Whatever may happen, Einstein’s teaching has a power of synthesis and prediction which will inevitably incorporate its majestic system of equations in the science of the future.
M. Émile Picard, perpetual secretary of the Academy of Sciences, and one of the luminous and profound thinkers of our time, has asked if it is an advance “to try, as Einstein has done, to reduce physics to geometry.” Without lingering over this question, which may be insoluble, like all speculative questions, we will conclude with the distinguished mathematician that the only things which matter are the agreement of the final formulæ with the facts and the analytic mould in which the theory casts the phenomena.
Considered from this angle, Einstein’s theory has the solidity of bronze. Its correctness consists in its explanatory force and in the experimental discoveries predicted by it and at once verified.
What changes in theories are the pictures we form of the objects between which science discovers and establishes relations. Sometimes we alter these pictures, but the relations remain true, if they are based upon observed facts. Thanks to this common fund of truth, even the most ephemeral theories do not wholly die. They pass on to each other, like the ancient runners with their torch, the one accessible reality: the laws that express the relations of things.
To-day it happens that two theories together clasp the sacred torch. The Einsteinian and the Newtonian vision of the world are two faithful reflections of it: just as the two images, polarised in opposite directions, which Iceland spar shows us in its strange crystal both share the light of the same object.
Tragically isolated, imprisoned in his own “self,” man has made a desperate effort to “leap beyond his shadow,” to embrace the external world. From this effort was born science, and its marvellous antennæ subtly prolong our sensations. Thus we have in places approached the brilliant raiment of reality. But in comparison with the mystery that remains the things we know are as small as are the stars of heaven compared with the abyss in which they float.
Einstein has discovered new light for us in the depths of the unknown. He is, and will remain, one of the light-houses of human thought.
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Footnotes:
[1] Albert Einstein, born in 1879, is a German Jew of Würtemberg. He studied in Switzerland, and was an engineer there until 1909, when he became professor at Zurich University. In 1911 he passed to Prague University, in 1912 to the Zurich Polytechnic, and in 1914 to the Prussian Academy of Science. He refused to give his name to the manifesto in which ninety-three professors of Germany and Austria defended Germany’s war-action.—Trans.