Translator's
Preface
This
volume
presents
new English
translations of
all
but
three
of
the
documents
in
Volume 4
of
The
Collected
Papers
of
Albert
Einstein.
The omitted documents
are
unpublished manuscripts,
either
working
notes
or
lecture
notes, containing mostly
calculations:
Docs.
10, 14,
and
19.
Of
the
twenty-eight
documents translated
here,
the
documentary
edition
presents twenty-six
in
German
and two in French.
The
translation
volume
does not
reproduce
the
annotations
or
editorial
apparatus
of
the
documentary edition,
which the
reader should
consult. We
have,
however,
included
the
editorial footnote
numbers,
which
appear
in
brackets
(usually
in
the
margins),
corresponding
to
the footnotes
in the
documentary
edition.
Bracketed numbers that
are
preceded by
a
"p."
in
the
margins
of
Docs.
1
and
10
refer
to
pages
in the
original
manuscripts.
For
the most
part,
misprints
and
errors
in the
original
documents have
not
been corrected.
As
with
the
translations of earlier volumes
in The
Collected
Papers
of
Albert
Einstein,
our
aim
here
has
been
to
produce
an
accurate and
readable
English
text. Where
necessary, style
has
been sacrificed for literalness
to
enable readers
not
fluent
in
German
to
make
an independent
scholarly
evaluation of
the text.
We
hope,
nevertheless,
that the
quality
of the
original
German
prose
shines
through.
Some
of
the
technical
vocabulary
found
in
the
original
documents
is
peculiar
to the
time
and
place
of their
composition.
We
have
tried,
so
far
as
possible,
to
provide
not
modern translations
but
English
equivalents commonly employed
in the
contemporary
physics
literature,
otherwise
supplying
literal
translations.
Similarly, we
have
reproduced
all
notations
and
equations
in
a
form
as
close
as
possible to
the
original.
We thank the staff of
the
editorial offices of
the
Einstein
Papers
in
Boston for their
help,
which has
come
in
many
forms and
on
many
occasions.
Alice
Calaprice,
senior
editor
and
Translation
Project
administrator
at
Princeton
University Press,
has
again
provided
invaluable assistance in
ways
too
numerous
to
mention.
She
is
to
be
thanked,
in
particular,
for her
patience
and
industry.
Last but
not
least,
we
also thank
Michael
Perlman for his technical assistance
in the
corrections
and
preparation
of
the final
camera-ready copy
of
this volume.
Anna Beck, Translator
Don Howard, Consultant
xi