xxviii
INTRODUCTION
TO
VOLUME
3
to
Heinrich
Zangger.[63]
And
to Besso
he commented
that
the
Congress
re-
sembled the "lamentation
over
the ruins of
Jerusalem."[64]
Einstein also told
Besso
that
nothing positive
had
come
of the
meeting,
and
that
he had heard
nothing
he did
not
already
know.
Surely
none
of the other
paticipants
could
have made
that
last
comment.
Einstein's
Solvay report
and
his
contributions
to
the discussions show how
unique
was
his
appraisal
of the
current
situation in
physics.
Most of
his
colleagues
were
tentatively searching
for
ways
to
incorporate
some
sort
of
quanta
into
a
theoretical
structure
of
physics
that
they expected
to
remain
largely unchanged.
Some
were
prepared
to
consider the
possibility
of basic
change
in
mechanics,
but
probably
no one
except
Einstein
expected
such
change
to
be needed in
electrodynamics.
Einstein himself had
long
been
con-
vinced
that
profound
modifications of
both
subjects
would be
required.
As
early
as
1907
Max Laue had
written,
after
a
visit
to
Einstein in
Bern:
"This
fellow is
a
revolutionary.
In the first
two
hours of conversation he overturned
all
of mechanics and
electrodynamics,
and this
on
the basis of
statistics."[65]
V
A few
months before the
Solvay Congress,
Einstein had returned
to
the
ques-
tions
concerning gravitation
and accelerated
frames of
reference
that
he first
raised in his
1907 review
article
on relativity.[66]
These
subjects
had
gone
unmentioned in
his
papers
for four
years,
and
hardly
ever
appear
in
his
corre-
spondence during
that
time.[67]
But in June
1911
Einstein
completed
a
short
paper,
"On the Influence of Gravitation
on
the
Propagation
of
Light."[68]
This
was
only
a
month after
his
letter
to Besso
announcing
that
he
was
abandoning
his efforts
to create
a
new theory
of radiation. It looks
as though
his renuncia-
tion of that
quest
set
him
free to focus
his
attention
once more on
gravitation.
In
1907
Einstein had discussed the
question
of whether
one
could
generalize
the
relativity principle
to
systems uniformly
accelerated with
respect
to
an
[63]"Die
ganze
Geschichte wäre ein Delicium für diabolische
Jesuitenpatres
gewesen."
Ein-
stein
to
Heinrich
Zangger, 15
November
1911.
[64]"Der
dortige
Kongress
sah
überhaupt
einer
Wehklage
auf den Trümmern Jerusalems
ähnlich." Einstein
to
Michele
Besso,
26
December
1911.
[65]"Das
ist
ein Revolutionär. Er hat
in
den
ersten zwei
Stunden des
Gesprächs
die
ganze
Mechanik und
Elektrodynamik
umgestürzt,
und
zwar
aus
Gründen der Statistik." Max Laue
to
Jakob
Laub,
2 September 1907,
Gerd Rosen auction
catalog 35
(8
November
1960),
lot
4578.
[66]Einstein
1907j
(Vol. 2,
Doc.
47),
chap. 5.
[67]See,
e.g.,
Pais
1982, pp.
187-188.
[68]Einstein
1911h (Doc.
23).