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Albert Einstein has been awarded the Nobel Prize. After the enormous popularity that the creation of the theory of relativity has brought to this great man, this distinction will hardly come as a surprise to the general public. What is surprising is that the citation from the Swedish Academy of the Sciences does not mention the theory of relativity, but specifically honors Einstein for a different achievement: “for his investigations in the field of theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery- of the law of the photoelectric effect”. It would seem that the Swedish Academy wished to avoid taking a position on the question of the theory of relativity — in itself a display of justifiable caution, since the Nobel Prize ought not to render a decision in scientific disputes. Nonetheless, the Nobel Committee has thereby rejected the historic opportunity to do public honor to one of the greatest physical theories of all time.

The philosophical content of modem science has found perhaps its clearest expression in the widespread interest of the public in Einstein’s theory of relativity. While this interest set in, of course, only after the theory had taken firm root in physical circles, and while it is certainly riddled with misunderstandings of the physical theory, it is nonetheless only to be explained by the fact that the theory resolves more than merely technical problems, that it touches upon genuinely philosophical issues the intellectual consequences of which are of a significance similar to that of Copernicus’ discovery in his day.

With the death of Svante Arrhenius, the world has lost a scholar whose personality and work became the embodiment of a new era in the exact sciences: the era of the fusion of two basic sciences, physics and chemistry. If the great development that took place in both sciences in the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century can be credited to their separation and the concentration of efforts within a narrower sphere that it made possible, then the blossoming experienced by both sciences in the last quarter of the century is to be attributed equally to the fact of their coming together. This unification was given visible expression in the concept of physical chemistry, the name given to the common border area. If we were to assign to Arrhenius a professional classification. we would have to call him a physical chemist.

The idea of strict causality has long been regarded as the most visible hallmark of modern natural science, and it is indeed a concept through which modern science has taken a long step forward from the science of antiquity. While the ancient Greeks found strict regularity only in mathematics — that is, in a science dealing solely with abstract entities — and contented themselves with merely approximate rules in their knowledge of nature, the modern age has embraced the idea that mathematical strictness is to be found in every natural event, that the “book of nature is written in mathematical symbols”, and since the time of Galileo scientists have learned how to implement this idea systematically in the form of a mathematical physics.

The death, in Haarlem, of Holland’s greatest physicist, Professor Hendrik Antoon Lorentz, was reported yesterday in the morning paper.

It is not generally the custom for those who do not understand a scientific theory to publish a joint presentation of their misunderstandings. The One Hundred Authors Against Einstein (edited by Dr. Hans Israel, Dr. Erich Ruckhaber, and Dr. Rudolf Weinmann and published by R. Voigtlander, Leipzig) do not see eye to eye with this custom and have enriched the literature with a magnificent collection of naive errors.

The goal of the new theory is not so new at all — it has been pursued with great tenacity by a number of mathematicians and physicists for about ten years now. The great achievement of the theory of relativity was the combining of a series of physical facts under a single law of great scope, yet it had to interrupt its progress upon encountering one last barrier; it could not unite the theory of electricity with the theory of mechanics. Thus two vast bodies of laws stood at the pinnacle of physics. On the one hand, there was the complex of mechanical laws, which happily brought about a union between the phenomena of gravitation and the facts of space-time theory, culminating in Einstein’s gravitational field equations; on the other, there was the complex of electrical laws, which had already been formulated in essentials by the Englishman Maxwell by the end of the last century. These two sets of laws had, as it were, nothing to do with each other; the world of physics was divided into two kingdoms, one ruled by Einstein, and the other by Maxwell. The temptation to attempt a supreme union was irresistible: however, nature proved to be more stubborn than had been anticipated.

The great upsurge of public interest that Einstein’s theory of relativity attracted several years ago has subsided. If we now wish to weigh the net results of this movement, we must first try to comprehend the roots from which it sprang.