We are pleased to be publishing this translation of selected documents
of Volume 12 of The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, the companion
volume to the annotated, original-language documentary edition. As we
have stated in all earlier volumes, these translations are not intended for
use without the documentary edition, which provides the extensive
editorial commentary necessary for a full historical and scientific
understanding of the source documents. The translations strive first for
accuracy, then literariness, though we hope that both have been
achieved. The documents were selected for translation by the editors of
The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein.
We thank Ann M. Hentschel and Klaus Hentschel for their continuing
good work and dedication to making Einstein’s correspondence
available to the English-speaking world; Diana Kormos Buchwald for
her attention to the translation project; Rosy Meiron for stylistic
suggestions; and Osik Moses for indexing, typesetting the manuscript,
and producing the camera-ready copy, assisted by Jennifer Nollar, Rudy
Hirschmann, Carol Chaplin, and Linny Schenck. Many thanks to Alice
Calaprice for her thorough copyediting of the manuscript.
Finally, we are most grateful to the National Science Foundation, Grant
No. SBR-9710507, for its support of our project.
Princeton University Press
June 2009
PUBLISHER’S FOREWORD