D O C U M E N T 1 5 5 A P R I L 1 9 2 2 1 4 5 the whole enterprise fulfilled its purpose.[2] The corrections aren’t finished yet. But you will get them.[3] The Anschütz hearing went well it is good that I was there.[4] I am mailing you a letter for Baron Rothschild that I ask you please to pass on.[5] Hopefully, someday, we shall spend some time together more in the old Bernese style.[6] Cordial regards from your A. Einstein. 155. From Peter Debye Zurich 7, 36 Gloria Street, 20 April 1922 Dear Einstein, It’s not a matter of getting agitated.[1] I just wonder, and very much so, at how calmly you accept the totally false quotation of you that Nernst fabricated, accord- ing to your own report. In this way you are supporting him in his effort to intimidate me, as he is evidently trying to do by having you say: “You know these remarks very well and subscribe to every word of it”! To which is appended the good advice that I should surely doubly reconsider whether I wanted to pick an entirely unmo- tivated fight. By the way, I enclose herewith a transcription of Nernst’s statement so that you are acquainted with it. I cannot imagine how to arrive at half-way rea- sonable agreement with Nernst if even you prefer, despite everything, to stay on the sidelines and to hide his mistakes even from himself under a cloak of love. Now you write: you only asserted that in the empirical equations of state, which are currently being viewed as the expression of experience, there is no term in the attraction term that does not vanish for .” Not even this mild version con- forms with the facts. In my previous letter I already referred to Zwicky and the more recent calculations by Keesom.[2] But now I have to think that a witness from earlier times may be preferable to you. Such a witness exists in Kamerlingh-Onnes himself. All his empirical formulas (not a single one excepted) to describe the sec- ond virial coefficient contain the term in question not vanishing for . You can probably most speedily be convinced by the enc[yclopedia] art. by Kamer- lingh-Onnes and Keesom (Enc. d. mathem. Wissenschaften, vol. 5, [part] 1, issue 5, p. 730).[3] You do not want to accept my argument about the noble gases, pointing out instead a possible future, but as yet not extant, statistic of orientation. I agree with you that such a statistic is conceivable but, on the other hand, of course, it is also clear that it is not needed at all, at least for the time being. The existence of T = T =
Previous Page Next Page