A GREAT PHYSICAL THEORY like Schrödinger’s wave mechanics, when it is confirmed, takes on its own impersonal existence in the course of time, becomes completely detached from its originator, and is finally received as self-evident. In this way one forgets how many inner struggles, hopes, and disappointments were bound up with its beginnings and one forgets too all the pros and cons of contemporary reactions to it. This more personal side can be reawakened into life if there are contemporary letters like the ones reproduced here.
Schrödinger’s widow, Mrs. Annemarie Schrödinger, cherished the wish that her husband’s correspondence concerning wave mechanics might be published among the works of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and so be made accessible to a wider scientific circle. She turned to the undersigned, as the senior among Austrian physicists, with the request that he make her wish known to the Academy. A motion concerning the publication of the letters was passed unanimously and with joyful gratitude at the meeting of the Academy’s Division of Mathematical and Natural Sciences on 25 January 1962; the editing was entrusted to the undersigned.
Little needs to be added to the letters; they speak for themselves. Apart from their essential content, they reveal something of the personalities of the four men of genius, corresponding to Buffon’s sentence, “Le style c’est l’homme.”
There are some omissions in the carbon copies of Schrödinger’s letters, which were all that were available here, since the mathematical formulas that were entered by hand on the typed originals are often missing. These omissions were supplied according to the meaning and by comparison with Schrödinger’s published works. The other scientists’ communications are all in the form of hand written letters, or postcards (No. 1, 7, 10, and 12). A calculation on wave packets that filled many pages was omitted from Lorentz’s second letter (No. 21); also omitted were the beginnings of letters 8, 15 and 16, which contained only personal matters, and a paragraph in letter 8 dealing with molecular statistics. The sketch in No. 12 is a facsimile in natural size. All texts are reproduced faithfully—salve errore et omissione; several inconsistencies in punctuation and style have been left uncorrected. Some (numbered) footnotes, set in smaller print, may be of assistance in giving a broader orientation.
We express our thanks to the heirs of Max Planck and H. A. Lorentz as well as to the Executor of the Estate of Albert Einstein for permission to publish the corresponding letters, and to the latter also for photographic copies of letters 13 and 15, (as well as the letter referred to in the footnote to letter 13), no carbon copies of which were to be found here.
Finally we thank the Springer-Verlag of Vienna for undertaking the publication and for its painstaking accomplishment.
K. Przibram
Vienna, Summer 1963