Science: He Is Worth It

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A plump, broadfaced hausfrau sat quietly in the drawing room of the S. S. Belgenland as it lay in New York harbor last week. Although her eyes were laughing, she seldom glanced away from the frail-looking man with the tousled white hair and big, gentle brown eyes who sat beside her. The room was full of cameras, newsgatherers with vast questions on their tongues.

"Do you think religion can promote world peace?"

An interpreter turned to the frail-looking man, repeated the question in German.

"It never has in the past, and I am no prophet," he answered.

"What do you think of Adolf Hitler [German Fascist leader]?"

He answered quickly: "Hitler is living on the empty stomach of Germany. ..."

Newsgatherers read in his printed statement: "American genius may be able to establish a ... satisfactory balance between manufacturer and consumer. . . the most important practical issue . . . of 1930."

Most of the time the tousle-headed man laughed also. But occasionally his eyes looked frightened, his left hand opened and shut nervously. Then the quiet woman would lean toward him, pat his hand. She, Frau Elsa Einstein Einstein, knew that the world must continue making its legend about this small man, her double cousin to whom she has been married for 14 years.∙ She knows that popular imagination makes of him a hero who works in a solitary study mixing mathematical equations to get Truth as old-time alchemists mixed base metals to obtain Gold. She also knows that der Professor is afraid of and troubled by the world which makes a hero of him.

Fortnight ago the two started for U. S. from their small apartment home in Haberlandstrasse, Berlin. Frau Einstein had a busy time preparing for their long journey. So soon as Dr. Einstein announced last month that he would make his second trip to the U. S. to visit his scientific friends Dr. Albert Abraham Michelson, University of Chicago physicist, and Dr. Robert Andrews Millikan, chairman of California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif. (TIME, Nov. 24), scores of U. S. private citizens, public officials, clubs, and universities sent invitations for teas, dinners, receptions. Frau Einstein, who is her husband's keeper, had to reply with a refusal to every invitation. Her husband's weak heart cannot stand the excitement of many public functions.

Because Mathematician Einstein cannot keep his bank account correctly, she had to make most of the arrangements for the trip. She purchased new traveling clothes for both of them, discovered at the last minute that her husband's raincoat was too worn for visiting. A Berlin shopkeeper, impatient with her explanations, told her he must see her husband to fit the raincoat perfectly. She replied:

"If you knew how hard it was even to persuade my husband he needed a new coat, you wouldn't expect me to fetch him here. I wish you had my worries."