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Small income and cultural preferences send the Einsteins to the popular, but not costly, German water resorts for their vacations. Last summer, when the professor was so weak from illness, they were at Luebeck, old Hanseatic town on the Baltic. There Dr. Einstein lolled about in his beach chair or in his sailboat. He likes placid sailing. Once the sails are fixed he stretches out, hands under his head, and idly watches the sky. This he will do for hours.
Sailing was the main reason for the Einstein's house-hunting at Wannsee last week. The lake is a bulge in the Havel River and boats for hire are plentiful. And it is not far (only twelve miles) from Berlin, where Dr. Einstein must earn his academic salaries by explaining his physi- cal theories of the world, of electricity, of magnetism, of the real unity of all.
Einstein's World. The first philosophical explanation of the world was by Thales (7th & 6th centuries, B. C.), Greek philosopher. He reasoned that all things were made of various combinations of earth, air, water and fire. Compared to modern natural philosophy, Thales was simply saying that a small man was rapidly walking down a broad street.
During succeeding centuries, especially during the 19th, scientist-philosophers recognized more and more elements in nature. Once the world was considered flat with the sun leaping over it daily, the moon nightly. Then Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) showed that the moon spun around the earth and that the moon and earth together spun around the sun.
And men gradually grew to conceive the sun and all its planets moving together through the Milky Way, and the Milky Way with all its stars (and their probable planets) drifting with other galactic systems through the universe.
Isaac Newton (1642-1727) figured out a law which explained pretty well, but not perfectly, how those stellar bodies moved. One body, said he, attracts another body according to their mass (weight, size, momentum) and the distance which separates them. Such is the action of gravity.
Other men discovered electricity; others magnetism. They phrased mathematical laws which explained in a rule-of-thumb way, electrical and magnetic action. James Clerk Maxwell (1831-79) put these laws most precisely—and made electricity and magnetism nearly the same thing. Maxwell's laws made possible electric light and power, telephones, radios.
Heinrich Hertz (1857-94) discovered electro-magnetic waves. Light was realized to be an electro-magnetic phenomenon.
Other men discovered that things were not as they seem. They are made up of particles; particles of molecules; molecules of atoms; atoms of electrical protons and electrons; protons and electrons of world waves which happen to meet, get tangled up, unkink and go undulating on again. Ernest Rutherford (1871-— ) in 1911 proved the electron theory. Arthur Stariley Eddington (1882 -—) is a fine fiddler with the wave theory. Arthur Holly Compton (1892 -— ) is another.