Lost Passion

Gentle Dr.Albert Einstein has a learned complaint to make in the current Scientific American.* In language shrouded in darkling mathematics, he takes modern physicists to task for what he considers their lack of interest in the greatest problem still unsolved. "There exists a passion for comprehension," writes Dr. Einstein, "just as there exists a passion for music. That passion is rather common in children, but gets lost in most people later on." P:Present-day physicists, Einstein believes, are so busy gathering facts about the innards of atoms that they have no time for the great, round, four-dimen sional universe. He lists the main steps toward understanding the universe. First (after Newton's useful but insufficient Laws of Motion) came Maxwell's work on electromagnetic fields: the effect that electrical charges have upon space. Then Einstein himself, with his Theory of Relativity, explained gravitational fields: the effect that mass has upon space.

The correctness of Maxwell's laws was easily proved; generations of scientists have used them and depended upon them. Relativity was a great deal harder to check, but its correctness also is firmly established by this time.

Many mathematicians and theoretical physicists have tried hard to connect the two theories. Electrical fields and gravitational fields exists in the same space, surrounding the same bodies; but they seem to be independent, obeying different laws. No one has been able to find a common law that governs both of them.

Einstein, who believes passionately that such a law must exist, has devoted the last 30 years of his life to searching for it. A few months ago (TIME, Jan. 2), he published as an appendix to his third edition of The Meaning of Relativity his Generalized Theory of Gravitation, which he considers the long-sought link between electricity and gravitation, explaining the behavior of both electrons and stars.

So far, Einstein complains, no one has proved him right, and no one has proved him wrong. The theoretical physicists, he says, act as if gravitational effects did not exist: "I do not believe that it is justifiable to ask, 'What would physics look like without gravitation?'"

So why, Einstein asks, don't the theoretical physicists really start getting busy and check his new theory against the experience of nature? "Affirmation or refutation will not be easy, in spite of an abundance of known empirical facts. The derivation, from the equations, of conclusions which can be confronted with experience will require painstaking efforts and probably new mathematical methods."

*For other news of Scientific American, see PRESS.

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