D O C U M E N T 9 5 J U L Y 1 9 2 0 2 2 5
I also tried to read your short exposition from the Société Suisse
[1920].[5]
First,
and mean quantities that refer to different clocks and the same frame of
reference. Then, quantities that refer to the readings of the same clocks in different
frames of reference. Then you move on, in a manner completely puzzling to me, to
the clock in the gravitational field, in which you utilize the same letters again. It all
remains puzzling to me (in the chain of reasoning).
95. From Max and Hedwig Born
Frankfurt, 31 July 1920
Dear Mr. Einstein,
Max asked me to thank you warmly for your letter; your judgment is particularly
important to him, as Wachsmuth is agitating against Stern for anti-Semitic reasons.
So Epstein, as a Jew and a Pole, will be even less
acceptable.[1]
– Max is being very
industrious, his experiment (atomic diameter of?) is finally working and he sits in
the institute taking measurements until 8 o’clock in the
evening.[2]
It is our greatest
heartfelt joy that you are coming to [Bad]
Nauheim[3]
and I hope that you will be
staying with us then for a few days. Now—after my mother’s
death[4]
—I am so
very much in need of the genuinely close relationships left to me. The more distant
the stroke of death becomes, the stronger is my yearning for what has been lost, the
more incomprehensible and obscure is death’s mystery. The cessation of such a
strong personality and the sudden extinction of every one of her rights in life is such
an agonizing problem that you wonder how you can simply live on without being
constantly unsettled by it. But from it you learn to live more consciously and to feel
more deeply and truly and to hold on to what you do have. If this were not so, one
would have to sink hopelessly into the bitterly pessimistic philosophy of life of the
ladybird comedy by
Widmann[5]
(are you familiar with it?), scenes of which
constantly flashed by me in the first bitter moments of anguish: you talk yourself
into thinking it is forever May and the whole world is always full of juicy, young,
tasty vegetation, there just for you; and suddenly, in a split instant, you are sitting
there with a leg torn off, weary of life, floundering in the mud of a rain-drenched
roadway.–
My first thought was: ah, now I am stuck in the mud; but I see now that it still is
May and that you shouldn’t let it get you
down.–[6]
So Göttingen is now decided, but there still isn’t any prospect of residing there and
we still may be staying here over the winter, because the Ministry is still dawdling.–