Yes, you can read Albert Einstein’s own papers online. The Digital Einstein Papers, launched on 5 December 2014, opened the annotated volumes of The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein to anyone with a browser: roughly 5,000 documents covering the first 44 years of his life, up to 1923. Each item appears in its original language, usually German, next to an English translation, with notes from the editors explaining who is who and what is going on. The Einstein Papers Project at Caltech, Princeton University Press and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem worked together on it, and the launch was free, with no paywall.
That is the short answer. The longer one is more interesting, because the archive is not a pile of famous quotations. It is a careful scholarly edition, and knowing how it is built makes it far more rewarding to explore.
What the Digital Einstein Papers contain
The first release brought together the thirteen volumes of the printed edition that existed in 2014, plus an index volume. Inside are scientific papers, Einstein’s reviews of other people’s work, drafts and unpublished writings, travel diaries and a large body of correspondence. Some of the most human material sits right beside the physics: letters to his first wife Mileva Marić, letters to his children, school records and the paperwork of a difficult divorce.
Readers searching for the “secret” Einstein are often surprised by how much of the collection is ordinary life. A letter about money or a sick child can sit a few pages away from a paper that changed physics. That mix is the point. It shows a working scientist with a family, friends, quarrels and bills, rather than a marble bust.
The material was gathered over decades from many places. Einstein’s own files form the core, but editors have also tracked down letters that ended up with friends, colleagues, collectors and families, sometimes surfacing from private boxes long after his death in Princeton in 1955.
Who owns Einstein’s papers?
Older viral stories, including the one this page was first based on, said that Einstein had a copyright agreement giving Princeton University the publishing rights to his work after he died. That is not correct. In his will, Einstein left his literary estate and personal papers to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a university he helped to found. Its Albert Einstein Archives hold the originals and collaborate on the edition.
Princeton appears in the story for two other reasons. Einstein lived and worked in Princeton, at the Institute for Advanced Study, from 1933 until his death. And Princeton University Press set up the editing project in 1977 and publishes the volumes. Since 2000 the editorial team itself has been based at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
So there are three separate roles: the archive that holds the documents, the editors who transcribe, translate and annotate them, and the publisher that issues the books and the digital edition. Being able to read a letter online does not mean it is free to reproduce. Anyone who wants to publish an image or long extract should check the terms with the archive or publisher first.
How the edition has grown since 2014
The 2014 launch stopped at 1923, the year after Einstein received the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1921. The editors work through his life in chronological order, which is slow, careful work: every document has to be found, dated, transcribed, checked, translated and placed in context.
The series has kept moving. The Caltech project now lists Volume 17, which takes the story to late 1930, just before the first of Einstein’s three winter stays at Caltech. Across the published volumes the editors count around 700 annotated writings and more than 4,500 letters, with thousands more documents summarised in short abstracts. The whole edition is planned to reach about 30 volumes, ending with his death in 1955.
Diana Kormos-Buchwald, a historian at Caltech, has directed the project and served as its general editor for many years. The figures quoted in the first news reports, such as “13 of 30 volumes,” were accurate for 2014 and are now out of date.
Scan, transcription, translation, notes: reading the layers
A single Einstein letter can reach you in several forms, and it helps to know which one you are looking at.
- The scan shows the physical item: his handwriting, corrections, crossings-out and the paper itself. High-resolution manuscript images are linked through the Einstein Archives Online.
- The transcription turns that handwriting into readable text in the original language, exactly as he wrote it.
- The translation puts the text into English. It is a careful rendering, but still an interpretation by a translator.
- The editorial notes identify people, events, papers and references, and point to related letters.
Only the first two are Einstein’s own words. The translation and notes are expert help, and they are labelled as such. Many invented “Einstein quotes” circulating online would not survive a quick search of this archive, which is one of the best reasons to use it.
How to explore the archive yourself
A good first visit is small. Pick one dated letter and follow it through its scan, transcript, translation and footnotes, then click through to the documents the editors link to it. You will see a conversation unfold over weeks or months, which tells you much more than any single sentence lifted from it.
Some starting ideas:
- Read letters from 1905, his “miracle year,” alongside the papers on light quanta, Brownian motion and special relativity published that year.
- Follow his correspondence with Mileva Marić from student days to separation, and notice how the tone changes.
- Look at 1915, when he completed the general theory of relativity, and see how much of his effort went into letters, corrections and arguments with colleagues.
- Search in English or German for a person or place you care about. The edition supports both languages.
Kormos-Buchwald has warned against the romantic image of sudden genius. As she put it in a Caltech interview, “Things didn’t happen with flashes of insight.” The documents bear that out: they record drafts, errors, revisions and long exchanges with other physicists.
The best way in today is through the Einstein Papers Project at Caltech, which links to the volumes and to the archive database. Princeton University Press’s Einstein Papers site now describes a larger database aimed at libraries, scholars and individual readers, with its own access options, so check there for current terms.
The video above accompanied the original news of the launch and is a quick visual companion to the archive.
Common myths the papers help clear up
“Einstein failed maths at school.” His school records, part of the early volumes, show strong marks in mathematics and physics. The myth seems to have grown from confusion over Swiss grading scales.
“It was all unpublished until 2014.” Much of the material had already appeared in the printed volumes since 1987. What changed in 2014 was easy, free online access to the whole annotated set at once.
“Everything here is Einstein speaking.” Translations and footnotes are the editors’ work, and many letters were written to him by others. Always check who wrote what.
For more on how archives open up old documents, see the story of the DigiVatLib digitized manuscripts.
Sources: Caltech: Einstein Online, interview with Diana Kormos-Buchwald; Einstein Papers Project, Caltech; Wikipedia: Einstein Papers Project; Princeton University Press: Einstein Papers. Original news story: John Vibes, True Activist.
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