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Last spring they issued a terse, tight-lipped announcement that they had completed actual measurements, would need six months to check their data, iron out some unaccountable variations. In the Pease-Pearson report last week the variations, up to 12 mi. per sec., were stunningly unaccounted for, were apparently real fluctuations in the speed of light. Worse, they were not irregular but seemed to occur in well-defined rhythms. There was one cycle of 14¾ days, another of about a year, another apparently following the tides of the ocean. And at 9 p. m. every night something happened which threw the tests entirely askew. Dr. Pease and Assistant Pearson did not say flatly that the speed of light could no longer be regarded as a constant. "The observed irregularities," they said, "are unexplained and their elucidation apparently will require more sensitive apparatus." Albert Einstein, at Princeton's Insti tute for Advanced Study, foresaw no need of revising his relativity theory, spoke of deformations in the earth's surface, said the Pease-Pearson results should be "most interesting from a geophysics standpoint." Harvard Observatory's Director Harlow Shapley thought the results were due entirely to the relationship of earth, sun and moon movements, pointed out that the 14¾-day fluctuation was roughly equal to half a lunar cycle and the annual fluctuation to the earth's revolution round the sun. From nearby Caltech, Dr. Robert Andrews Millikan suggested that there may have been something wrong with the apparatus.