Science

Einstein’s Most Famous Notebook Is Available Online And You Can Read It Right Now

ByAdarsh Verma February 16, 2016

einstein notebook zurich notebook cover

Short Bytes: The Zurich notebook contains one of the most important works of Albert Einstein. The notebook contains his work during the 1912–1913 and provides a glimpse into the development of the theory of general relativity. Let’s take a look.

The internet is a wonderful place as it keeps on bombarding amazing things at us from time-to-time. The same happened to me when I came across Albert Einstein’s most important notebook, so-called Zurich notebook, on the internet. The science maestro wrote it during the winter of 1912–1913 and laid the foundation of the revolutionary theory of general relativity.

This notebook is the part of the complete catalog of about 80,000 documents written by or addressed to Einstein. This was made available online by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Einstein Papers Project (EPP) at Caltech long back in 2012.

This little brown notebook was found amongst his papers after his death in 1955.

Here are some of the most notable portions of the notebook.

The beginning — the notebook has two front covers

Line Element of General Relativity mentioned for the First Time

Einstein discussed the motion in curved surfaces

Here comes the Riemann Tensor

You can see more pages from Zurich Notebook here. Did you find this interesting? Share your views in the comments below.

Also Read: Why Is Marie Curie’s Century-old Notebook Kept in Lead-lined Boxes?

Adarsh Verma

Fossbytes co-founder and an aspiring entrepreneur who keeps a close eye on open source, tech giants, and security.
Get in touch with him by sending an email — [email protected]