1918 Rare ALBERT EINSTEIN Annals of Physics JACOBI'S THEOREM Relativity Article

Description

Rare 1918 German physics journal with a contribution by
Albert Einstein related to his epochal theory
Beiblätter zu den Annalen der Physik
[Supplement to the Annals of Physics], Band 42, Heft 17 u. 18.
Leipzig: Verlag von Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1918. Printed wraps, 8-3/4" x 5-3/4", approx. 36 pages. Toning and a bit of edge wear to covers with a few tiny chips and tears (discreet archival reinforcement of tear to bottom margin of front cover); early library ink stamp at upper left; otherwise clean, tight, and near fine overall. A sound, attractive copy of this scarce, fragile and significant publication.
Transforming our understanding of the universe.
The first article in the publication is a one-paragraph clarification or correction to Einstein's article "Eine Ableitung des Theorems von Jacobi" [A Derivation of Jacobi's Theorem] published in the previous year in
Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Sitzungsberichte.
That article was itself the second part to "Kosmologische Betrachtungen zur allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie" [Cosmological Considerations in the General Theory of Relativity], in which Einstein continued to explore the implications and limits of the theory for which he became best known—and, indeed, which overshadowed all of his discoveries to follow. His brief article in the present supplement makes multiple references to the Hamilton-Jacobi equation—the only formulation of mechanics in which the motion of a particle can be represented as a wave—which, as the field of quantum physics continued to grapple with Einstein's theory in the 1960s, in turn provided the germ for the Hamilton-Jacobi-Einstein equation.
Original printings of Einstein's publications from this early date are of exceeding scarcity. Given their exclusive, rarefied audience, the vast majority of copies would have been absorbed into institutional collections (the provenance of the present item providing one such example). Moreover, the inexpensive wood-pulp paper, as well as the deaccession and wholesale destruction of such publications upon the arrival of microfilm and other technologies across subsequent decades, suggests that the number of surviving physical copies in private hands is very small indeed. A rare opportunity for the scholar, historian, or collector!
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