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Typed letter signed ('A. Einstein') to A.C. Robbins, 112 Mercer Street, Princeton, 27 December 1950.
细节
EINSTEIN, Albert (1879-1955)
Typed letter signed ('A. Einstein') to A.C. Robbins, 112 Mercer Street, Princeton, 27 December 1950.
In English. One page, 257 x 165mm, on paper with Einstein's blind-stamped address, two pen annotations to text. Provenance: by descent.
'The idea of the creation of atoms out of empty space is ... in direction contradiction to the field equations of gravitation'. Einstein thanks Robbins for a book by Fred Hoyle, which praises as 'a masterpiece of popular interpretation'. He goes on in a more critical tone: 'I doubt, however, the justification for bringing before the general public such a highly hypothetical structure of ideas in a rather apodictic form. Everything is based on the idea that the "ordinary" stars consist nearly completely of hydrogen, an assumption which is based entirely on a rather precarious theory of the inner equilibrium of the composing matter ... This hypothesis of the origin of the planets and their satellites is for me rather little convincing. / Finally the idea of the creation of atoms out of empty space is not only quite arbitrary but in direction contradiction to the field equations of gravitation. The basis for the latter, is of course not completely secure but, in my opinion, more solid than the aforementioned hypothesis'.
Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) was a prominent and controversial astronomer. Einstein's comments relate to his The Nature of the Universe, derived from a series of BBC lectures on astronomy, in which Hoyle popularised the term 'Big Bang' – a theory which Hoyle rejected.
Typed letter signed ('A. Einstein') to A.C. Robbins, 112 Mercer Street, Princeton, 27 December 1950.
In English. One page, 257 x 165mm, on paper with Einstein's blind-stamped address, two pen annotations to text. Provenance: by descent.
'The idea of the creation of atoms out of empty space is ... in direction contradiction to the field equations of gravitation'. Einstein thanks Robbins for a book by Fred Hoyle, which praises as 'a masterpiece of popular interpretation'. He goes on in a more critical tone: 'I doubt, however, the justification for bringing before the general public such a highly hypothetical structure of ideas in a rather apodictic form. Everything is based on the idea that the "ordinary" stars consist nearly completely of hydrogen, an assumption which is based entirely on a rather precarious theory of the inner equilibrium of the composing matter ... This hypothesis of the origin of the planets and their satellites is for me rather little convincing. / Finally the idea of the creation of atoms out of empty space is not only quite arbitrary but in direction contradiction to the field equations of gravitation. The basis for the latter, is of course not completely secure but, in my opinion, more solid than the aforementioned hypothesis'.
Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) was a prominent and controversial astronomer. Einstein's comments relate to his The Nature of the Universe, derived from a series of BBC lectures on astronomy, in which Hoyle popularised the term 'Big Bang' – a theory which Hoyle rejected.
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Julian Wilson
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