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Notes
1Einstein first used the term ‘unified field theory’ in the title of a publication in 1925 (‘Einheitliche Feldtheorie von Gravitation und Elektrizität’), but he had already begun to treat the subject in at least six earlier publications, dating from1918 He subsequently wrote 10 more papers where the term also appeared in the title. In all, Einstein wrote more than 40 technical papers on various UFTs, which represents roughly a fourth of his published work, and about half of his published scientific work after 1920 (p. 58).
2As Abraham Pais wrote in his highly acclaimed biography, ‘Subtle in the Lord…’ The Science and Life of Albert Einstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), ‘The last period of Einstein's scientific activities was dominated throughout by unified field theory… In all those 30 years, he was as clear about his aims as he was in the dark about the methods by which to achieve them. On his later scientific journey he was like a traveler who is often compelled to make many changes in his mode of transportation in order to reach his port of destination. He never arrived’ (p. 341).
3There is some sadness in Einstein lonely quest, but in the paragraph following the one cited in footnote 2, Pais writes: ‘The most striking characteristics of [Einstein's] way of working in [his last thirty years] are not all that different from what they had been before: devotion to the voyage, enthusiasm, and an ability to drop without pain, regrets, or afterthought, one strategy and to start almost without pause on another one’ (pp. 341–42).
4Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe. Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), p. 15. Elsewhere Greene writes: ‘Albert Einstein, who for more than three decades, sought to combine electromagnetism and general relativity in a single theory, is rightly credited with initiating the modern search for a unified theory. For long stretches during those decades, he was the sole searcher for such a unified theory, and his passionate yet solitary quest alienated him from the mainstream physics community. During the last 20 years, though, there has been a dramatic resurgence in the quest for a unified theory; Einstein's lonely dream has become the driving force for a whole generation of physicists’. Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality (New York: Random House, 2004), p. 329; see also pp. 16, 18.