Preface
This volume
presents
new English
translations of
all
of the documents
in
Volume
3
of
The
Collected
Papers
of Albert
Einstein,
with
the
exception
of the
"Scratch
Notebook,
1909-1914,"
which
is
published
as
Appendix
A in
the
documentary
edition.
The
documentary
edition
presents
twenty-four
of these documents
in
German
versions,
the
remaining
three
appearing
in
their
published
French
versions.
The translation
volume
does not
reproduce
the annotations
or
editorial
apparatus
of the
documentary
edition,
which
the reader should
consult.
We
have, however,
included
in this volume
the editorial
footnote numbers that
correspond
to
the footnotes
in
the
documentary
edition;
they
are
placed
within
square
brackets.
Bracketed numbers
in
the
margins
that
are preceded by
a
"p."
refer
to
pages
in
Einstein's notebooks.
Angle
brackets
indicate
crossed-out
material. For the
most
part,
misprints
and
errors
in
the
original
documents
have not
been
corrected,
except
for
the
occasional
correction of
misspelled names.
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."
Therefore,
our
aim
has not
been
to
produce
a
"literary
translation,"
so
style
has
been
sacrificed to
literalness
in
some places
to
enable readers
who
are
not
fluent
in
German
to make
a scholarly
evaluation of the
content
of the
documents.
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,
whenever
possible,
to
provide
not
modern translations
but
English
equivalents
commonly employed
in
the
contemporary
physics
literature;
otherwise
we supply
literal translations.
Perhaps
the
most
significant
exception
to this
rule
is
our
translation of
"Spannung"
as "voltage" or as
"potential
difference"
(depending
on
the
context),
there
being
no one
standard
English
equivalent
in
common use
in
the
first two
decades of
this
century. Similarly,
we
have
reproduced
all
notations
and
equations
in
a
form
as
close
as
possible
to
the
original.
Three documents
in this volume
presented
a
special
challenge-the
three
sets
of
lecture
notes
(Docs.
1,
4,
and
11).
As
might
be
expected,
the
style
of these
notes
is
often
fragmentary
and
telegraphic.
To the
greatest
extent
possible,
we
have
sought
to
reproduce
Einstein's
abbreviations, repetitions,
and
errors
of
grammar
and
spelling, so
as
to
preserve
the
feel
of
the
original
notes,
except
in
the
few
cases
where
such
literalness
would have
produced
an impossibly
unclear translation.
We
would like to
thank the
staff at
the Einstein
offices in
Boston
for
their
help
at
various
stages
in
the
preparation
of
this
translation. We
owe a
debt
to
Walter
Lippincott,
director of Princeton
University
Press,
for
his
support
and
encouragement
of this
project.
Alice
Calaprice,
senior editor
at
Princeton
University Press,
has
provided
invaluable
assistance,
for
which
we
thank her. Our thanks
go
as
well to Michael
Perlman for
his
technical assistance in
the
preparation
of
the final
camera-ready
copy
of
the
volume,
and
to
Charles
Creesy
and
Michael Volk for
seeing
to
our
computer
needs.
ANNA
BECK,
TRANSLATOR
DON
HOWARD,
CONSULTANT