SCIENCE AND WORDS

Waikato Times, Volume 93, Issue 14536, 7 December 1920, Page 3

SCIENCE AND WORDS

T EINSTEIN THEORY. (From our London Correspondent.) LONDON, September 150. A report from Berlin tells us that the savants discussed the Einstein theory, at a conference of natural scientists at Nauheim, without the least regard to whether the upholder or the denouncer was a .lew or Gentile. A packed audience of mathematicians, astronomers and others, who came to cheer their favoured racial protagonists were "disappointed," we are told, hut remained 'to hear analyses of crude science. Yet, it is certain that their estimate of the value of "relativity" as 8 working proposilion, depends much upon "whether its discoverer is an Aryan or a Semite." At this time o' day! What a motley world it is, after all, when even scientific men proclaim opinions in accordance with their racial predilections or antipathies. One may well wonder what hope there can ho of the emergence of lesser mortals from the thraldom of superstitions, obvious errors sanctioned by usage or even customs which preclude progress and perpetuate absurdities. Overseas' Britons who have never seen a "Lord Mayor's Show" cannot conceive what colossal buffonery, what tawdy rubbish the whole thing is. Much less can they understand after seeing it why this annual tomfoolery is so dear to the heart of the average Londoner. Of course, the explanation may be that he likes to see other people—he refrains himself—"playing the giddy goat," as one New Zealander put it last year, so that he may laugh at them. But not only scientists ride unscientific hobbyhorses. Behold the Jove-like editor of the London Mercury lecturing the editor of the Journal, the official organ of the Institute of Journalists, because, in an article recommending greater accuracy of language in the British press, he expresses a preference—which we do not happen to share—for "kinema" rather than "cinema." What on earth does it matter? The Mercury man has probably been too busy putting feeble thought into feebler rhythmic frames to have read Pope's Essay on Criticism, or he might have kept his blunt shafts of satire for the scribe who offers us three or four "alternatives," whose bounty extends to a third "moiety," who insists on "different to," who is always "informative" when he wants to be "informing." and so through tin: whole gamut of things which ought not to go into the newspapers. The colloquial phrase defence might be set up by the scribe who tnis week announced that "the new fares have burst on London." Some of us wish they had and that we could travel on the fragments. But what of the tip-top paper which sonorously, intimated that cei'tain politicians it disapproved of must be "purged from the stigma" of something they are said to have done? Perhaps there is a phase of Einstein's "relativity" notion hidden away in this, for physicians assert that there are marks on human beings removable by purging medicine.