The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein

The fifteen months covered in this latest volume are punctuated by the assassination of Einstein's friend, the German foreign minister Walther Rathenau, which leads Einstein to fear for his own safety. He decides to depart Berlin, and briefly contemplates abandoning academic life altogether. In his detailed and poetic travel diary for his trip to the Far East, Palestine, and Spain--published here for the first time--Einstein makes no note of receiving the news that he has won the Nobel Prize in Physics. Among his numerous writings during this period, a paper on the Stern-Gerlach experiment, written with Paul Ehrenfest, shows with uncompromising clarity that the experiment posed a problem that could not be solved by contemporary quantum theory and anticipates, in a sense, what later would become known as the quantum measurement problem.