Cosmology

For the past month Dr. Edwin Powell Hubble, astronomer of Mt. Wilson Observatory, has been telling Dr. Albert Einstein what he has seen through his big telescope. He has carefully described the red shift in starlight which he is studying with his fellow astronomer, Dr. Milton La Salle Humason. At the same time, a neighbor, Dr. Richard Chace Tolman, physicist of California Institute of Technology, has been explaining his interpretation of Dr. Hubble's starlight news to Dr. Einstein. It appears to him that the Universe is not static as Dr. Einstein has asserted, but constantly enlarging in size, changing in shape. The nebulae seem to be shooting away from one another like pieces of a bursting shell. Therefore, last week, when Dr. Einstein indicated that he had changed his mind about a few points of cosmology, California physicists and astronomers stuck feathers in the scientific caps of Astronomers Hubble and Humason and Physicist Tolman.

Dr. Einstein had just finished a lecture on his Unified Field Theory at Mt. Wilson Laboratories when he made his announcement.* One of the audience, Dr. Walter Sydney Adams, Observatory director, asked him to tell the applications of his Unified Field Theory to cosmology. "The old symmetrical spherical space theory is not possible under the new equations." Dr. Einstein answered hastily. Immediately he rushed from the laboratory, already late for an appointment.

Said Dr. Adams: "There is some real meat in that."

His audience remained, wondered what the meat was. They thought it most probable that he had adopted the idea of an expanding Universe. Other famed scientists who also have adopted it: Harlow Shapley of Harvard Astronomical Observatory; Walter Nernst of the University of Berlin. Most vehement exponent is Sir James Hopwood Jeans, British physicist.

To the questionnairing Yale Daily News, Dr. Einstein wrote confirmation: "New observations . . . make the presumption near that the general structure of the Universe is not static."

While the California scientists were planning another cosmological talk with Dr. Einstein, they received contradictory news which complicated their Universe for them. Dr. Einstein built his Relativity theory upon the negative results of the famed Michelson-Morley ether-drift experiment performed in 1887. Last week two men announced that they had rechecked that experiment, obtained opposite results. One man, Dr. Dayton Clarence Miller, had made 175,000 more readings of his interferometer at Case School of Applied Science, Cleveland. His results showed a definite ether drift, which he will expound in April at the meeting of the National Academy of Sciences. In Germany, the other ether detector. Dr. Georg Joos, professor of theoretical physics at Jena University, reported that he had obtained a negative result, upheld Dr. Einstein.

*Last week in Los Angeles suit was filed against Dr. Einstein in U. S. District Court by one Ira D. Edwards who claimed that Dr. Einstein had stolen his theories. Dr. Einstein, told of the suit, said, ''I never heard the name before.''

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