Albert Einstein (1879-1955).

Autograph correspondence card signed ('A. Einstein') to Wilhelm Wien, Zurich, [postmarked 7 October 1910].

In German. One page, 140 x 90mm. Provenance: by descent from Wilhelm Wien.

A paper for the Annalen der Physik. Einstein informs Wien of the impending arrival of 'a manuscript of a paper I have just finished. Please accept if for the Annalen. The first part of the paper, which deals with Boltzmann's principle, is perhaps rather long-winded. But I beg you not to take this amiss; I have been wanting to expound my opinion about this, and this was an opportunity to do so'.

The paper in question was Einstein's 'The theory of the opalescence of homogenous fluids and liquid mixtures near the critical state', published in Annalen der Physik 33 (20 December 1910). Einstein was evidently intrigued by Boltzmann's principle (which was a definition of entropy): in spite of his apology here, he returned to it in a lecture in Zurich in the following month, and in his Solvay lecture in 1911. Martin J. Klein, A.J. Kox and Robert Schulmann (eds), Collected Papers, vol. 5, no. 226.

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