The Value of the Einstein-Besso Manuscript

Abstract

On November 23, 2021, a manuscript consisting of about fifty pages of scratchpad calculations by Albert Einstein and his close friend Michele Besso sold at auction in Paris for a record $11.5 million. Most of these calculations date from 1913 and deal with the secular motion of Mercury’s perihelion. Einstein and Besso could only account for eighteen of the forty-three seconds of arc per century missing from the Newtonian account of this motion. In November 1915, drawing on this work with Besso, Einstein was able to account for all forty-three seconds. In the early 1990s, I prepared the Einstein-Besso manuscript for publication in volume four of The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein and wrote an essay about it for the auction catalog the first two times it changed hands, for $360,000 in 1996, for $500,000 in 2002. Rather than on the manuscript’s increasing monetary value, however, this essay focuses on its intellectual significance and its importance for my academic career.