346 THE LATER JOURNEYitational and electromagnetic fields are separated, an old difficulty. There the mat-
ter rested for several months, when odd things began to happen.
On November 4, 1928, The New York Times carried a story under the heading
'Einstein on verge of great discovery; resents intrusion,' followed on November 14
by an item 'Einstein reticent on new work; will not "count unlaid eggs." ' Einstein
himself cannot have been the direct source of these rumors, also referred to in
Nature [N2], since these stories erroneously mentioned that he was preparing a
book on a new theory. In actual fact, he was at work on a short paper dealing
with a new version of unification by means of distant parallelism. On January 11,
1929, he issued a brief statement to the press stating that 'the purpose of this work
is to write the laws of the fields of gravitation and electromagnetism under a
unified view point' and referred to a six-page paper he had submitted the day
before [E52]. A newspaper reporter added the following deathless prose to Ein-
stein's statement. 'The length of this work—written at the rate of half a page a
year—is considered prodigious when it is considered that the original presentation
of his theory of relativity [on November 25, 1915] filled only three pages' [N3].
'Einstein is amazed at stir over theory. Holds 100 journalists at bay for a week,'
the papers reported a week later, adding that he did not care for this publicity at
all. But Einstein's name was magic, and shortly thereafter he heard from Edding-
ton. 'You may be amused to hear that one of our great department stores in Lon-
don (Selfridges) has posted on its window your paper (the six pages pasted up
side by side) so that passers-by can read it all through. Large crowds gather
around to read it!' [E53]. The 'Special Features' section of the Sunday edition of
The New York Times of February 3, 1929, carried a full-page article by Einstein
on the early developments in relativity, ending with remarks on distant parallelism
in which his no doubt bewildered readers were told that in this geometry paral-
lelograms do not close.* So great was the public clamor that he went into hiding
for a while [N4].
It was much ado about very little. Einstein had found that
(17.58)
is a third-rank tensor (as follows at once from Eq. 17.25) and now identified B^,
with the electromagnetic potentials. He did propose a set of field equations, but
added that 'further investigations will have to show whether [these] will give an
interpretation of the physical qualities of space' [E52]. His attempt to derive his
equations from a variational principle [E54] had to be withdrawn [E55]. Never-
theless, in 1929 he had 'hardly any doubt' that he was on the right track [E56].
He lectured on his theory in England [E57] and in France [E58] and wrote about
distant parallelism in semipopular articles [E59, E60, E61, E62]. One of his co-
workers wrote of 'the theory which Einstein advocates with great seriousness and
emphasis since a few years' [LI].
"Consider four straight lines LI,..., L 4. Let L] and L 2 be parallel. Let L 3 intersect L, and L 2.
Through a point of L, not on L 3 draw L 4 parallel to L 3. Then L 4 and L 2 need not intersect.