Einstein online.

When Albert Einstein died in 1955, he left behind thousands of documents, including letters, scientific manuscripts, speeches, and political writings, and he probably never dreamed that one day millions of people would be able to access them as they can today via the Internet.

The Albert Einstein Archives at the Hebrew University and the California Institute of Technology recently introduced a new Web site, www.alberteinstein.info, containing digitized images of 900 Einstein papers as well as a searchable list of 43,000 documents in the archive. The online collection also includes all 230 original scientific manuscripts and drafts that were in his possession when he died, according to Diana Kormos Buchwald, a science historian at the California Institute of Technology and director of the Einstein Papers Project, which has published eight annotated volumes of Einstein's papers.

Among the documents posted online is a notebook in which he worked out his general theory of relativity, which explained gravity as the warping of space-time geometry and is generally regarded as his greatest achievement. In addition, there are about 800 non-scientific writings and speeches and fragments from his travel diaries kept during trips to the United States, Japan, and South America.

Most manuscripts posted online have not yet appeared in the printed volumes, Buchwald said. Because many of the papers from Einstein's early years were destroyed, most papers on the Web site are from the 1920s and later. Those that have been published already will be posted to the Web site with full annotations and translations that have been published.