Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Typed letter signed ('A. Einstein') to Cornelius Lanczos, 112 Mercer Street, Princeton, 9 July 1952
In German. One page, 280 x 216mm, Greek letter psi added by hand, blind stamped address. Provenance: Sotheby's, 26 November 1980, lot 167.

'We are born in a herd of buffalos, and must be happy if we are not prematurely trampled': on the difficulties of finding one's way in life, also mentioning the ongoing dispute with Schrödinger and Max Born over the 'Copenhagen Interpretation' of quantum physics. Einstein is delighted at the prospect of seeing Lanczos again after such a long interval, and congratulates him on his new appointment (in Dublin). 'I understand wholeheartedly your unease at the present circumstances here, but am all the more pleased to know that you are in a position that satisfies you professionally in every respect. This is the best thing achievable by us: we are born in a herd of buffalos, and must be happy if we are not prematurely trampled. I found the idea of a flight to Brazil rather comical. If you had only first got to know it rather better ... !'. Turning to his scientific work, Einstein admits to difficulties: 'With my theoretical aspirations I am still floating in the clouds and see no possibility of landing any facts on terra firma. I also see with some amusement how the unease in statistics is starting to reach even the Babbitts. Schrödinger has recently made the desperate attempt to reject Born's interpretation and to immediately proclaim the Ψ function as the complete description of the real facts'.

Lanczos had come under suspicion for possible communist affinities in McCarthyite America: this seems to have been the stimulus for him to 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 longstanding 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.