We are pleased to be publishing this translation of selected documents
of Volume 7 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. Due to the nature of scientific-historical research, this volume
is appearing out of sequential order, after Volume 8. The next volume in
the series will be Volume 9. The documents were selected for translation
by the editors of the The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein.
We thank Alfred Engel and Engelbert Schucking for their continuing
good work and dedication to making Einstein’s scientific writings
available to the English-speaking world. And we welcome Marion
Philadelphia and Andreas Kossak as the compositors of this Writings
volume. We thank Alice Calaprice for the copyediting, and Osik Moses
for creating the index and finalizing the production with Linny Schenck.
Finally, we are most grateful to the National Science Foundation, Grant
No. SBR-9710507, for its support of our project.
Princeton University Press
January 2002
PUBLISHER’S FOREWORD