EINSTEIN, Albert.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Autograph manuscript leaf, in German. An unpublished working document in Einstein's hand, written and carefully revised during his dauntless pursuit of "a research problem that easily transcended the intellectual capacities of a single researcher": a unified field theory (Sauer, p. 289). This is an early approach to the topic of his famous 1945 paper, "Generalization of the Relativistic Theory of Gravitation" (Weil 215).Einstein's investigations into unified field theory - the creation of a unified foundation for physics - preoccupied him for most of the second half of his life. His "most vivid philosophical concern was at the heart of this enterprise... to see the whole of physics as an organic entity, where no part can be separated from any other without severe loss of meaning" (Sauer, p. 281). Beginning in the early 1940s, he attempted to extend the formulation of the general theory of relativity to unified field theory using a Hermitean metric tensor field. His highly abstract investigations employed mathematical constructs that were not widely understood at the time, so Einstein repeatedly developed and abandoned different approaches to the problem, ranging from affine theory and trace-free equations through to the five-dimensional approach, distant parallelism, bivectors, and asymmetric theory. He hoped that the equations would eventually have a direct application to the real world.In this manuscript leaf, Einstein works through what appears to be extended gravity field

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