SCIENCE

Einstein's Field Theory

As 24-cent copies of Albert Einstein's abstruse "Coherent Field Theory" reached the U. S. last week, the man himself, his wife and a daughter plodded about Wannsee, simply hunting rooms at that lake colony twelve miles from Berlin.

The man's face was yellowish. He looked haggard, nervous, irritable. He sounded querulous. An internal disease, which last summer he feared would kill him before he could complete his newest theory, has made him so. That disease--plus the harrying visitors who buzzed and scraped about him the past fortnight, and years of indoor, sedentary work. Dr. Einstein, like so many other scholars, takes no physical exercise at all.

He works in the attic of a five-story apartment house at Haberlandstrasse, 5, a quiet thoroughfare near Berlin's zooelogical garden. A large iron door, which clangs as it shuts, keeps him in solitude and silence. The room smells of tobacco. He smokes a long-stem briar pipe, into which he tamps tobacco with his thumb. His working tools are paper and pencils on a good-sized table and his books (cheaply bound in paper for the most part) on shelves around the wall. Ornaments are a four-foot telescope and a large terrestrial globe. The grand piano in the room is his diversion.

Albert Einstein's is a superb mind. In his world nothing stands still. All moves; all changes. There are no straight lines. Everything curves. The world has an end but no boundary. It is like an orange with the rind pared down to nothing and the pips taken out. Within and around that imaginary sphere which remains of the orange, intangible forces wave in every direction. Some waves bump and dampen each other's motion until they have no movement left. But their energy is not lost. It goes into other waves which may bump and merge and thereby strengthen each other. Electrons and protons form and attract each other. They create atoms of matter, the atoms molecules, the molecules earth, water, air.

The Einstein world is a great "field" which has height, breadth, depth and time as its elements. Measuring those four elements requires a new kind of geometry--fourth dimensional geometry, Einstein geometry.

Dr. Einstein in 1905 had shown that electricity and magnetism were different aspects of one world activity. In 1919 he showed that gravity was another world activity. It was impossible, he believed, that gravity and electro-magnetism were two distinct activities. So he was obliged to re-examine his world.

Working in his Berlin study, musing in his sailboat on Wannsee, lolling in his beach chair at Luebeck, Albert Einstein figured out a new metric. It lies between Euclid's and Riemann's conceptions. It shows that gravity, electricity, magnetism, everything is a logical, not chance, part of the world. It enabled him last week to phrase in mathematical terms a theory by which "everything in the world" can be explained. Albert Einstein's theories have altered human existence not at all. But they have revolutionized human understanding of existence.

Rocketeering

So unobtrusively does Professor Robert Hutchings Goddard of Clark University, Worcester, Mass., work on his study of the air's upper miles by means of rockets that to many a Clark student he is only a tradition. They call him the moon man, in the inaccurate belief that he is trying to reach the moon with his missiles. Last week, Tradition Goddard detonated very loudly. From a 40-ft. steel tower he fired his latest rocket, a huge steel cylinder 9 ft. long by 2 1/2 ft. diameter. A new propellant sent it whizzing from the ground. It rose straight up about a quarter-mile. There the fuel seemed to ignite all at once, instead of in a stream, as planned. The roar sent Worcester ambulances and police hunting for tragedy. They found Professor Goddard and assistants inquisitively studying his rocket shell, which had landed near the site of its propulsion.

Over the Pole

Last week, in the two-year story of Commander Richard Byrd in Antarctica, came his successful flight to inspect some 10,000 square miles of Antarctica in a Fairchild monoplane with Pilot Bernt Balchen. They saw some mountain peaks no one had seen before and decided to name them for John D. Rockefeller Jr., one of the heavy contributors to the expedition's fund. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.