WIZARD EINSTEIN

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 47, 23 August 1930, Page 26

WIZARD EINSTEIN

WILL .HE GAIN NATURE'S. SECRETS?

Can man ever find the "first principle," the "primary element," the beginning of all things material? Now Professor Albert Einstein, the originator of the theory of "relativity," is j trying to .discuss the problem in a new work on the beginnings of which he has been engaged for two years, writes the Berlin correspondent of tho "Daily Chronicle." .... I In a cautious, exclusive statement to me, Professor Einstein has written: "It is'true that I have- been working for two years on a new foundation for the general theory of relativity. That thesis would treat gravitation.and electricity as a-uniform condition of space. But the calculation of the consequences of this theory have not progressed sufficiently as-yet to permit comparison of the theory with practical experiments." To friends 'Professor Einstein /went further, and admitted that the "new foundation"-is turning into "a practically new theory.'' His latest work, submitted to the Prussian Academy of Science, hints at-leastat a re-formation

of the theory to square it with th© results of his new calculations. Abroad it has been wrongly suggested that Einstein maintains that gravity and electricity are one and the same thing. Einstein himself characterises the relation between, gravitation and electricity as a "uniform condition of space." But here it should be remembered that Einstein's "space" is a space in which "time" has been added to the three ordinary dimensions of "length," "breadth," and "depth." { Professor Freundlich, of the Einstein Tower at Potsdam (where Einstein theories are tested), holds that the j Einstein theory has already reduced ] nature to two "fields." Some day, ho believes, science will get beyond these two "fields," and will discover the one primary principle from which gravitation and electricity and all this material world originated. So far all is theory and research, but Einstein's method, as he himself has explained, is to search for the "logically simplest law to which a structure can be submitted."