DOCS.
348,
349
JUNE
1917
337
behaved
so
tactlessly
toward
you
in Vienna at
our
discussion.[2] I
beg you
not
to
allow
your
feelings
toward
me
to
be clouded
by
this minor faux
pas;
I probably
do not need
to
impress upon you
that the
proceedings
of
that
time
are
in
stark
contrast with
the
enthusiastic
respect
I
have
for
your
scientific
research.[3]
I
am
delighted
that
now
you
also
value
the
generalized
relativity
idea
as a
hy-
pothesis
that
stringently
restricts
the
possibilities.
That
which
you
have called
the
relativity
of
gravitation potential,[4]
must-if
I
have understood
you
correctly–
apply
to
any system
of
field
equations
that
is
covariant
under linear transfor-
mations;
invariance
under
similarity
transformations
already
suffices,
of
course.
Your result
that
general
transformability
(covariance)
is
not
compatible
with
the
requirements
of
a
complete
theory
was
my opinion
also
three
years
ago.
How-
ever, my
reasons
at
the time
were
not
sound.[5] I
am
very
curious
about what
you
are
going
to
say regarding
this
crucially
important
problem.
Like
you,
I
believe
that
a
specialization
of
the
coordinate
system
a
posteriori
could
perhaps
enhance
the
theory
very
much.
But
no
attempts made with this intention
until
now are
genuinely
satisfactory.[6]
At all
events, please
do
give
me a
few
hours
of
your
time when
your
path
leads
you
through
Berlin.
A
conversation
is
usually
a
great
deal
more
useful
than
mere
correspondence.
In
wishing you happy
and
inspiring days
in
Göttingen, I
am
with best
regards, yours very truly,
A.
Einstein.
349. To
Wilhelm
Wien
[Berlin, 2
June
1917]
...
My
remarks
are
limited
to
such
absorption processes
in which electrons
are
not released.[1]
The
fact
that
such do
exist,
we
learn from Bohr’s
theory,
for
ex.,
and
naturally
also from direct
experience.
If,
for
inst.,
there
is
a
Bohr
monatomic
hydrogen molecule,
at
sufficiently
low temperature
the third
inner-
most electron
orbit
becomes
improbable
(rare) enough against
the
innermost
and
second innermost
ones,
that the
only absorption
and emission reactions
to
be
taken into consideration
are
thus
transfers between
the
innermost and second
innermost orbits. In this
case,
the
theory
would be
directly applicable.
In
cases
where
a
multitude
of
transfer
reactions
can
take
place,
it
is
assumed
that
any
re-
action
corresponding
to
a
pair
of
states
conserves
the
thermodynamic
equilibrium
on
its
own....
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