1 The Einstein-Besso Manuscript: Looking Over Einstein’s Shoulder

In this segment of the course, I want to show you slides of some pages of a set of research notes by Einstein and his closest friend and confidant Michele Besso (1873–1955). These notes, known col-lectively as the Einstein-Besso manuscript, are from the period 1913–1914, when Einstein was still developing his general theory of relativity. Einstein first published the theory in the form in which physicists still use it today in the last of a series of four papers in the Proceedings of the Berlin Academy of Science in November 1915. Manuscript material such as the Einstein-Besso manuscript offers historians and philosophers of science a unique glimpse behind the scenes of Einstein at work. I am interested in how Einstein came up with such a spectacular and strikingly novel theory as general relativity, which explains gravity in terms of the curvature of space-time. The analysis of documents such as the Einstein-Besso manuscript has helped me understand to some extent “how Einstein did it. ” And this is precisely what I want to focus on in talking about these notes. Rather than talk about Einstein’s MO in the abstract (which would be pure speculation) or look at what Einstein himself said about it reflecting on his work years later (which turns out to be highly mis-leading), I want examine the specific case of general relativity in the making. There is no bette