Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist
 Victor Jakob, a Physics professor in a small German university, reflects on his life as a physicist, recalling major discoveries and ideas of recent decades and his interactions with prominent physicists whose ideas challenge the classical physics worldview. Meanwhile the tide of World War I is turning against Germany. As he meditates on the changing world, Jakob hikes to a mountain overlooking his university, where he becomes trapped in a muddy ditch, while gunfire rings out below. In an apparently hopeless situation, he takes out his revolver and "open[s] his mouth." (Some reviewers characterize his apparent death as an accident, while others interpret it as suicide, a parallel to that of Ludwig Boltzmann; John Maddox considered it open to interpretation whether Jakob succeeds in killing himself.)