D O C U M E N T 2 5 9 M A Y 1 9 2 4 2 5 3
to the success of its work. If I should not be elected—which in view of what has
passed would be entirely justified—I should nevertheless be glad to work for the
Committee on occasion.
259. To Paul Ehrenfest
[Berlin,] 31 May
1924[1]
Dear Ehrenfest,
I congratulate you on your happy return and honestly admire that, after touring
around for so long now, you can already think of going to California with
me.[2]
For me it’s the other way around, however. As I’m a bit unsociable, the thought of
such a journey is quite unsettling, beautiful though it may be over there. Moreover,
I promised the South Americans that my next trip outside Europe would be to go
to
them.[3]
I should have gone there this year already but couldn’t resolve to do so.
I declined Naples (philosophical conference), after having already
accepted.[4]
So
tell the people (that is, Millikan) that I find it very kind of them to have thought of
me, but that I request they not invite me for the time
being.[5]
It’s touching of you that you thought, completely of your own accord, of being
my advocate for a salary raise for Mr.
Grommer,[6]
who is helping me in the battle
over the Quantum Princess (that’s how
Anschütz[7]
tends to call my hobby). He
gets 200 M a month. That would correspond to an annual salary of 600 dollars; it
would be a great favor to me if the stipend were raised to this amount. The man de-
serves it for his industriousness. He is also financially disadvantaged by his terrible
illness (acrocephaly).
The equations from December did not hold
up.[8]
I’m following another track,
still along the lines of an overdetermination. But I can’t find my way out of the di-
lemma: a superposition of the waves in empty space requires Maxwell’s equations.
But via Huygens’s principle these necessarily require the emission of the electrons
circling in Bohr’s stationary orbits. As soon as I substitute nonlinear equations for
Maxwell’s (or complete them), I lose the possibility of superposing the light waves.
Recently I reviewed the paper by Bohr, Kramers, and Slater in the
colloquium.[9]
This idea is an old acquaintance of mine, whom I don’t consider to be the real Mc-
Coy. Main
reasons:[10]
1) Nature seems to retain the conservation laws strictly (Franck-Hertz, Stokes’s
rule). Why should action-at-a-distance be excluded?
2) Mirror box in a radiation-free empty space with internal radiation ought al-
ways to execute increasing Brownian motion.