6 6 D O C U M E N T 6 7 J U N E 1 9 2 3
Delight us soon with the news that little Albert is visiting you and, after a row
(in which he handled you with good-natured consideration), you played music to-
gether.
My wife is currently trying to obtain the permit to visit her friends in Petrograd
and Moscow. Hopefully she will get the permit early enough in order to be back in
Leyden at the beginning of November.—
Tanichka[7]
must somehow get away from
Holland for a time (and very particularly from her parents).— She’s completely de-
teriorating here.— She works a great deal—but that’s a drab gray mess with the dil-
igence and heavy load. If I could only send her somewhere for 2–3 weeks where
there was true-blue nature (real woods—flowing water. …) and interesting people
with whom she could laugh.— The
Nordströms[8]
very, very kindly invited her to
visit them in Finland but she doesn’t want to. (Scared of (the people = the
Dutch[9]
?) the expenses?) Tanichka’s sullen face torments me so much—she’s los-
ing her few years of cheerful youth unspent.— Aren’t there any people somewhere
in the mountains (Bavaria?) to whom she could be safely sent (for pay, of
course)?— She can be so gloriously joyful—if only the right people were around—
but our presence is completely fatal to her.
We’ll very probably be sending little Galinka and Pawlik to Jena for a couple of
weeks so that they get into contact with Wassik again, which they are demanding
very
much.[10]
I’m staying in Holland, because I have to go to England in
September.[11]
Pre-
sumably I’ll be having various guests from England in July and August.
I’m very sorry that Ilse isn’t quite well now again.[12] Send her very cordial re-
gards from me. Likewise to Margot and your wife. How is her health?
I’d very much like to tackle the zero-point problem with you in
September;[13] I’ve already tried to think about it a little. But I
run up against the following difficulty: How should one—even
if only roughly—quantize according to a “mean collision-free
period”? The problem is most easily recognized in the following
model: an atom travels around energy-free inside a spherical
vessel with diffuse reflection off the wall.—Hence, irregular collision-free periods
clustered around a mean value.—How to quantize such a thing??!— Perhaps in-
stead of diffuse reflection, any somewhat “smoother” model.
Before I know how such a model should be treated (more or less), I can’t see how
to treat gas.— The quantization simply with the help of a “mean” collision-free pe-
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