1 2 0 D O C U M E N T 1 0 1 N O V E M B E R 1 9 2 5 advice since she is a complete stranger in England.[6] I said nothing about a schol- arship. I do not believe at all that she lost my letter of recommendation however, I believe that it did not actually seem sufficiently effective to her. She studied here, she is intelligent, but somewhat erratic and simply a hussy, i.e., replaces strength with cunning, relies on her attractive appearance. With all that, she is still deserving of having her life made somewhat easier. Kind regards, your A. Einstein 101. From Erwin Schrödinger Zurich, 3 November 1925 Dear Professor, Already some time ago (on 28 Feb.), you generously replied in a most kind man- ner to a quite stupid objection of mine to your first degeneracy article[1] and an- swered in such a way that the issue was immediately clear to me.[2] It was your letter that made the originality and novelty of your statistical approach dawn on me, which I had not understood at all before, even though Bose’s paper[3] preceded it. But it is indeed a fact that Bose’s paper (e.g., compared to Jeans-Debye)[4] (1) swaps energy for the ether resonators (2) but also changes the statistics, so of course the same result is attained as before. Initially, this did not appear to me to be particularly interesting. Your gas degeneracy theory really is something fundamen- tally new, though—and at first this completely escaped me.— Please pardon me for not replying to that letter, which was so valuable to me having heard that you were in America, I postponed answering and then it completely slipped my mind. I don’t want to do this again with your letter of 26 September,[5] which pleased me exceedingly, even though I have not yet managed to think everything completely through. I want to consider very carefully this peculiar and interesting thermodynamics with the energy levels proportional to . At first I could only slap my forehead and ask how this simple, clear, obvious, and absolutely straight- forward way of continuing Planck’s thought could stay hidden until you revealed it in three lines. How could Planck arrive at his strange conceptions? How could he and I arrive at the shared view that an infinite ambiguity exists that can only be re- moved by special assumptions?[6] If the law that follows out of your equations must be definitely rejected, as you suspect, then the insight gained is even more valuable because then one would have the secure result that a quantization of the gaseous body as a whole, at perfect dissymmetry (i.e., N! essential permutations in each quantum state), cannot come into consideration. n2 3N ⁄