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A genius with shaky maths

James Randerson

Archival papers show Albert Einstein's struggles and failures

Albert Einstein

London: To many, he is the greatest scientist who ever lived, but a unique collection of Albert Einstein's letters and papers has revealed a history of struggle and failure made worse by an apparently shaky grasp of mathematics.

An archive that goes on sale in London next month with a price tag of £800,000 shows how after transforming physics and securing unprecedented celebrity status with his general theory of relativity in 1916, Einstein suffered years of frustration as he failed to top that with "a grand theory of everything." The 15 manuscripts and 33 letters penned between 1933 and 1954 give a glimpse into a period in Einstein's life when he strayed away from mainstream physics and grappled with the most fundamental questions in the universe.

The collection is unique in helping to document the latter half of his life, when he moved to Princeton University in New Jersey and embarked on a struggle to unite all branches of physics.

But his work in this period made very little impact on contemporaries and he never found his grand theory — something physicists are still grappling with.

The archive was collected by Einstein's colleague Ernst Gabor Straus, a young mathematician whom the great physicist selected to help him during his Princeton years. Einstein used Straus as he had used other mathematically gifted colleagues in his early career. "Straus' mathematical virtuosity gave a framework to Einstein's intuitive vision of the universe."

The papers have never been studied because they have been held by Straus and his family since they were written. Scholars were not even aware they existed until Straus's wife and son decided to put them on the market. They tell the story of the two men's evolving thought process in the vain search for the unified field theory, as the grand theory was called.

There are lighter moments too. For example, a set of scribbled equations describes a card trick, and there is a grumble familiar to many academics about inconvenient teaching duties. "Even if the professional work is not fully satisfactory in certain regards, it is most important that one is somehow normally integrated into the curious machinery of economics," Einstein wrote on October 28 1948. "On the side, one can also do something of permanent value."

An intriguing possibility is that the manuscripts might contain ideas that Einstein abandoned but could have mileage today in the light of subsequent discoveries.

- Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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