
original
as
possible while still
producing
readable
English."
This
is,
therefore,
not
a
"literary" translation but should allow readers
who
are
not
fluent
in
German
to
make
a
scholarly
evaluation of the
content
of the
documents
while also obtaining
an
appreciation
of their
flavor.
Many
technical
expressions used
in the
original
documents
are
outdated
(see
the editorial
comments
in
Volume
2);
whenever
possible,
we
have
not
replaced them
with the
modern English
versions but
have used
the
expressions
employed
in
the technical literature of the time, if
known,
or
else
we
provided
a
literal translation. In
particular,
we
retained
the
term
"electric
Previous Page Next Page