Baffled Sage

Four years ago Professor Albert Einstein, the good grey sage of Princeton, N. J., published an essay in which he compared science to a pyramid (TIME, March 16, 1936). At the pyramid's base are a number of unconnected sense impressions, such as that boiling water is turbulent while cold water is quiet. As progress is made up the pyramid, sense impressions are connected by theorems and syntheses which cover more & more phenomena, so that the basic statements need be fewer (the cross section of the pyramid diminishes). Such progress was made, for example, when heat was found to be energy of molecular motion; and when light, X-rays, gamma rays, wireless waves, ultraviolet and infrared radiation were all disclosed as electromagnetic vibrations. At the pyramid's apex there should be a master synthesis embracing all physical phenomena.

Einstein's relativity, which burst on the world as a mathematical vision but which has accumulated many astronomical proofs through the years, explains mass, gravity, inertia, space and time, but not atoms and electric particles, which seem to perform in a bizarre, non-relativistic world of their own. Quantum mechanics, the mathematics of the atom, has developed apart from relativity. Physicists of broad beam feel, however, that this should not be so.

Einstein once said he expected to devote the rest of his life to the search for a unified field theory which would bridge relativity and quantum mechanics, embrace all phenomena from the atom to the universe. Once he hit on a promising lead-a treatment of space as a double sheet with atomic particles as "bridges" connecting the sheets-but that ran into a dismal dead end.

Last week, in an address delivered to the American Scientific Congress in Washington, the sage of Princeton confessed himself baffled. "For the time being," he said, " we have to admit that we do not possess any general theoretical basis for physics which can be regarded as its logical foundation. The field theory, so far, has failed in the molecular sphere. . . ."

But: "Some physicists, among them myself, cannot believe that we must abandon, actually and forever, the idea of direct representation of physical reality in space and time; or that we must accept the view [supported by the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics] that events in nature are analogous to a game of chance."

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