Original Einstein Manuscript Discovered

   By TOBY STERLING
   The Associated Press
   Saturday, August 20, 2005; 2:06 PM

   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, scholars said
   Saturday.

   The German-language manuscript is titled "Quantum theory of the monatomic
   ideal gas," and is dated December 1924. Considered one of Einstein's last
   great breakthroughs, it was published in the proceedings of the Prussian
   Academy of Sciences in Berlin in January, 1925.

   High-resolution photographs of the 16-page manuscript and an account of
   its discovery were posted on the institute's Web site.

   "It was quite exciting" when a student working on his master's thesis
   uncovered the delicate manuscript written in Einstein's distinctive
   scrawl, said professor Carlo Beenakker. "You can even see Einstein's
   fingerprints in some places, and it's full of notes and markups from his
   editor."

   "We're going to keep it as a reminder of his visits here, which is quite a
   fond memory for us."

   Einstein, the Jewish-born physicist whose name is now synonymous with
   genius, taught in Berlin between 1914 and 1933, fleeing to the United
   States after Hitler came to power.

   He was a frequent guest lecturer at Leiden in the 1920s due to his
   friendship with physicist Paul Ehrenfest, among whose papers the
   manuscript was found.

   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 then-theoretical state of matter 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 for physics in 2001, together
   with Wolfgang Ketterle of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

   Professor Beenakker said the student who found the manuscript, Rowdy
   Boeyink, was painstakingly reviewing documents in the archive for a thesis
   on Ehrenfest when he came across the Einstein manuscript and immediately
   recognized its importance.

   He said Boeyink had found other interesting documents during his search,
   including a letter from Danish physicist Niels Bohr, and was all but
   certain to receive top marks on his thesis.

   On the Web:

   http://www.lorentz.leidenuniv.nl/history/Einstein_archive/

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose-Einstein_condensate

                         (c) 2005 The Associated Press