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 Jews and scholars, takes no physical exercise at all.

He works in the attic of five-story apartment house at Haberlandstrasse, 5, a quiet thoroughfare near Berlin’s zoological 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.

He taught himself to play the piano. In music he prefers Beethoven, Haydn and Mozart, Mozart most of all. He also plays the violin well. A concert is one of the few evening attractions that will entice him out of his flat below his study. He goes to bed early and rises early. Another lure is any opportunity to play his fiddle to the inmates of a Jewish home for the aged. Dr. Einstein is a conservative Jew, a Zionist and, politically, a Socialist. So is his wife, Frau Elsa Einstein.

Dr. and Mrs. Einstein are cousins. March 14 he will be 50 years old. She is almost that age. Ten years ago they married, after previous marriages and divorces. She is a levelheaded, practical woman who finds her philosophizing husband no nuisance. Said she of him some time ago: “Professor Einstein is not eccentric. He wears stiff collars when the occasion demands it without protest. He hardly ever mislays things. At least, not more than most men. He knows when it’s time for lunch and dinner.”

A fortnight ago, when his “Coherent Field Theory” was finally printed (in a six-page pamphlet), he wrote a 5,000-word explanatory article for the New York Times. That article brought him several thousand dollars. The money was useful, for the Einsteins are, like most scientific families, comparatively poor. Not much income ensues from his professorship at the Academy of Sciences or from his directorship at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics. Yet the Einsteins, if they were really in need, might look with confidence to their very rich relatives, the Kochs and Dreyfuses of Germany and France. They are related to that Robert Koch (1843-1910) who discovered tuberculin and, after Louis Pasteur (1822-95), founded modern medicine. Alfred Dreyfus (1859-), of France’s famed “Dreyfus case,” is Dr. Einstein’s cousin.

Small income and cultural preferences send the Einsteins to the popular, but not costly, German water resorts for their vacations. Last summer, when the professor was so weak from illness, they were at Luebeck, old Hanseatic town on the Baltic. There Dr. Einstein lolled about in his beach chair or in his sailboat. He likes placid sailing. Once the sails are fixed he stretches out, hands under his head, and idly watches the sky. This he will do for hours.

Sailing was the main reason for the Einstein’s house-hunting at Wannsee last week. The lake is a bulge in the Havel River and boats for hire are plentiful. And it is not far (only twelve miles) from Berlin, where Dr. Einstein must earn his academic salaries by explaining his physi-cal theories of the world, of electricity, of magnetism, of the real unity of all.

Einstein’s World. The first philosophical explanation of the world was by Thales (7th & 6th centuries, B. C.), Greek philosopher. He reasoned that all things were made of various combinations of earth, air, water and fire. Compared to modern natural philosophy, Thales was simply saying that a small man was rapidly walking down a broad street.

During succeeding centuries, especially during the 19th, scientist-philosophers recognized more and more elements in nature. Once the world was considered flat with the sun leaping over it daily, the moon nightly. Then Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) showed that the moon spun around the earth and that the moon and earth together spun around the sun.

And men gradually grew to conceive the sun and all its planets moving together through the Milky Way, and the Milky Way with all its stars (and their probable planets) drifting with other galactic systems through the universe.

Isaac Newton (1642-1727) figured out a law which explained pretty well, but not perfectly, how those stellar bodies moved. One body, said he, attracts another body according to their mass (weight, size, momentum) and the distance which separates them. Such is the action of gravity.

Other men discovered electricity; others magnetism. They phrased mathematical laws which explained in a rule-of-thumb way, electrical and magnetic action. James Clerk Maxwell (1831-79) put these laws most precisely—and made electricity and magnetism nearly the same thing. Maxwell’s laws made possible electric light and power, telephones, radios.

Heinrich Hertz (1857-94) discovered electro-magnetic waves. Light was realized to be an electro-magnetic phenomenon.

Other men discovered that things were not as they seem. They are made up of particles; particles of molecules; molecules of atoms; atoms of electrical protons and electrons; protons and electrons of world waves which happen to meet, get tangled up, unkink and go undulating on again. Ernest Rutherford (1871-— ) in 1911 proved the electron theory. Arthur Stariley Eddington (1882 -—) is a fine fiddler with the wave theory. Arthur Holly Compton (1892 -— ) is another.

E. F. Fitzgerald discovered that an object changes its shape somewhat, according to its position or movement. Albert Einstein proved that objects change with time, that time itself is not a definite thing. It is different according to the viewpoint. Your hour is not my hour. . . . The scientists, in short, got a long way from the short man rapidly walking down a broad street. They had noted details. The short man was perhaps 5 ft. 4 in. tall; he weighed 145 Ibs.; wore unpolished black leather half-shoes, black lisle socks, a grey tweed suit, a taupe-colored felt hat pulled down over his bespectacled hazel eyes. His black, curly hair was awry and needed cutting. His hands were in his pockets, with one nickel, one dime and one quarter. Other people of other descriptions were milling and bumping around him with other gaits. Traffic was moving, rumbling and screeching. The earth quaked from subway trains and building blasting. . . .

Only a superb mind could note and keep track of all those people, all their attributes, all their movements. Albert Einstein’s is such 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. Fire (heat) is one effect of their interaction.

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. It is infinitely more complicated than Euclidean geometry taught at high schools and colleges.

Special Theory of Relativity. Einstein did not develop his conception of the world suddenly. He began by suspecting that nothing in the world was privileged, neither matter, nor motion, nor anything else. His suspicion led to the perception that there is one great physical law which describes everything.

First he inspected electrical and magnetic phenomena. Everyone knows, and had known, that they are intimately related. Electricity flowing through a wire coiled around a piece of iron makes that iron magnetic. As a piece of wire passes between the prongs of a horseshoe magnet, an electric current is generated. James Clerk Maxwell showed that the laws of electricity and of magnetism were very much alike. Albert Einstein, in 1905. showed that the forces were different aspects of the same mother force.

Maxwell said that two orphan boys resembled each other very much. Albert Einstein hunted around until he found that they were brothers, sons of the-same electro-magnetic mother.

General Theory of Relativity. If a man and an egg drop from an airplane at the same moment they will strike the earth, if there is no air resistance, at exactly the same moment. Such is an effect of gravity. Isaac Newton described the effect well with his laws of gravity. Albert Einstein did better with his general theory of relativity. He found a metric (a measure) with which he could subdivide practically everything that happened in his fourth dimensional world. It was a theoretical measuring unit invented by Georg F. B. Riemann (1826-66), mathematician.

The Riemann metric subdivides time, space, undulations, tensions and the other simplest phenomena of the world. By multiplying that unit as though it were (crudely) pounds, gives the force of gravity between, say, the earth and the man or egg falling from the airplane. Gravity is thus not unique as Newton believed. It is a part of the world’s pervasive unity. Again Dr. Einstein’s suspicion brought him to perception. This was in 1916.

Coherent Field Theory. The natural phenomenon for which the general theory of relativity did not account was electromagnetism. 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 world activities. His Riemann metric must be inaccurate.

So he was obliged to re-examine his whole world and to remeasure it. Euclidean methods of measurements were only approximate. So, too, were Riemannian.

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.

Consequences. Albert Einstein’s theories have altered human existence not at all. But they have revolutionized human understanding of existence.

One human field where the theories may have consequences is in aviation. The airplane motor is operated by electricity set moving by the magneto and intensified by electro-magnetic coils. When the plane is on the ground electricity and its spark act in a definite fashion. Perhaps that fashion changes when the plane is high in the air—powerfully lifted against the earth’s force of gravity and swiftly moved with or against earth’s rotational force. The possibility of such change may account for some airplane accidents. Perhaps such possible changes can be foreseen, calculated, forestalled. Perhaps—not to venture upon any more specific perhapses-—he pull of the Einstein intellect will raise mankind yet higher by the bootstraps.