Spend hours browsing through Einstein’s life on Princeton’s new digital hub

The digitized Albert Einstein is here. Today, Princeton University launched Digital Einstein, an open-access, online version of the University’s “Einstein Papers project.” This means that anyone with an internet connection can now read and share thousands of the physicist’s personal documents.

The archive includes letters, notebooks, and postcards, reports The New York Times. These documents were put together and edited by Diana Kormos-Buchwald, a physicist and historian at the California institute of Technology. Already, she has edited 13 print volumes of his work. But now that the archive has been digitized, about 5,000 documents from Einstein’s early life are available to the world, free of cost.

Princeton’s collection isn’t the only one that’s been digitized. Many of his papers were already available on Hebrew University’s Einstein Archives. But what’s nice about Digital Einstein is that you can toggle between the German and English versions of the papers by clicking on the titles at the top of each document. The Princeton University website is also a lot easier to use than Hebrew University’s offering. Finding and downloading documents like Einstein’s birth certificate, his violin test results, and a 1896 school transcript is ridiculously simple — so simple that you could easily spend hours just browsing through Einstein’s life.