l i i I N T R O D U C T I O N T O V O L U M E 9
defeated nation. His pacifism during the war, his efforts on behalf of the less fortu-
nate, and his concern about the dire conditions caused by the war added to his
unique stature.
In December 1919, Einstein was already complaining that he could not work
amid all the fuss (Docs. 187, 189, 198, 207). It was a condition from which he
would never again be entirely free.
[1]For a discussion of Einstein’s heuristics in his discovery of general relativity, see Renn and Sauer
1999, and for further information about the genesis of general relativity, see the references cited in
this work.
[2]For Einstein’s earliest attempts to account for the perihelion anomaly by means of a relativistic
theory of gravitation, see Einstein to Conrad Habicht, 24 July 1907 (Vol. 5, Doc. 69). For attempts to
compute the anomalous perihelion advance in the context of his “Entwurf” theory, see Vol. 4, Doc.
14, and the editorial note, “The Einstein-Besso Manuscript on the Motion of the Perihelion of Mer-
cury,” Vol. 4, pp. 344–359. For the successful account of the anomaly in the final theory, see Vol. 6,
Doc. 24. For further historical discussion of the problem of explaining the perihelion motion, see Ear-
man and Janssen 1993.
[3]See Einstein 1907j (Vol. 2, Doc. 47), §§19–20.
[4]See Einstein 1911h (Vol. 3, Doc. 23), p. 496.
[5]Ibid. and, e.g., Einstein to George E. Hale, 14 October 1913 (Vol. 5, Doc. 477).
[6]See Einstein 1915h (Vol. 6, Doc. 24), p. 834, and Einstein 1916e (Vol. 6, Doc. 30), §22.
[7]Einstein to Otto Naumann, 7 December 1915 (Vol 8, Doc. 160).
[8]Einstein to Karl Schwarzschild, 29 December 1915 (Vol. 8, Doc. 176).
[9]See Einstein to Erwin Freundlich, 7 December 1913, and ca. 20 January 1914 (Vol. 5, Docs. 492
and 506).
[10]See Docs. 105 and 106 for references by Freundlich and Einstein to the Lick expedition. A
report on that expedition was given at a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society on 11 July 1919
(see The Observatory 42, 542 [August 1919]: 297–306), but its results were never published. Crelin-
sten 1983 and Earman and Glymour 1980 provide accounts of the several pre-1919 Einstein eclipse
expeditions.
[11]Erwin Freundlich to Einstein, 17 June 1917 (Vol. 8, Doc. 353).
[12]De Sitter 1916a, 1916b, and 1917. For Einstein’s appreciation of De Sitter’s work, see Doc.
187.
[13]Eddington 1917b, 1918a, and 1918b.
[14]See Dyson 1917 on the initial assessments of a test, and Dyson et al. 1920 for a final report of
the expeditions and their results. The following account of the chronology of the British eclipse expe-
ditions is based mostly on Dyson et al. 1920, as well as on Crelinsten 1983, Earman and Glymour
1980a, Sponsel 2002, and Stanley 2003.
[15]Birck 1917.
[16]See Vol. 7, Doc. 19, pp. 147–149, and this volume, entry of 15 April 1919 in Calendar.
[17]Eddington’s telegram read “Through cloud. Hopeful.” Crommelin’s first telegram read “Eclipse
splendid.” The members of the British expedition had agreed on a code to be used for the telegrams,
but Eddington had departed from the agreed conventions in saying that he was hopeful of obtaining
good results.
[18]See Doc. 61, note 4, and “Meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society,” The Observatory 42,
541 (July 1919): 261–262.
[19]Einstein’s 1911 prediction was often advertised by Eddington and others of the eclipse team as
the Newtonian prediction, because it could be derived in the so-called Newtonian order of approxi-
mation of general relativity theory, as well as within the old Newtonian theory under the assumption