1 0 8 V O L U M E 8 , D O C U M E N T S 5 8 8 c , 6 0 7 a
Vol. 8, 588c. From Eduard Einstein
[Zurich, ca. 17 July 1918]
[1]
Dear Papa,
How are you? I hope very well. Thank you very much for the book, which made
me very
happy.[2]
It’s my birthday on the 28th of July, I’m looking forward to it very
much.[3]
I’m feeling well. Now we are on
holiday.[4]
I send you many greetings, yours,
Teddi
Vol. 8, 607a. From Michele Besso
Zurich, 28 August 1918
Dear Albert,
I just received your letter of the 20th, which was not in transit as long as my last
one, but long enough as it
is.[1]
I’d also still like to discuss your suggestion for Zu-
rich with our friends
here.[2]
—This isn’t an embarrassment of riches in Heine’s
sense[3]
but, as courteous as the people here are, it’s rather home-baked loaf being
proffered against fancy cakes, on the one hand, and a very fine sphere of intellectual
life, on the other, which expects enormously much of you and is offering itself to
you now, after a number of options that will perhaps soon be exhausted. There
wouldn’t be a lack of piety toward your Berlin friends attached to it, if I understand
it correctly, which would reflect the exceedingly obliging conduct on the part of his
Exc.
Naumann.[4]
But don’t rack your brains over this anymore right now:
The worst thing is that I can’t see from your letter when you are coming. (My
time here is soon coming to an end already. Am I going to be able to see you at
all?)[5]
–
You will surely best be able to make your final decision here with a completely
fresh mind.
I’m beginning to get a scare now, after
all.[6]
If it’s really possible to show that
the energy law is no longer capable of plausible formulation once the gravitation
equations become fourth order, then this seems to me to be a very weighty argu-
ment against the theory of contact action driven to its
extreme.[7]
You had, by the
way, overestimated the meaningfulness of my observations again: I was not aware
that they had the meaning that an energy tensor for gravitation was dispensable. If
I understand it correctly, my inadvertent statement now implies that planetary mo-
tion would satisfy conservation laws just by chance, as it were. What is certain is
that I was not aware of this consequence of my comments and cannot grasp the ar-
gument even now.