NORTHERN ADVOCATE DAILY TUESDAY, JUNE 11, 1929. PROBING WORLD MYSTERY

Northern Advocate, 11 June 1929, Page 4

NORTHERN ADVOCATE DAILY

TUESDAY, JUNE 11, 1929. PROBING WORLD MYSTERY

Registered for Transmission Through the Post as a Newspaper.

Tlioro 'has boon published a six-pago pamphlet filled with algebraical formulae, in which Professor Einstein has embodied the results of his ten j years’ study of the phenomena of I electro-magnetism. The publication of j this pamplet has created an appetite for popular enlightenment which apparently cannot be gratified. Even learned mathematicians confess that the great exponent of relativity lias set them “a hard nut to crack,” and this fruit of a prolonged quest for a formula which will embrace ip a single sweeping generalisation virtually the whole of the laws of Nature cannot be assimilated by “the man in the street’’ who knows little of physics and less of mathematics. It is, howI • ' # ever, possible to indicate the object and scope of Einstein’s inquiry. To quote his own words in an interview he gave to a .British journalist in Berlin, he has been endeavouring to unify natural laws which in the respective fields of gravitation and electro-mag-netism now present a baffling dualism. On gravitation and its law's science has built up its entire system of mechanics

and movement, while electrodynamics | nml its laws furnish the basis on wlib-li physios interprets the phenomena of ■ light, heat, eleetrieity, ami magnetism. \ Between tihe two sets of laws there j was a hiatus which the ‘‘general” j theory of relativity Jiff not cover. Einstein now claims to have spannei the gap, arid brought all cosmic phenomena under a single concept, thong.i it is admitted that this simplification by means of a law which applies equally to the gravitational and elec-tro-dynamic fields is even yet not complete in every detail. As a writer recently put it, in the “space-time” universe' presented to us by relativity, gravitation has become just a. nonEuclidean geometrical construction. The Newtonian law of gravitation set men looking for the mysterious cosmic force which was assumed ito be making every particle of matter in the universe attract every other particle. Einstein called off the hunt. There is, as relativity explains gravitation, no reciprocal “pull” or tug of material bodies, and the old difficulty of “action at a distance,” without a known medium or method, disappears. We have now to think of gravitation as an illusion created by the nature' of the movements of bodies in a part of “space-time” which is warped, bent, or curved. It is not easy so to think. Even so eminent n physicist as Sir Oliver Lodge acknowledges that to liiin the notion of a warp in empty space is meaningless. It does not become any the more comprehensible when, as by the relativity doctrine, time is added to space as a fourth dimension. Space thought of as entirely devoid of objects is more nothingness. Except, with material things to measure from wo could form no idea of dimensions or distance. And the position is the same with time; emptied of events, time becomes a vacuum, a nullity. Yet, though it cannot be visualised, the space-time of relativity admits not only of formal and logical statement in mathematical terms, but the theory of its curvature in a field occupied Iby largo masses of matter bears the test of experimental verifij cation. But of this mathematical universe of Einstein, into whicli, like the missing part of a jig-saw puzzle, he is now fitting the province of electrodynamics, the philosophic mind is bound to inquire: has it any correspondence to the ultimate reality of things, or is it only a scientific symbolism to satisfy the human craving fot a symmetrical and an ordered world? Science enables us to form clear concepts of the relations of things, and we give the things names, such as gravitation, electricity, light, etc., but, as the .great French mathematician, .M, Poincare, has warned us, these are merely the names of the images which we substitute for the real objects Nature hides for over from our eyes. “The object of mathematical'theories,” he says, “is not to reveal to us the real nature of things; that would be. an unreasonable claim. Their only object is to co-ordinate the physical laws with which physical experiment makes us acquainted.” The same thing is said by Professor Eddhigton, the distinguished English relativist, who declares that the theory of relativity serves to unify the laws of Nature.- -. •‘ ‘ And yet, in regard to the nature of things,” says the professor, “this knowledge is only an. empty shelf—a form of symbols. It is knowledge of structural form, and not of content. All through, the physical world runs that unknown content, which must surely be the stuff of our consciousness. Hero is n hint of as poets deep within the world of physics, and yet. unattainable by the methods of physics.” The scientific mind does no more than regain from Nature that which it first put into Nature. Einstein probably would acknowledge that, he is only building up a new cosmic geometry, and not offering a solution of the mvsterv .of the world.