AMSTERDAM, Netherlands - "What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world." -Albert Einstein. Well, if God did not have any choice nor did Einstein. He was destined to be a genius, whether he wanted it or not. His life was one constant discovery after another. A missing piece of Einstein's life has now been uncovered in the archives of Leiden
University's Lorentz Institute for Theoretical Physics in the Netherlands.
A student found the last work of Einstein when he was going through the scientist's friend's papers. Rowdy Boeyink found the manuscript written in German and running up to 16 pages. It was originally written by the master in December 1924 and is titled, "Quantentheorie des einatomigen idealen Gases" (Quantum theory of the monatomic ideal gas).
This theory deals with the behaviour of gases at extremely low temperatures. Einstein devised the theory in collaboration with the great Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose. The theory was published at the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin in January 1925. The theory predicted that at temperatures near absolute zero, atoms collapsed into a single quantum state known as Bose condensation or Bose-Einstein condensation. This theory was finally proved in 1995.
Boeyink was apparently hard at work for a thesis on Ehrenfest when he came across the tattered manuscript. According to professor Carlo Beenakker, he immediately recognized its significance, "It was quite exciting. 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," Beenakker said.
High-resolution copies of the manuscript are posted on the institute's Web site. The manuscript also contains some mark-ups for Einstein's editor. The German-born genius was a guest lecturer at Leiden in the 1920s. He usually lectured there to be with his friend physicist Paul Ehrenfest.
