Einstein’s 1912 Manuscript on the Special Theory of Relativity

Einstein’s 1912 Manuscript on the Special Theory of Relativity matters in the novel as both a physical book and an intellectual presence that occupies Martin Dekker’s attention. Martin studies its facsimile with unusual intensity, attending to handwriting, corrections, technical language, and the pages’ appearance. Through that attention, the manuscript becomes a subject of conversation between Martin and Diane Lucas, while later, in a period of crisis, Einstein’s work remains part of the vocabulary Martin carries in his head.

Identity and Access

For a year, Diane has been telling the young man to return to earth. Martin seems only fitfully present, as though he barely occupies a chair; his absorption is directed toward the manuscript. The account presents this attention as compulsive and wonders whether his pale trances are a sickness or a condition, without resolving the question. The book thus enters the narrative first through its effect on a reader whose concentration can appear to remove him from ordinary company.

Martin encounters the work through facsimile pages bound in a substantial volume, rather than through any stated direct access to Einstein’s original manuscript. His description combines the scholarly with the bodily: he hefts the book, turns its pages, and scans them. Reading here is not reduced to extracting scientific propositions. It includes handling a large object and looking closely at marks and surfaces, so that the manuscript’s material representation becomes part of what Martin studies.

The Book’s Material Form

Martin specifies a slipcase and hard cover, with pages ten inches by fifteen inches. The measurements and binding make the facsimile conspicuously large: it is something to lift and turn, not merely a text encountered as an abstract sequence of ideas. He emphasizes the physical beauty of the pages along with Einstein’s handwriting, formulas, letters, and numbers. His attention holds intellectual content and visible form together.

The appearance of the facsimile is not uniform. Martin notices that its pages become less pale, but only briefly, before the book nears its end. In a later recollection, he describes the manuscript’s brown ink and unwatermarked paper, then notes that the paper improves and the ink turns black. These observations make the object legible through changes in its recorded surfaces as well as through its words. The novel does not explain those changes; it shows Martin retaining them as precise features of the artifact he has studied.

Reading as Conversation

Diane draws Martin into explaining what holds his attention. He begins with the words and phrases Einstein crossed out, describing them as a way to see him think. The manuscript’s revisions therefore matter to Martin not only as corrections on a page but as traces of thought in progress. He also attends to the handwritten text’s numbers, letters, and expressions, moving between the visual character of the pages and the technical language inscribed on them.

The exchange gathers force through Diane’s repeated requests for more. Martin supplies phrases including The force that the field exerts and The theorem of the inertia of energy, then World point and World line, followed by their German forms, Weltpunkt and Weltlinie. The succession gives the conversation its own rhythm: Diane prompts, and Martin retrieves one detail after another. When she asks whether he repeats a phrase in English or German, his answer is that it depends. The manuscript’s language is not fixed to a single linguistic register in his mind.

One phrase has particular importance because Martin says he keeps repeating it: The beautiful and airy concepts of space and time. He resists presenting the phrase as cleverness; its appeal lies in its persistence and in the way it sounds. Later he offers Additional theorem of velocities. Diane asks him to say it again, and the narration identifies their exchange as a teacher-and-student coupling in reverse. The manuscript gives Diane a route into Martin’s knowledge, but the scene also reverses the expected direction of instruction: she solicits the phrases, while he possesses and delivers them.

Study, Attention, and Disturbance

The discussion is described as having an erotic quality, conveyed through the quickness of Martin’s responses and the eagerness in his voice. That charge belongs to the exchange itself: close attention to the manuscript becomes a form of intimacy between the two people speaking about it. Diane, however, keeps looking straight ahead at the blank screen. The contrast places their vivid conversation beside an unresponsive visual surface; the screen does not take part in the exchange, while Martin’s detailed recollection supplies its substance.

The manuscript also shapes the image of Martin as someone at once intensely attentive and difficult to reach. Diane has spent the past year urging him back to earthly company, yet she engages the very study that seems to draw him away. Her prompts do not dispel his absorption; they give it a shared form. The book’s precise phrases become things they can repeat together, and the final request for Additional theorem of velocities makes repetition itself part of the encounter.

Einstein in the Wider Crisis

Later, Martin’s thoughts return to Einstein while he considers the surrounding crisis, which he calls World War III. He wonders whether Einstein’s theory is causing riots in the streets or whether exhaustion has made him imagine the connection; he has not slept or eaten much, and he feels unheard by the people with him. The passage presents the association as Martin’s uncertain, strained thought, not as a claim that the manuscript has caused the unrest.

Martin recalls Einstein’s statement that World War IV would be fought with sticks and stones, and places the 1912 work one hundred and ten years in the past. He remembers its brown ink, unwatermarked paper, later-improving paper, and black ink, gathering the book’s technical and material details into an internal record. Even while he turns to immediate bodily needs, including the need to shave, he says that Einstein is what he carries in his head. He imagines walking silently with Einstein across the Princeton campus, then returns to terms associated with surveillance and technological systems. Against those contemporary terms, the manuscript offers an older language—English and German, formulas and phrases—that continues to occupy his attention. Its significance lies not in an asserted solution to the crisis, but in its persistence as an object of study and thought when ordinary circumstances have become unstable.