D O C U M E N T 3 6 A U G U S T 1 9 2 5 5 5 Japanese boy with a huge head.[9] The committee is congenial, but primarily French oriented. Nevertheless, I like them better than “ours.” I most likely won’t live to see these different worlds amalgamate. However, I enjoy observing the two of them. I do what I can without feeling that I belong to one or the other. Hopefully, everything’s going as desired with all of you. Warm regards to every- one (particularly to Margot,[10] who has so often and kindly thought of me) from your Albert 36. From Michele Besso Bern, 2 August 1925 Dear Albert, Perhaps a postcard sent on the off-chance to Kiel, where I suspect young Albert[1] to be, pursuant to his parting information at my last lecture in Zurich and where I now suspect you to be, too, informed you that with thanks and “Fuchti”[2] I received your letter of the 28th from Geneva.[3] I would even have liked to go out of town for a night, if need be, in order to spend a couple of hours with you. This in reiteration, in case my postcard didn’t reach you. Therein I also asked whether I may speak with Gonseth[4] about the content of your letter, but I didn’t say the main reason why I would have particularly liked to do so. I lack the knowl- edge about what the denotation (in German—g) means, you see, in order to understand your message.[5] Where can this knowledge be gathered? I would have asked Gonseth foremost for that reason. And besides, I believe he would have taken up the new trail with energy and skill.— But let me continue from what I believe I do understand: In the ’s, the gravitational and electromagnetic fields figure as things of the “same kind,” of the same kind as opposed to the formal (I would like to say, geo- metrical) element, which is what the Γ’s are conceived as. You say, the Γ’s and the g ’s, or the g’s, are “independent of one another.” But surely not in every sense, ¢as the Γ’s do surely depend on the g’s, in accordance with the² because the variation law does connect them, apart from the arbitrary element, which we are accustomed to, ever since the hole argument of 1912, and which re- flects the arbitrariness of the choice of coordinates.[6] Continue by writing down a few formulas so that I can see what is being varied and how the two results emerge from it! As I already wrote you, for me the mystery is at the foundation: What should things in space be, whether, as in the chain of reasoning of Reichenbach and gμν gμν