Typed letter signed ("A. Einstein").
4to. 1 page. In German. Greek letter psi added by hand. On blindstamped headed stationery.
€ 14,500.00
To the Hungarian-born physicist Cornelius Lanczos (1893-1974) on the difficulties of finding one's way in life, discussing his ongoing dispute with Erwin Schrödinger and Max Born over the "Copenhagen Interpretation" of quantum mechanics.
Einstein is happy to hear that Lanczos is content in his new position in Dublin and no longer considers fleeing to Brazil, an idea Einstein found rather amusing. He compares the struggle of existence with living in the midst of a herd of buffalos, always under threat of being trampled: "Dies ist schon das Beste, was unsereinem erreichbar ist: man ist in eine Büffelherde geboren und muss froh sein, wenn man nicht vorzeitig zertrampelt wird. Die Idee einer Flucht nach Brasilien fand ich etwas drollig".
Turning to scientific matters, Einstein comments on Schrödinger's "desperate attempt" to dismiss the Born rule in favour of the wave function as a stand-alone description of the facts: "Schrödinger hat neuestens den verzw[e]ifelten Versuch unternommen, die Born'sche Interpretation zu verwerfen und die [psi] Funktion unmittelbar als die volls[t]ändige Beschreibung der realen Tatbestände zu proklamieren".
Lanczos had come under suspicion for possible communist affinities in McCarthyite America, and this appears to have caused his move to Ireland in 1952, where he took over Erwin Schrödinger's position at the School of Theoretical Physics at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. Einstein's long-standing objection to the predominance of statistics in the Copenhagen Interpretation was famously summed up in his dictum 'God does not play dice'. The psi function represents the amplitude of the wave in Schrödinger's time wave equation.
