Albert Einstein, 1931

EINSTEIN, Albert (1879-1955). Autograph manuscript, n.p. [1931].

In German. One page, 285 x 225mm, numbered "(17)" in autograph, ink with several emendations in pencil (small chips at upper and lower margins). Encapsulated in Mylar.

A draft page from one of Albert Einstein's lectures before the meeting of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, entitled, Einheitliche Theorie von Gravitation und Elektrizität, this being a significant portion of the seventh section: "Einführung spezieller Koordinaten im V₅." Whereas his initial papers (and post 1940s work) attempted unification by the alternation of the geometry of space-time, here Einstein attempts to manipulate the dimensionality of space-time. On this page, drawing from the work of Theodor Kaluza, Einstein introduces a five-dimensional vector space at each point of the space-time manifold. This was the only paper in which Einstein worked with Kaluza's five-dimensional space-time, and he composed it with the assistance Walther Mayer (1887-1948). Mayer began working with Einstein in 1929 at the suggestion of Richard von Mises, first on distant parallelism and later on relativity and the unified field theory from 1931 to 1935. Mayer, who was Jewish, followed Einstein to the United States, where he too took a position at the Institute for Advanced Study.