EINSTEIN WITHOUT RELATIVITY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 278, 20 October 1944, Page 17

EINSTEIN WITHOUT RELATIVITY

OST readers of magazines know Einstein’s face when they meet it in a new photograph, and many have met him in this limerick: I don’t like the family Stein There is Gert, there is Ep, and there’s Ein Gert’s poems are bunk Ep’s statues are junk And nobody understands Ein. But not so many know that he is one of the mildest, best-natured and most meekly obedient of all the world’s great men now alive, According to the latest book about him-a new study printed recently in New York-he is almost too simple to be true. To his house in Princeton comes a continuous stream of the great names of the world-in literature, politics, economics, science, diplomacy-but not for any of them does he change out of his slippers, baggy trousers, and brown leather jacket. Except in winter he seldom

a ---- wears socks, and his main domestic worries are trying to persuade his family that he doesn’t need a new suit. : It’s not that Einstein can’t afford a new suit, for he receives a salary of 20,000 dollars a year, but in spite of this he refuses to stay at expensive hotels when he is travelling and loves to wander round cheap departmental stores with a child’s delight in the glittering articles displayed. Once he was given a zipp bag, and mathematics and © relativity were forgotten while he zipped and unzipped it again and again. But Einstein isn’t mean. Although he won’t own a car and has the plainest and most scantily furnished study imaginable, he gave orders for a lift to be installed in his two-story house — not because he needed one, but because. he liked the salesman so much that he couldn’t refuse him. He receives gifts from his admirers’ all over the world, and almost invariably sends them back. People are continually writing to him asking for advice or assistance in matters not only scientific but also personal. © But he has one trump card, which he sometimes plays when flatterers_ sit admiringly at his feet and ask him to explain his theory of relativity. He does!