New-York tribune., 1922-10-15
Making Einstein Easy
BY Will Cuppy

learned in Physics l. We have lost
| them all, including even such trifling
/ but mono the less priced belongings rs
space, time and matter. father, it il
1 the physicists and not we who have
'ost al .hese things. Well, they go,
| themselves into this mess.
! What have we left? The Interval.
| Says one authority on present condi
! tions in the stricken universe: "The
| sole reality accessible to man in the
external world, the only really objec-
tive and impersonnl thing which is
| aomprehe. sible, is the Einsteinian In
terval." But what is that?
At any rate the plain person can
gather much delightful information
from these books. One finds out how
practical and how progressive are our
physicists. While the medieval theolo-
gians debated how many angels could
dance on the point Of needle our
scientists have discovered that there
are more than i5,000,000 molecules of
iron in the head Of pin. Also, an
individual e,ectron is about a thousand
billion times smaller than the smallest
known atom and the size of the atomic
nucleus is again about one thousand
milliorth part the size of negative
e'ectron. How do they fnd these things
out? The plain man doesn't know. he
can only tap his forehead and smile.
This same plain man is likely to re-
! tort upon tho relativists in several Bit
! ing ways. He might well assert sthat
the theory seems to apply only to peo-
pie who move at velocity of $4,000
miles second and that he has no
time for that, what with rotating daily
with the earth and following his orbit
sround the sun in addition to his rou-
tine tasks. And that physicists seem
to think that the only natural place
for thing to happen is in an arti'
ficially created vacuum or In an intel
lectual abstraction.
Really, just because the relativists
are quick at figures, must we move into
universe that probably doesn't exist
and would certainly collapse in the
first warned breeze if it did. Just TO
take them down a bit one hopes that
somebody will take notion to rela-
tivize the multiplication table.
"For me-" feel like saying to Pro
fessor Einstein, "for me, as for Ruskin,
the rentian is blue" although l don't
recall ever seeing gentian.) y,
"Ah," he would surely reply, DIV
lust imagine an ichthyosaurus travel
inc at the velocity Of the Beta rays OF
radium." And can't.
The means employed by our four
expounders Of simpl fled Einstein to
reach the plain intelligence differ as
widely as their nationalities. In his
effort TO impart the fact that accord
ing to the newer conceptions Of ply
sizes, space, time, and matter are not
absolute and independent, but rela-
tive to tha observer, Mr.. Dingle in
"Relativity For All' mentions promi-
nently Scylla and Charybdis, love
God, and Professor A. N. Whitehead.
and advances the pregnant thought
that "truth is simple to the simple
minded" In "Relativity and the Uni
verse" by DR.. Harry Schmidt, the
demonstrations are so ingenious, the
summar es so concise, the chapters so
well built and thorough that feel
have only myself to blame if l do
not quite get the idea.
Perhaps the most comforting thing
in all these books Is Professor Nord-
mann's suspicion that "Voltaire never
quite understood Newton, though he
wrote much about him, and Newton was
less difficult to understand than Elm
stein is." One of my aunts remarked
that perhaps Voltaire read simplified
Newton. She said that she had perused