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“A recently rediscovered obscure paper by a then up-and-coming young physicist named Albert Einstein on superconductivity has been published on Cornell Universitys arXiv e-print service on the Web.
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 Bjцrn Schmekel, then a Cornell graduate student and now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California-Berkeley.
The paper contains nothing revolutionary from the point of view of todays researchers in superconductivity, but it is, Ashcroft said, “a totally charming paper,” with significant insights for its time. Among other things, Ashcroft said, Einstein correctly predicted that a strong magnetic field would destroy superconductivity, something verified later by experiment.
“Its just wonderful to know that the greatest scientist had an interest in this dramatic phenomenon,” added Ashcroft, whose own research partly deals with superconductivity in metallic hydrogen.
The paper was discovered through a series of serendipitous events. Some years ago Ashcroft happened to be visiting Leiden when a retiring professor was cleaning out his office. The professor was about to throw away his personal collection of the old Leiden Communications (a journal devoted mainly to low-temperature physics), but Ashcroft arranged to have the books shipped to Cornell. They are still on display in a small oak cabinet in Clark Hall. Reading through these books, Ashcroft found hints that the Einstein paper existed, and he asked Patricia Viele, physics and astronomy librarian at Cornells Edna McConnell Clark Physical Sciences Library, to try to locate it.
Viele located it in a library in Europe. No English translation seemed to exist, so Ashcroft arranged for Schmekel to translate it. Schmekel then obtained permission from Leiden to copyright the English translation and submitted it to the history of science section of the arXiv.
Ashcroft cautions that