I was pleased to receive your two letters. Please let me know whether your crossing was pleasant, and how you are getting along in Copenhagen. Dr. Corey has just told me about your letter to him. While I was in Stockholm I saw a couple of Americans from Copenhagen, who said that they were expecting you. They also said that they were looking forward to telling you about the ways in which a European university differs from an American one.

You no doubt have learned that you will be pretty much on your own in Copenhagen, and that it will be up to you to determine whether you accomplish anything in the way of research or not. The problem of electron theory of metals is a difficult one indeed, and you might well have some trouble in finding some phase of it to work on. Don't worry if you flounder around for awhile, without getting anything very definite accomplished.

One attack that has seemed to me worth while, but which I have not followed up at all, is the extension of the calculations that J. Bardeen reported, on the compressibilities of the alkali metals, in a couple of papers in the Physical Review nearly ten years ago. He says something about using s and p orbitals in his calculations, but Dr. Waser told me that he did not really consider hybridization, in that the wave function that he used involves only the constant dependency on the angle; that is, an s wave function so far as angular dependency goes. I believe that he used an orbital wave function that in some way is similar to both the s and p orbital functions.

Perhaps you would be interested in studying Bardeen's papers carefully, and then in examining the calculations to see whether there is any way in which hybridization of the s and p functions, including the angular dependency, can be introduced. I would be interested to hear from you about this or about any other problem on which you may work.

Please let me know, when your plans become definite, what you intend to do about coming to Oxford. It might be necessary to make arrangements for living quarters for you - it seems hard even to get board and room in Oxford. I shall be lecturing during the second and third terms, that is, from about the middle of January till about the middle of March (a term of eight weeks) on the nature of the chemical bond, and from nearly the end of April to the middle of June, probably on inter-molecular forces and biological specificity. I expect that I shall travel on the continent for about a month, from perhaps the 20th or 25th of March to the corresponding time in April. I am then planning to leave Oxford about July 1, to spend a few days in Copenhagen, about a month in Sweden, a couple of weeks in Norway, and a week in England before leaving for home near the end of August.

Please give my regards to Professor Bohr.

Sincerely yours,

Linus Pauling

Linus Pauling:W