DOCS.
266,
267
APRIL-MAY
1911 187
colleagues so
far. Administration
very
bureaucratic.
Never-ending paperwork
for the
most petty
trifles.
Request
to
the
High Viceroyalty
to
allocate monies for
cleaning
the
institute
rooms
etc.,
etc.[4]
With
best
wishes from
me
and
my family
to
you
and
your
family,[5]
your
Albert Einstein
Could I ask
you
to
buy
a
slide
rule
&
send it to
Prof
Zangger,[6]
Inst.
for Forensic
Medicine at
the
University,
and
let
me
know the
price?
If the
answer
is
yes,
then thank
you
in advance.
267. To
Michele
Besso
Prague,
13
May
1911
Dear
Michele,
Your
new
postcard
makes
me
feel
very
ashamed. There
is nothing to
excuse
my
not
having
written
to
you
for such
a
long
time. But
you
can
and will
forgive
me
my long
silence
even
if
there
is
no excuse
for
it.-
I
would love
to spend
some
time with
you,
but
I
don't
know when
this could be done. I will
not
leave
Prague
this
summer
because I
desperately
need the vacation
to do
some
work.
My
position
and
my
institute here
give
me
much
joy.[1]
Only
the
people
are so
alien to
me.
These
are
not
people
with
natural
sentiments;
unfeeling
and
a
peculiar
mixture of class-based
condescension and
servility,
without
any
kind
of
goodwill
toward
their
fellow
men.
Ostentatious
luxury
side
by
side
with
creeping
misery on
the
streets.
Barrenness
of
thought
without
faith.
But I
am
compensated
for it
by
the
possibility
of
indulging
in scientific
ruminations
rather undisturbed. What
I have finished
lately
is
of
no
great
consequence.[2]
I
will send
it
to
you
together
with this
letter. Just
now
I
am
trying
to
derive
the
law
of heat
conduction
in solid
insulators
from
the
quantum
hypothesis.
I
no
longer
ask
whether
these
quanta
really
exist.
Nor
do I
try
to
construct
them
any longer,
for I
now
know
that
my
brain
cannot
get through
in this
way.
But
I
rummage
through
the
consequences
as
carefully
as
possible
so as
to
learn about the
range
of
applicability
of this
conception.
The
theory
of
specific
heats
has
celebrated
a
real
victory,
for
Nernst found
in his
experiments
that
everything
behaves
more or
less
the
way
I
had
predicted.[3]
To
be
sure,
the
shape
of the
curve
deviates
systematically
from
the
one
resulting
from
Planck's
law.
But
these deviations
can
be
explained
in
a
quite
natural
way
through
the
assumption
that
the atomic oscillations
deviate
very strongly
from
monochromatic
oscillations.
That
is
to
say,
one can
calculate the
proper frequencies
from
the
elasticity
and
show at
the
same
time
that the
amplitude
changes
during
a
half-period
by
a
quantity
of the
same
order of
magnitude
as
the
amplitude
itself.
These
matters
are
described in
a
short article that
is
now
in
press.[4]
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