What is the nature of space and time?

Many physicists and philosophers have reflected on this.

But no one has turned the physical worldview upside down with his conclusions like Albert Einstein.

The results of his studies, the special and general theory of relativity, count alongside quantum theory among the great physical theories of the twentieth century.

You have revolutionized the idea of ​​space-time, of simultaneity, of the nature of gravity.

Manfred Lindinger

Editor in the “Nature and Science” section.

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A manuscript by the great physicist on general relativity will now be auctioned in November at Cristie's in Paris. The value of the document, which Einstein wrote between June 1913 and spring 1914 with his colleague and friend Michele Besso, is estimated at two to three million euros. According to the auction house, this is the most valuable Einstein manuscript that has ever been offered for auction.

The fifty-four-page working paper was written in Zurich when Einstein began to reflect on questions that eventually led to his general theory of relativity, which he finally completed and published in Berlin in 1915.

With Besso he brooded over a problem that had preoccupied many scientists for decades: the perihelion of Mercury.

Observations have shown that the highly elliptical orbit of the inner planets of the solar system deviates from what would be expected according to Newton's laws.

Einstein and Besso were able to explain this discrepancy with the general theory of relativity.

Then the mass of the sun bends space so strongly that the point of Mercury's orbit closest to the sun, the perihelion, rotates measurably around our star.

Albert Einstein lost interest in the manuscript in 1913, which he himself probably saw only as an experiment.

And so the document might have been lost if Michele Besso had not taken it when he left Zurich.

Einstein finally published a paper in November 1915 in which he precisely calculated the course of Mercury's orbit using the field equations of general relativity.

Handwritten research manuscripts by Einstein from this period are "extremely rare," says Adrien Legendre, director of the books and manuscripts division at Christie's.

Another well-known document from this crucial phase in Einstein's research, the “Zurich Notebook”, is in the Einstein Archives in Jerusalem.