AIP historian Anna Doel asked Michel Janssen, a historian of quantum physics, Einstein scholar, and longtime friend of AIP, to share memories of the renowned historian and philosopher of physics John Stachel.

On May 9, 2025, John Stachel, founding editor of The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, passed away. Lucid to the very end and surrounded by his children, grandchildren, and two newborn great-grandsons, he died peacefully in the home of his daughter Laura in Berkeley, where he had moved from Boston a few years after the death of his wife Evelyn (1928–2011).

John was born March 29, 1928, in New York City into a Jewish communist family in a predominantly Christian capitalist society. His father, a leader of the American Communist Party, was imprisoned during the McCarthy era, and John would remain a staunch Marxist his whole life. John got his undergraduate degree at City College, followed by graduate work at the Stevens Institute of Technology, earning his PhD in physics in 1958 with a dissertation on general relativity. As he remarked in “Autobiographical Reflections” at a conference in Berlin in 1998 to mark his seventieth birthday, this career choice made him part of yet another distinct minority.¹

As the roster of contributors to the Festschrift in which those reflections were published makes clear, John made some important contributions to general relativity and its foundations. He is best remembered, however, for his work in Einstein studies. As a beneficiary of these efforts, this is what I will focus on, but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention John’s weariness of disciplinary boundaries. “Go where the problem takes you,” he would exhort those following in his footsteps.

One of his best-known contributions illustrates the point. John was the first to propose a new reading of Einstein’s “hole argument” purportedly showing that generally covariant field equations cannot determine the metric field uniquely. Earlier commentators had accused Einstein of mistaking two different coordinate representations of the same field for two different fields. John showed that Einstein actually used such different coordinate representations to construct what looked like genuinely different fields. This led to renewed interest in the hole argument, not just among historians and philosophers of science but also among modern relativists thinking about quantum gravity.²

John first presented his new reading of Einstein’s argument in a talk he gave in Jena in 1980, which was eventually published in 1989 in the first volume of Einstein Studies, a series he founded together with Don Howard.³ This volume was based on the proceedings of a conference on the history of general relativity that John organized at Boston University, the first of seven such conferences held between 1986 and 2005.

I first met John at the second one, held in Luminy, France, in 1988. John was the towering figure at this conference, and the same can be said about the next five. He was the undisputed leader of the community of Einstein scholars, first as editor of the Einstein Papers Project from 1976 till 1989, which John took with him from Princeton to Boston University, where he was professor of physics, then as director of the Center for Einstein Studies, also at Boston University. (The Einstein Papers Project moved to Caltech in 2000).

It was only toward the end of John’s tenure as editor of the Einstein papers that the first two volumes appeared (in 1987 and 1989, respectively). It obviously took time to lay the groundwork for the edition, but the project was also held up by legal wranglings involving the executors of Einstein’s will, Helen Dukas and Otto Nathan, staunch defenders of the plaster-saint image of Einstein, which John set out to replace by a warts-and-all portrait of an endlessly fascinating human being.

Even though John edited only volumes 1 and 2 of the Einstein edition, it is hard to overestimate the importance of these two. The big revelation of volume 1 was the newly discovered “love letters” between Einstein and his first wife, Mileva Marić.⁴ Because of the efforts to obtain these letters, as John explains in an essay about editing the Einstein papers, The Aspern Papers by Henry James became required reading for all aspiring Einstein editors.⁵

Volume 2 revolves around the papers from 1905, Einstein’s annus mirabilis. Essays based on the editorial headnotes for this volume were later collected in a separate volume and remain the best guide to these papers.⁶ These and subsequent volumes of the Einstein edition did much to dispel what John identified as the biggest myth about Einstein, i.e., that he was born at the age of fifty.⁷

Though John wrote insightful papers on all facets of Einstein’s scientific output, his papers on Einstein and general relativity are probably his most important. For one thing, they make the chapters on general relativity in what is still the best scientific biography of Einstein look the most dated.⁸

I got to know John better when, in the early 1990s, I joined what would become the flagship project of Jürgen Renn’s Abteilung of the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, founded in Berlin in 1994. The project revolved around the analysis of Einstein’s so-called Zurich Notebook.⁹ A seminal 1984 paper by John Norton, building in part on John Stachel’s 1980 talk in Jena, had made it clear that this notebook was critically important for the reconstruction of Einstein’s path to general relativity, yet many of its pages remained to be deciphered.¹⁰

Shortly after I joined, I heard others on the project—in hushed and reverent tones—refer to “Stachel’s famous sleepless night” during which, as project lore has it, he cracked p. 20L of the notebook. On this page, as John realized, Einstein first suggested adding a term with the trace of the energy-momentum tensor to candidate linearized field equations. It was also during these meetings that I first heard what we have come to call “Stachelisms”, often variations on famous quotes that were nonetheless new to us. About geodesics: going straight in a crooked world. About sufficient versus necessary conditions: comforting but not conclusive. About wild speculations: we can conjecture with certainty.

John seemed to have a quote ready for any occasion, such as this gem from Mahagonny: “Verkauf dich nicht” (don’t sell yourself)—at which point John inserted a pregnant pause—“für ein paar Dollar” (for a few bucks). Attending a performance of The Threepenny Opera starring Lotte Lenya in Greenwich Village in the 1950s had made John a lifelong Brecht-Weill fan. He also liked to quote this line from my great hero, Bob Dylan: “I was so much older then, I am younger than that now.”

With John, the community of Einstein scholars, and the broader history and philosophy of science community, loses one of its giants. Those of us who got to know him personally also lost a mentor and a friend. John ended his autobiographical reflections in Berlin in 1998 talking about his “intellectual family.” “Like all parents,” he said, “I take special pride in the younger people who think of me as their colleague and some of whom I like to think of (to myself) as my intellectual children.”¹ Thinking about what picture to choose for this piece, I thus decided to use one that shows John surrounded by two of his intellectual children and two of his intellectual grandchildren. I am proud to be one of the latter.

Michel Janssen
University of Minnesota
Janss011@umn.edu

References

1. John Stachel, “Autobiographical Reflections,” in Revisiting the Foundations of Relativistic Physics: Festschrift in Honor of John Stachel, eds. Abhay Ashtekar et al. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 234 (Kluwer, 2003), xi–xiv.
2. John Stachel, “The Hole Argument.” Living Reviews in Relativity .
3. John Stachel, “Einstein’s Search for General Covariance, 1912–1915,” in Einstein and the History of General Relativity, eds. Don Howard and John Stachel. Einstein Studies, vol. 1 (Birkhäuser, 1989).
4. Jürgen Renn and Robert Schulmann, eds., Albert Einstein–Mileva Marić : The Love Letters (Princeton University Press, 1992).
5. John Stachel, “‘A Man of my Type’—Editing the Einstein Papers,” in Einstein from ‘B’ to ‘Z’, Einstein Studies. vol. 9 (Birkhäuser, 2002), 97–111.
6. John Stachel, ed., Einstein’s Miraculous Year: Five Papers That Changed the Face of Physics, Centenary Edition. (Princeton University Press, 2005).
7. John Stachel, “Albert Einstein: The Man Beyond the Myth,” in Einstein from ‘B’ to ‘Z’ (see note 5), 3–11.
8. Abraham Pais, “Subtle Is the Lord ...”: The Science and Life of Albert Einstein (Oxford University Press, 1982). John’s review is reprinted in Einstein from ‘B’ to ‘Z’ (see note 5), 551–554.
9. Jürgen Renn, ed., The Genesis of General Relativity, 4 vols. (Springer, 2007).
10. John D. Norton, “How Einstein Found His Field Equations: 1912–1915.” Reprinted in Einstein Studies, vol. 1 (see note 4), 101–159.

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