The Perfect Machine Read Free Page A

the General Theory of Relativity were widely touted as the most important scientific discovery of the century. A myth circulated that only twelve men in the world could understand the theory, but the alleged limits of comprehension didn’t stop editors and soapbox orators from extolling the importance of relativity, tossing off a casual E = mc 2 , or announcing that “there are no absolutes, everything is relative” to prove that they too were part of the great age of science.
    Yet the intellectuals and poseurs who revered Einstein were a tiny minority of the American public. For much of the country formal science was too abstract, so obscure that it was somehow un-American. In 1914 a congressman questioning a witness at an appropriations hearing said: “What is a physicist? I was asked on the floor of the House what in the name of common sense a physicist is, and I could not answer.”
    Even the august National Academy of Sciences enjoyed less than universal prestige. Andrew Carnegie typified the American reaction when he dismissed a request for funds for the academy: “Oh,” he said. “That’s just one of those fancy societies.”
    Americans had their own science. To the ordinary folk of Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, science meant know-how, the ability to make cars, vacuum cleaners, electric irons, light bulbs, radios. America was the country that could build anything. Americans believed that they had won the Great War in the shipyards and mills and factories as much as the trenches, and few doubted that there was any problem of science that couldn’t also be solved by the same commonsense engineering that brought invention after invention out of the laboratories of Thomas Edison and car after car out of the factories of Henry Ford.
    In 1920 few Americans had ever heard of Harlow Shapley or Heber Curtis. Most would have named Edison as the greatest living scientist. But the United States was a land of newspaper readers, and the newspapers had discovered the art of turning the commonplace into the kind of stories that readers demanded. A mine cave-in that killed seventy men earned a brief mention in the paper; a single man trapped in a mine was a story that could be developed and enhanced to hold readers for days. A good murder trial could hold them for months. The National Academy of Sciences wasn’t a usual newspaper beat, but then Albert Einstein in the audience wasn’t the usual lead. If there was ever a science story that would get readers, this was it. On April 26, 1920, the newspapers promised, at the annual meeting of the National Academy of Sciences, held in the central hall of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, in the august presence of Professor Albert Einstein, the most basic questions about our universe would be answered.
    By the second day of the journey, the travelers on the train were weary. The steady click-clack of the bolted rails, reassuring the firstday, was monotonous. The view through the miasma of black smoke from the soft coal that fueled the engine was no longer exciting. The panorama outside the windows, hour after hour of wheat or rice or woods or bottomlands, became tedious. Those who hadn’t prepared for the journey with reading material or games were soon bored.
    Heber Curtis, an amateur classicist as well as an astronomer, had brought Latin and Greek texts with him. Reading the classics was a gentleman’s avocation. Hour after hour he would sit with a familiar, leather-bound volume open on his lap, as if he were in a club chair in the Atheneum. Harlow Shapley was fascinated by Curtis’s choice of reading material. He had been educated a generation later, when the classics had already faded in high school and college curricula.
    There was no room for extraneous reading in Shapley’s life. He thought of himself as a modern man, with a modern education. His avocation when he couldn’t work on astronomy was nature studies. He was an amateur naturalist, but he approached