Establishing Quantum Physics in Berlin

Hubert Goenner is professor emeritus at the Institut für Theoretische Physik, Universität Göttingen. He studied mathematics and physics at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg (1962), receiving his doctorate there (after one year at Yeshiva University under Arthur Komar) in 1966 under Helmut Hönl and K. Westpfahl on contributions to the general-relativistic motion problem of fast, interacting, and self-interacting pole-dipole particles. As a post-doctoral researcher, he was an assistant to Peter Havas at Temple University in Philadelphia, and from 1969 to M. Kohler at the University of Göttingen, where he habilitated in 1973 (local isometric embedding of Riemannian manifolds and Einstein’s theory of gravitation). From 1975, he was a lecturer in Göttingen and from 1980 professor. He retired in 2002, but continued to be active in research. He has been a guest researcher at the Australian National University in Canberra and at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Sciencein Berlin.Giuseppe Castagnetti studied philosophy of science at the University of Milan. He was an early collaborator of the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein in Boston, and a former fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. He was a respected member of the international family of Einstein scholars, making important contributions to the understanding of Einstein’s call to Berlin, his early relations with astronomers, and his forced emigration by the Nazis. Castagnetti was a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin from its foundation in 1994 until his untimely death in 2016.

• Chapter 1. Einstein Comes to Berlin.- Chapter 2. The Foundation of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics.- Chapter 3. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics under Einstein’s Directorship 1917–1922.- Chapter 4. Einstein’s Directorship: An Evaluation.- Appendix.