Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Autograph manuscript of scientific calculations, n.d. [c.1950]
Two pages, 280 x 216mm, verso partly written upside down. Provenance: Sotheby’s, 30 May 1979, lot 49 (part).

The mathematical pursuit of unified field theory. The manuscript comprises at least 42 lines of mathematical calculations, with a few words or phrases in German, including ‘Dann wird die Gleichung …’ (then the equation becomes…), ‘stimmt nicht‘ (isn’t right).

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 introducing an element of asymmetry (in variance to the theory of general relativity). Einstein often complained of the heavy mathematical burden imposed by this approach, as demonstrated in the present manuscript.