In all that he did, Schwarzschild would take things to the limit; during an expedition to the Alps, at the invitation of his brother Alfred, he ordered their guides to loosen the ropes at the most dangerous part of a glacier crossing, putting the entire expedition at risk, merely so that he could get closer to two of his colleagues and solve a problem that they had been working on together, by scraping equations into the permafrost with their pickaxes. His recklessness so angered his brother that the two of them never climbed together again, although they had spent nearly every weekend in
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