This manuscript was written in 1922, when Albert Einstein had just heard that he had been awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics. Many physicists were still skeptical of his theory of general relativity, which turned the conceptions of time, space and gravity of classical physics upside down. Einstein did not receive the prize for his theory of relativity but for other ground-breaking work. However, many physicists and mathematicians continued to work according to the theory of relativity. One of the them was Eric Trefftz, who thought he had found a solution to a problem in the theory of general relativity – how two bodies move around a common center of mass. In the manuscript, Einstein comments on Trefftz’s article and demonstrates problems with his solution.
One of the previous owners of the manuscript was Max von Laue, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1914. This manuscript was donated to the Nobel Prize Museum by Åsa and Per Taube.
In a 1954 letter Albert Einstein replies to Evert Fornäs, a teacher at a Swedish folk high school, who had written Einstein about his general theory of relativity and the limitations of science based on mathematics. Einstein believes that in principle the laws of nature can be described in mathematical terms, but that the limitations of human intelligence makes it impossible to describe even elementary rules of psychology on the basis of physics and chemistry.
This letter was donated to the Nobel Prize Museum by the Fornäs family.
The announcement that Albert Einstein had been awarded the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physics came as no surprise to him. Following his divorce from Mileva Maric in 1919, Einstein had promised that he would give her and their two sons his prize money if he was awarded the Nobel Prize. In this letter written by Einstein to his two sons in 1924, he mentions one of the uses to which they put the prize money: a house.
