458
DOC.
20 LIGHT QUANTUM HYPOTHESIS
Statement
on
lecture
at
meeting
held
in Zurich,
21 February
1911.
Published
in
Naturfor-
schende
Gesellschaft
in
Zürich.
Vierteljahrsschrift 56.
Part
2,
Sitzungsberichte
(1911):
XVI.
[1]The
introductory
sentence to
the
following
text states
that
Einstein
presented,
at
the end
of
the
preceding
discussion
on relativity,
"a condensed overview of the
new
light quantum
theory"
("eine
gedrängte
Übersicht über die
neue
Lichtquantentheorie").
Einstein
objected
to
conceiving
of the
"light quantum theory" ("Lichtquantentheorie") as
a
theory
in
the usual
sense
of
the
word
(see
Einstein
1914
[Doc. 27],
p. 351)
and
in
the document
at
hand
refers to
it
as a
"working hypothesis" ("Arbeitshypothese").
[2]Einstein had earlier written
a
nontechnical overview of the
problems
related
to
the
quan-
tum hypothesis (Doc.
16),
in
which
he
emphasized, in contrast to
the
present exposition,
that
the contradictions faced
by
contemporary physics are
unresolved.