The battle of Einstein is raging on all fronts more fiercely than ever. Scarcely had Dr. William Wallace Campbell, director of the Lick Observatory, announced that photographs taken by the Crocker expedition at Wallal, on the northwest coast of Australia, during the solar eclipse of last September, confirmed the predictions of Einstein's theory of relativity as to the bending of star rays out of their normal paths by the sun's influence, when Captain Thomas Jefferson Jackson See, U. S. N., astronomer at the Mare Island Navy Yard, issued a statement regretting Dr. Campbell's action and denouncing Dr. Einstein as an impostor and plagiarist.
Captain See is no slouch of a mathematical astronomer in his own right. A graduate of American universities and a Ph.D. of Berlin, a member of all the great astronomical societies of the world, a research worker of established reputation in the very fields in which Einstein has gained his fame, he is " starred " in Cattell's American Men of Science, which means that he ranks among the 1,000 most distinguished scientists and the 50 leading astronomers in America whose work is supposed to be most important, by vote of their own colleagues. And so is Dr. Campbell, for that matter.
Dr. See's indictment charges:
1) That the fundamental postulates of Einstein that ether does not exist and that gravity is not a force, but a property of space, are crazy vagaries, disgraceful in a scientific age, and repudiated by the Paris Academy of Sciences and by reputable German scholars.
2) That the English physicist, Henry Cavendish (1731-1810), and the German mathematician, Johann von Soldner, especially the latter, anticipated Einstein by 120 years in calculating the effect of gravitation on light rays and in deriving the formulas on which his work is based. Einstein never mentions von Soldner in his writings, and he even copies an error which von Soldner made in his formula, and which was exposed in recent years.
" Einstein cannot be regarded as a scientist of real note," concludes Captain See. " He is not an honest investigator."
So far, however, the weight of evidence, as well as the opinion of the majority of intellectuals, seems to be in favor of Einstein. The Lick photographs, partly confirmed by those taken at the same place by.
University of Toronto astronomers, give results for the bending of a stellar ray just grazing the sun's edge, within one-hundredth of a second of arc of Einstein's prediction that they would be deflected 1.75 seconds.
From the Bureau of Standards simultaneously comes evidence of a different nature. The demonstration involved the weighing of topaz and diamond crystals in certain positions in relation to the axis of the earth. The experiments were in charge of Dr. Paul R. Heyl. Under the Newtonian theory of gravitation, the crystals would vary in weight in certain positions. This Einstein denied, and Dr. Heyl has so far found no variation, though using scales so delicate that they can detect differences of one part in a billion.