Unified Universe

A placid, smiling man, Dr. Albert Einstein, walked slowly up & down the streets of Pasadena, Calif, last week. According to his usual custom he wore no hat. His stubborn hair stood on end, its whiteness making his brown eyes seem black. He probably did not realize that the U. S. scientists who occasionally join him in his daily stroll hold their own hats at their sides out of deference to him. Dr. Einstein had been in Pasadena for three weeks. His Frau Elsa had established him comfortably in a seven-room English bungalow. Every morning he works in his study, in afternoons chats with Pasadena scientists or attends advanced seminars at California Institute of Technology. Evenings are usually spent quietly at home. But one evening last week, so gay was he over an invitation to visit his old friend Lawyer Samuel Unter-myer in Coachella Valley, that he did a thing unusual for him--went to a Los Angeles cinema.

Dr. Einstein has really been going to school in Pasadena. He has attended lectures about the galaxies by Dr. Gustaf Benjamin Stromberg of Mt. Wilson Observatory. Richard Chace Tolman, physicist-mathematician of Caltech, has been giving him lessons in astrophysics. Dr. Edwin Powell Hubble of Mt. Wilson Observatory has promised to let him look through the Mt. Wilson telescope. One evening all the California scientists had a banquet, invited Dr. Einstein as guest of honor. He spoke to them in German, complimented the works of Dr. Albert Abraham Michelson who is remeasuring light, Mt. Wilson's Dr. Hubble who measured the red shift in starlight, and Professor Tolman who believes with Sir James Hopwood Jeans that the universe is "exploding" (TIME, Jan. 5). After having been lectured to, Dr. Einstein gave a lecture himself last week. Before a class of 30 he talked for 90 minutes. While he rolled German words about his tongue,* he scrawled figures upon the blackboard--mathematical equa- tions. When he had reduced them down to a small group, his audience gasped. He had demonstrated to them the newest equation in his latest theory, the Unified Field Theory upon which he has been working since he completed the General Theory of Relativity in 1915. For the past century physicists have been striving after scientific monism. Dr. Einstein has been a monist leader. Scotland's James Clerk Maxwell (1831-79) correlated light and electricity. In 1905 Dr. Einstein announced that electricity and magnetism are two aspects of one world force. His General Theory of Relativity demonstrated that gravity is an other world force. His hope, realized in the Unified Field Theory, was that gravity and electromagnetism would be found to be aspects of the same fundamental, that he would be able to express all the laws governing electromagnetism, gravity and light by one mathematical equation. Proof of his Unified Field Theory has already been found in experiments with weak electromagnetic and gravitational fields. Additional work on stronger fields and in terrestrial magnetism is still needed to check him. The theory, says Dr. Einstein, provides a conception for a new geometry of space having for constants the speed of light, the charge of an electron, the mass of an electron, the mass of a proton, and Max Planck's wave-corpuscular light constant.

*No interpreter was needed. High-ranking scientists the world over learn German early, must do so to get along.

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