Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Autograph manuscript of scientific calculations, n.d. [c.1950]
Two pages on separate half-leaves, 137 x 216mm (marked ‘A’) and 141 x 216mm (‘B’) (partial watermark of Whitings mutual bond rag content). Provenance: Sotheby’s, 30 May 1979, lot 49 (part).

Working with an ‘imaginary antisymmetrical field’. The two inter-related manuscripts comprise 24 or more lines of mathematical workings, headed with the German phrase ‘Antisymmetr. Feld imaginär’.

Einstein devoted the last thirty years of his life to the quest to combine general relativity and Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism into a single physical and mathematical framework which would account for all of the then-known fundamental forces of nature – a ‘unified field theory’. Although his early attempts in the 1920s focused on ‘distant parallelism’, he later concentrated on an approach treating both the metric tensor and the affine connection as fundamental fields, often as here introducing an element of asymmetry (in variance to the theory of general relativity).