Einstein's '1925' manuscript found

[cal04]

Amsterdam, Netherlands
The original manuscript of a paper Albert Einstein published in 1925 has been found in the archives of Leiden University's Lorentz Institute for Theoretical Physics, a university spokesperson said. Photographs of the 16-page manuscript and a description of how a student stumbled upon it were posted on the institute's website. University spokesperson Hilje Papma confirmed the finding. The German-language manuscript is titled "Quantum theory of the monatomic ideal gas," and dated December 1924. It was published in the proceedings of the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin in January 1925.

The paper's predictions

The paper predicted that at temperatures near absolute zero - around 273 degrees below zero Celsius or around 460 degrees below zero Fahrenheit - particles in a gas can reach a state of such low energy that they clump together in one larger "mono-atom". The idea was developed in collaboration with Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose and the theoretical gas was dubbed a Bose-Einstein condensation.

In 1995, University of Colorado at Boulder scientists Eric Cornell and Carl Wiemann created such a condensation using a gas of the element rubidium and were awarded the Nobel prize in 2001. Einstein was a professor at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin between 1914 and 1933, before he fled to the United States when Hitler came to power.

According to an account of the discovery in newspaper NRC Handlesblad, Dutch student Rowdy Boeyink found the manuscript among the papers of Paul Ehrenfest, a friend of Einstein's who frequently invited him to lecture at Leiden in the 1910s and 1920s.

http://www.news24.com/News24/World/News/0,,2-10-1462_1757153,00.html

[Dudley_DUright]

1. Excellent!

Einstein (and Bose) were way ahead of their time on this work. B-E condensation was not realized experimentally until 1995 (which won the Nobel prize in physics in 2001).