Radio: Einstein in Half an Hour

Most popularizers of science operate on the hopeful theory that anything, no matter how complex, can be reduced to terms a layman can understand. Radio hardly ever bothers to try.

Last week it did. Radio rushed in where such popular angels as Sir Arthur Eddington and Sir James Jeans have tried to tread: to explain the Einstein theory of relativity. It also tried to make the instruction painless—and all in one half hour’s time.

The audacious pioneer of this experiment is the University of Chicago, which has tried the trick before, with The Human Adventure (Mutual, Wed., 10-10:30 p.m., E.W.T.), but never with a big name cast and ballyhoo.

Whiz Quiz. Veteran Funnyman Colonel Stoopnagle (Frederick Taylor) played the part, without obvious effort, of a know-nothing layman. Clifton Fadiman played the part, without obvious effort, of the omniscient explainer. Whenever Fadiman got too hot to handle, Colonel Stoopnagle was to order the orchestra to play. There was a good bit of music in the half hour.

Knowing that the spoken word has only a moment to sink in, the University’s writers wisely steered clear of mathematics, tried to get across only a few ABCs of relativity.

With much whizzing and sound effects, the Colonel was shot up in a rocket ship to a star, looked down at the earth through a telescope and was startled to see the battle of Waterloo just going on. (Said Fadiman: “It took the light rays from Napoleon’s battle almost 200 light years to travel from the earth. . . . Things can’t be observed to happen simultaneously in space. . . .”) Then Stoopnagle was brought back to earth, put aboard a ship, where he observed that he was moving. (Fadiman: “Everything in the universe is moving all the time. The motion of a single object cannot be measured . . . except as it moves in relation to another. . . Relative is the key word. . . .”) Said Fadiman, explaining the fourth dimension (time) : “Motion and the passage of light take time, [therefore] time is a dimension of measurement itself.” Pun Pudding. These tiny pills of theory were carefully concealed in a pudding of puns, skits and music. Human Adventure, setting out to be both entertaining and educational about Einstein, was only partly instructive, not wholly entertaining. Fadiman tried to give his hearers a glimmer of the theory’s importance : atomic scientists had used it, he said, in calculating the amount of energy in an atom. Concluded Fadiman: “Before Einstein, there was one essential error in the logic of physics — it considered the . . .

scientific observer stationed . . . on earth as the center of all things, and his observations of the laws of nature, the correct ones. The Einstein Theory made the laws of nature equally valid for all observers.”