Einstein posts to the arXiv

http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Nov05/Einstein.arXiv.ws.html

Nov. 29, 2005

By Bill Steele
ws21@cornell.edu

Cornell University's arXiv e-print service on the Web is a place to find reports on the latest research almost as soon as it happens.

But as television networks are fond of saying, if you haven't seen it before, it is new, so it is appropriate that the arXiv now includes a previously obscure paper by a then up-and-coming young physicist named Albert Einstein.

The paper, "Theoretical Remark on the Superconductivity of Metals," was written in 1922 for a symposium honoring Dutch scientist Kamerlingh Onnes, the discoverer of superconductivity, and published by the University of Leiden in the proceedings of the symposium. And there, apparently, it remained largely unnoticed until this year, when it was rediscovered by Neil Ashcroft, the Horace White Professor of Physics at Cornell, and translated from German into English by Bjorn Schmekel, then a Cornell graduate student and now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California-Berkeley.