Einstein Stopped Here

I don't like the family Stein;

There is Gert, there is Ep and there's Ein.

Gert's poems are bunk;

Ep's statues are junk,

And nobody understands Ein.

Last week, from nonscientific Dublin, of all places, came news of a man who not only understands Einstein, but has bounded like a bandersnatch far ahead (he says) into the hazy, electromagnetic infinite. Austrian-born Nobel Prizewinner Erwin Schroedinger, of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, claims to have generalized still further Einstein's Theory of General Relativity. If so, he has scored a scientific grand slam: mathematical physicists (including Einstein himself) have been trying to do this, without success, for the last 30 years.

Einstein's Relativity explained (to the serious students who understand it) the gravitational field which extends throughout space. But it did not explain the electromagnetic field, which is quite as big a subject. Physicists have plotted some minor electromagnetic laws. Engineers know some rules of thumb: they deal with electromagnetics in nearly every piece of electrical apparatus they touch. But no one has come forward with one acceptable theory to explain both the gravitational and the electromagnetic fields.

Schroedinger believes that his new theory "should express everything in field physics." It should also, he says, reduce Einstein's theory to a special case, just as Einstein's theory reduced Newton's laws of motion. Like all such high-flown scientific theories, Schroedinger's consists of a complex equation expressed in mathematical symbols. To the nonscientific, it looks like incomprehensible doodling (see cut of theory in Schroedinger's own hand).

Even Schroedinger seemed not entirely comfortable with it yet. "I believe I am right," he announced. "I shall look an awful fool if I am wrong."

At the other extreme of physics--the infinitesimally small end--there was also baffling news. Last week, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, ex-head of the Los Alamos (atom bomb) Laboratory, postulated a new sub-atomic particle: the neutral meson, which leads an even more feverishly active life than the positive and negative meson which scientists already know about. In its normal habitat within an atomic nucleus, it "lives" only one hundredth of a sextillionth (1/100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000th) of a second. The neutral meson's brief life, remarked Professor Oppenheimer, may be the reason no physicist has yet seen it.

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