Dans le cadre de sa présence à l’ÉNS comme professeur invité pendant un mois au sein de l’équipe Manuscrits scientifiques, le Prof. Tilman Sauer (Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz) donnera quatre séances de séminaire consacrées aux brouillons et manuscrits du physicien Albert Einstein.

Les conférences auront lieu au 29 rue d’Ulm, en salle Assia Djebar et en visioconférence. Pour obtenir le lien Zoom ou pour toute information : emmylou.haffner[at]ens.psl.eu

This seminar proposes to dive into Albert Einstein’s manuscripts and notebooks, inasmuch as they provide background information for an understanding of his heuristics and a detailed view into the writing process and the emergence of many of his prominent writings. Our aim is a truly transdisciplinary dive into the manuscripts, linking manuscripts studies, genetic criticism and history of science.

Einstein’s notebooks and manuscripts provide a unique opportunity to gain insight into the heuristics of his thinking. Some notebooks from Einstein’s early career, like the so-called Zurich notebook from the year 1912-13 and the Prague notebook from the period 1910-1914 have revealed details of his search for a relativistic theory of gravitation, including detailed calculations on the perihelion precession of Mercury and on the phenomenon of gravitational lensing. The historical reconstruction and analysis of these sources has provided a considerably richer picture of his search and discovery process than was possible on the basis of his published writings and correspondence alone. The Einstein Archives in Jerusalem also contains a considerable collection of calculations in the form of working sheets and scratch paper, documenting Einstein’s scientific preoccupations during the last three decades of his life until his death in 1955. These latter archival documents provide a considerable challenge for historical reconstruction but recent investigations of these documents have indicated that they reveal a lot of information about the background for his program of a unified field theory, which has never made it into print.

Pr. Sauer’s seminar is opened to anyone interested in modern manuscripts and history and philosophy of science. It will be the occasion to initiate interested students and researchers to the analysis of Einstein’s unpublished writings and work together on a better understanding of these raw documents.