Visiting Eminence
Last week, Albert Einstein stepped ashore at San Pedro, Calif.; Auguste Piccard stepped ashore at Manhattan. While Professor Piccard allowed his twin brother to talk about left-handed twins (see p. 23), the balance of scientific attention tilted to Professor Einstein. For an hour before debarking he had been scowling through field glasses at U. S. warships in San Pedro Harbor. They annoyed him, made him exclaim: "More than ever before, I wish on this visit to promote international goodwill." German-American inter-relations is the subject of an international radio broadcast which he will make Jan. 23 for Philadelphia's Ober-laender Trust which is paying his & Mrs. Einstein's expenses during this, their fourth, visit to the U. S.
Ashore, the Einsteins at once went to their customary living quarters in Caltech's Athenaeum at Pasadena. That night he stayed up late chatting abstrusely. Two days later, in a comfortable chair in the Mount Wilson Observatory library, he listened intently to a bright young man of relativity propound a retrovision of the universe.
No monk is Georges LeMaitre, Belgian priest, although he affects the conventional black suit of the learned U. S. Jesuit. No funster is he, although he chuckles continually. No nitwit is he, although he says of a steam engine device newly invented by his brother in Geneva: "It does something about the puff-puff--the exhaust--but I am not sure what it is." The Catholic University of Louvain educated him; the late Cardinal Mercier ordained him; M. I. T. taught him physics and English; Louvain created for him a chair of relativity. At 39 he deals with Nobel laureates.
"I think," said he at Pasadena last week, "all the matter in the Universe was once condensed into a single primordial atom and that this atom exploded with such force that we still see some of the smoke going away. And ever since that original disintegration, matter has been breaking up into lighter and simpler substances. We are still in time to see this wonderworld, for we still have radium that has not completely extinguished into dull substances like lead and helium."
One of the puffs from the first explosion is the Milky Way, in which Earth is a fleck of Sun-warmed soot. Other puffs are nebulae traveling 12,000 miles a second. Cosmic rays include flashes of light (Millikan photons) from that explosion, and chips of matter (Compton electrons and/or protons; TIME, Jan. 9). They equal one-tenth the light from all the stars and weigh (Millikan calculation) 10-34 gram per cubic centimeter.* Mount Wilson's Astronomer Edwin Powell Hubble estimates the total amount of matter in space as 10-31 gram per cubic centimeter. Cosmic radiation thus must be equal to about one-thousandth of all matter, making it "extremely probable that the whole of existing matter is involved in this phenomenon of cosmic rays."
Dr. Einstein, Dr. Millikan, others relaxed. Exclaimed Dr. Einstein: "The most beautiful and satisfying interpretation of the source of cosmic rays I have listened to."
*Minus exponents denote decimal places. Thus 103=1,000; 10-3=.001
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