2 0 0 D O C U M E N T 3 2 4 D E C E M B E R 1 9 2 1
possible, to dine with you in a most confidential setting. Crucy asks me now to seek
a way to relay this wish of Anatole France to you. I believe that the direct route is
the best and write you directly because I consider that, just at this moment, meetings
between representative men who wish to be active in an international sense are the
only essential and effective way. Anatole France will be arriving Friday evening at
Hotel
Adlon;[5]
perhaps you will be so good as to send word to him directly (in case
you welcome his wish, as I hope), when and where you could meet him in Berlin.
I very much hope, esteemed Professor, you do not regard this direct transmission
as presumptuousness on my part, but receive it in the true sense of admiration from
which it springs.
Yours ever in sincere devotion,
Stefan Zweig.
323. From Louis G. Du Pasquier
Neuchâtel, Sablons, 13 December 1921
[Not selected for translation.]
324. From Hermann Weyl
Z[uri]ch, 20 Tobelhof St., 13 December 1921
Dear Colleague,
I would like to inquire again about the permission to be granted by the Academy
for the reprinting of my Academy paper, “Electr[icity] and
Gravit[ation]”;[1]
should I write to the Academy directly or would you like to take on putting the mat-
ter into effect for me at one of the next sessions?– On occasion of Lenard’s unearth-
ing of
Soldner,[2]
about which a foolish article by Koelsch appeared here in the
N[eue] Z[üricher]
Z[eitung],[3]
I flipped through Newton once myself, because it
appeared very probable that he knew about this consequence of his theory of grav-
itation and light. But he puts it highly cautiously; he had, of course, computed the
deflection of a light ray that passes by the Earth, as I gather from one passage in the
Opticks,[4]
to estimate, through comparison against the deflection of light at the
boundary of a refractive medium, that in the latter case a force must be active that
is as much as
1015
times as large as the Earth’s attraction; but he does not speak of
the deflection of a light ray by gravity then but of a body that is flying along at the
same velocity as light.
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