Science: Checking Einstein

When Einstein announced his unified field theory 3½ years ago (TIME, Jan. 2, 1950), he asked his colleagues to check its validity. The theory attempted to connect the electromagnetic and the gravitational properties of the universe, which appear to follow separate sets of laws. To show that they are connected would complete the revolution in physics that began with the electromagnetic field theory of James Clerk Maxwell in the late 19th century. A single set of laws would be shown to rule and to unify the physical universe.

Hardly anyone accepted Einstein's challenge. More popular with physicists was a view derived from quantum mechanics, which holds that the universe is made up of small particles (quanta) that behave, individually, as if they were governed by mere chance. Einstein does not accept this. "I cannot believe," he remarked, "that God plays dice with the cosmos."

Last week Professor Vaclav Hlavaty of Indiana University, a refugee Czech expert on multi-dimensional geometry, announced that he had taken the first step toward checking Einstein.* Like most mathematicians, he cannot explain clearly to laymen just what he has done. Apparently he has worked out a solution for Einstein's equations, and has concluded that electromagnetism gives rise to both matter and to gravity, a property of matter. This would make the laws of electro-magnetism supreme, superseding the "dice" of quantum mechanics.

Professor Hlavaty believes that it will now be possible to test the unified field theory experimentally, but the crucial experiment, he says, has not yet been devised.