A 54-page handwritten document by Albert Einstein will be auctioned in Paris, France on November 23.
One page of Einstein’s manuscript to be auctioned. (Photo: Christie’s).
According to Christie’s, representing the auction house Aguttes, the manuscript includes preparatory work for the General Theory of Relativity that Einstein and his close friend Michele Besso wrote between June 1913 and early 1914 in Zurich, Switzerland. It is thanks to Besso that this manuscript has been preserved to this day.
“It is like a miracle because Einstein himself could hardly keep something he viewed as merely working documents,” Christie’s shared. “This manuscript will offer an exciting journey into the mind of the greatest scientist of the 21st century.”
The over 100-year-old document is estimated to fetch between $2.3 million and $3.4 million. “This is certainly the most valuable manuscript of Einstein ever to be sold at auction,” Christie’s emphasized in a statement.
Einstein was born on March 14, 1879, in Ulm, Germany, and passed away on April 18, 1955, in New Jersey, USA at the age of 76. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921 and is popularly regarded as the symbol of a genius scientist with his iconic wild hair, mustache, and bushy eyebrows.
One of Einstein’s most notable achievements, the General Theory of Relativity, reshaped our understanding of how the universe operates. It addresses and makes predictions that are fundamentally different from classical physics, including the definition of gravity. Einstein’s theory directly indicated the existence of black holes in the universe.
