Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Autograph manuscript of scientific calculations, n.d. [January 1951]
1½ pages, 279 x 216mm, text on the verso lightly cancelled, date added (probably by Helen Dukas) in pencil (watermark of ‘Whitings mutual bond rag content’). Provenance: Sotheby’s, 30 May 1979, lot 49 (part).

A possibility ‘which completely ignores gravity?’. The manuscript comprises at least 38 lines of mathematical calculations, opening with the text in German ‘Gibt es ?Näherung, welche Gravitation ganz vernachlässigt?‘ (Is there an approximation(?) which completely ignores gravity?); lower down is a note ‘Letzte Gleichungen’ (last equations).

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.