Dynamic Universe

A literary philosopher with a theatrical ancestry and a chemical education is James Medbery MacKaye of Dartmouth College. Last week he spellbound the American Philosophical Association, meeting in Manhattan, with his picture of a dynamic universe. The philosophers applauded the MacKaye universe as more perceivable and understandable than Dr. Albert Einstein's, more realistic than Sir Isaac Newton's.

In the Newton universe as interpreted today, especially by Professor Dayton Clarence Miller of Case School of Applied Science, a tenuous substance called ether pervades all space and things. This ether can be considered static, like a quiet pool of water, except as it is agitated by light and other radiations popping and wriggling through it.

Professor Einstein says there is no such ether. Energy in all its aspects, he thinks, proceeds through empty space. His astounding and generally ununderstood mathematical formulae are elegant kaleidoscopes in which almost all the infinite fractions of nature shift upon each other to form infinite patterns.

Mr. Mackaye says there is an ether. But it is not static like Professor Miller's ether. The MacKaye ether is composed of helter-skeltering radiations. Like light his radiations move in all directions, and with the same velocity (circa 186,000 mi. per sec.). They have a superfrequency and hence a superpenetration. As light goes through glass and X-rays through bodies, his radiations go through everything. They are never at rest. Modifications of them-- photons, protons, electrons and possibly other quivering mites of sub-matter not yet recognized--are only slightly less ubiquitous.

With this conception of an interspacial sea of turbulent radiation, Mr. MacKaye was able to adduce 17 phenomena which the relativists describe with their inconstant dimensions, but which he believed could be measured with the classical constants of time, space and motion. Scientist MacKaye, 57, is brother to Percy Wallace MacKaye, dramatist, poet, lecturer, esthete, and Hazel MacKaye, producer of esthetic pageants. A half-brother is Arthur Loring MacKaye, retired newspaper editor (Hilo Daily Tribune, Hawaii). All four are versatile writers.

More versatile than they was their father, the late James Steele MacKaye (1842-94), painter, actor, playwright, producer, lecturer on esthetic philosophy, inventor. His Hazel Kirke (1879) ran longer than any U. S. play until Frank Bacon's Lightnin' (1918). He organized the first U. S. school of expression, originated "harmonic gymnastics," first used over-head lighting in theatres, invented folding theatre chairs.*

James Medbery MacKaye is professionally a chemist. For 23 years he was with Stone & Webster, Boston engineers. In leisure time he wrote such books as The Economy of Happiness, The Politics of Utility, The Happiness of Nations, Americanized Socialism, The Logic of Conduct. Five years ago he quit Stone & Webster, and moved from stuffy Cambridge, Mass.. to sylvan Hanover, N. H. To students of Dartmouth, where he is a visiting lecturer in philosophy, he is an aloof though smiling mystery who teaches them how to think clearly, argue effectively.

*His father was Col. James Morrison MacKaye (1805-88), author of Birth & Death of Nations, president of American Telegraph Co., a forerunner of Western Union. The Postal Telegraph Mackays are no relations.

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