When he conducted experiments he was no less impulsive: he would remove pieces from one instrument to use them for another, without leaving any record of what he had done. If he needed a diaphragm in a hurry, he would simply drill a hole in the lens cap. When he left Göttingen to oversee the observatory in Potsdam, his replacement nearly quit before his appointment had begun: upon taking an inventory, in order to determine how badly the facilities had suffered under Schwarzschild, he found a transparency of the Venus di Milo inside the focal plane of the largest telescope, arranged in such a
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