114 RELATIVITY, THE SPECIAL THEORYlished [M10]. Later that year, he made the same claim in his retiring address in
Kansas City as president of the American Physical Society [Mil]. The outcome
of all this was that Miller received a thousand dollar prize for his Kansas City
paper from the American Association for the Advancement of Science [L6]—pre-
sumably in part an expression of the resistance to relativity which could still be
found in some quarters [Bl]—while Einstein got flooded with telegrams and let-
ters asking him to comment. The latter's reactions to the commotion are best seen
from a remark he made in passing in a letter to Besso: 'I have not for a moment
taken [Miller's results] seriously' [E2].* As to present times, quantum field theory
has drastically changed our perceptions of the vacuum, but that has nothing to do
with the aether of the nineteenth century and earlier, which is gone for good.**
The second postscript to the Miller episode concerns a lasting event. Oswald
Veblen, a professor of mathematics at Princeton, had overheard Einstein's com-
ment about the subtlety of the Lord. In 1930 Veblen wrote to Einstein, asking his
permission to have this statement chiseled in the stone frame of the fireplace in the
common room of Fine Hall, the newly constructed mathematics building at the
university [VI]. Einstein consented.! The mathematics department has since
moved to new quarters, but the inscription in stone has remained in its original
place, Room 202 in what once was Fine Hall.
Let us now move back to the times when Einstein was still virtually unknown
and ask how Michelson reacted to Einstein's special theory of relativity and what
influence the Michelson-Morley experiment had on Einstein's formulation of
that theory in 1905.
The answer to the first question is simple. Michelson, a genius in instrumen-
tation and experimentation, never felt comfortable with the special theory. He was
the first American scientist to receive a Nobel prize, in 1907. The absence of any
mention of the aether wind experiments in his citation^ is not surprising. Rela-
tivity was young; even fifteen years later, relativity was not mentioned in Ein-
stein's citation. It is more interesting that Michelson himself did not mention these
experiments in his acceptance speech [Nl]—not quite like Einstein, who
responded to the award given him in 1922 for the photoelectric effect by delivering
a lecture on relativity [E4]. Truly revealing, however, is Michelson's verdict on
relativity given in 1927 in his book Studies in Optics [Ml2]. He noted that the
*In 1927 Einstein remarked that the positive effect found by Miller could be caused by tiny tem-
perature differences in the experimental equipment [E2a].
**In 1951 Dirac briefly considered a return to the aether [Dl].
fin his reply to Veblen, Einstein gave the following interpretation of his statement. 'Die Natur
verbirgt ihr Geheimnis durch die Erhabenheit ihres Wesens, aber nicht durch List,' Nature hides
its secret because of its essential loftiness, but not by means of ruse [E3]. In June 1966 Helen Dukas
prepared a memorandum about this course of events [D2].
HThe citation reads 'For his optical precision instruments and the spectroscopical and metrological
investigations carried out with their aid' [Nl].