When I was a college student in Chicago, I spent hours at the Newberry Library, a world renowned research library with an outstanding collection. I loved searching through old books and manuscripts, reading the thoughts of great minds of the past.
Now, I don’t have to travel to Chicago or even to a local library to research old documents. As more and more fantastic books and papers become available online, I can use my computer and the Internet to explore information that was previously only available to research scholars.
My newest discovery is the Einstein Archives Online Web site, where the Einstein Papers Project at the California Institute of Technology and the Albert Einstein Archives at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have just posted hundreds of Albert Einstein’s original documents. Included are scientific papers such as documents on relativity and the quantum theory of light and matter. Personal letters, essays, speeches, and travel diaries are also included with some papers dating back to Einstein’s youth.
The Web site includes more than 900 digitized images of Einstein’s papers, and a searchable list of 43,000 documents. Some of the papers appear in the German.Others are in English or have translations available. Outstanding among the documents is the notebook that Einstein used to work out his theory of relativity.
Check out this Web site for a glimpse into the working of a great mind.
