An Einstein breakthrough
Published: August 23, 2005
A student at Leiden University in The Netherlands has discovered the manuscript of a key paper by Albert Einstein in the archives of one of the university’s science academies.
Rowdy Boeyink found the paper when he was looking through documents stored at the university’s Lorentz Institute for Theoretical Physics in preparation for his thesis on Paul Ehrenfest, a fellow physicist and close friend of Einstein.
The German manuscript, titled Quantum theory of the monatomic ideal gas and dated December 1924, was considered one of Einstein’s last great breakthroughs.
Carlo Beenakker, a professor at the university, said: “It was quite exciting when a student uncovered the delicate manuscript written in Einstein’s distinctive scrawl. You can even see Einstein’s fingerprints in some places, and it’s full of notes and mark-ups from his editor.”
High-resolution photographs of the 16-page manuscript and an account of its discovery have been posted on the institute’s website. The paper predicted that, at temperatures near absolute zero, about -273C, particles in a gas can reach a state of such low energy that they clump together in one larger “mono-atom”.
In 1995, Eric Cornell and Carl Wiemann, scientists at the University of Colorado in Boulder, created the condensation described by Einstein by using a gas of the element rubidium.
They won the Nobel Prize for physics in 2001, along with Wolfgang Ketterle, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Ehrenfest became professor of theoretical physics at Leiden University in 1912 and seven years later invited Einstein to become a special professor there for a few weeks every year.
In a letter, he assured Einstein he would be with “people who are really fond of you personally, and not just of the brain drippings that ooze out of you”.
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