Einstein at a Loss?

More than three years ago, Albert Einstein announced (in the third edition of his book, The Meaning of Relativity) that he had developed an overall theory to account for both gravitation and small-scale phenomena, such as the quanta of energy that are studied in atomic physics (TIME, Jan. 2, 1950). Hardly any theoretical physicists came to his support, though a "unified theory" is what many of them are looking for most eagerly.

This week (in the fourth edition) Einstein sounded less sure of his achievement. He thinks that he has improved his equations, and he still believes that gravitation (i.e., relativity) is the place to start when trying to explain the universe, but he admits that he does not yet have the whole answer. No one has found an experimental method of proving his unified theory. "Nevertheless," he says hopefully, "I consider it unjustified to assert, a priori, that such a theory is unable to cope with the atomistic character of energy."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.