The Hebrew University of Jerusalem has announced it has started a project that will put online more than eighty thousand documents relating to Albert Einstein on the already existing website Einstein Archives Online dedicated to the famous scientist.

That site was launched in 2003 in a joint project of associations dedicated to the preservation of Albert Einstein’s works “The Albert Einstein Archives” of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the “Einstein Papers Project” of the CalTech together with Princeton University Press.

This project is funded by the Polonsky Foundation UK, which in the past funded a similar project about Isaac Newton at Cambridge University. That site created had a great success.

During these years, about nine hundred documents were put online on the Einstein Archives Online site but now a major effort started to put online the entire collection of the great scientist’s works. Those aren’t only his scientific papers but also travel diaries and private letters to colleagues, to his mother, and to various women. There are even letters from his admirers.

The documents include an explanation of the photoelectric effect – he received the Nobel Prize for that – and the theory of relativity, but also show pacifist activities carried out by Albert Einstein in his lifetime. Einstein had trouble in Germany during World War I because of his pacifist positions and was a friend of British astrphysicist Arthur Eddington, who shared his views but during the war officially was his enemy. Einstein also wrote some proposals for a possible resolution of the Arab-Isreaeli conflict.

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Albert Einstein donated the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, of which he was a founder and great supporter, notes on his scientific research in 1925 and designated the university as his heir to his documents and related rights of use.

There currently are online on the portal about two thousand documents for a total of about seven thousands pages. Inevitably it will take a long time before all documents are scanned and put online and for the portal to have the adequate functions to carry out research among the documents. When this huge job is done, it will allow us to get to know Albert Einstein the best way as a scientist but also as a person.