_The Author_: Well, definitions of insanity are so uncertain that it is not safe to say who is crazy. But it seems there’s method in his madness--otherwise how could he have hit upon the exact extent of the sun’s attraction on light? _The Reader_: (Picks up his paper and reads aloud with concentrated attention) “Postulate I. Every law of nature which holds good with respect to a coördinate system K must also hold good for any other system K′, provided that K and K′ are in uniform movement of translation.” Say, do you know anything about this business? _The Author_: Well, yes, a little. I have followed the controversy--at a safe distance--for a number of years. _The Reader_: Can you tell me in plain language what it is all about? _The Author_: Yes. Just that. I can tell you what it is _about_, though I can’t tell you what it _is_. Einstein says that there are only twelve men in the world capable of understanding his latest paper. _The Reader_: Are you one of the twelve? _The Author_: No, nor the thirteenth. But without plunging into the mathematics of it, we might talk over some of the interesting aspects of the theory of relativity and in the end I could put you on track of the twelve so you could read up on the subject if you liked. _The Reader_: All right. That’s fair. This is a slow car anyhow. Go ahead. _The Author_: (See following pages)-- EASY LESSONS IN EINSTEIN “_A warp in nature has been found,_ _No line is straight, no circle round;_ _For Isaac Newton had unsound_ _Ideas of gravitation._” Why is it that our newspapers are sending out their reporters to interview astronomers as well as actresses and devoting pages to speculations on the nature of space and time as well as on the state of the market? It is--to get at the bottom of it--merely because a few photographs taken during the eclipse of the sun on May 29, 1919, by two telescopes, one at Sobral in northern Brazil and the other on the island of Principe off the west coast of Africa, showed an abnormal shift of less than one-324,000th of a right angle in the position of the stars. When these photograph films were laid over films taken before the eclipse it was found that the star-images about the darkened disk of the sun did not exactly coincide with the images when the sun was not in their midst. Measured with a micrometer the displacement of the stars from their ordinary positions was found to be 1.60 seconds of arc on the African plates and 1.98 seconds on the Brazilian plates. Average these two observations and you get 1.79. This is extremely close to the 1.73 predicted by Professor Einstein of Berlin and twice as large as the deflection calculated according to Newton’s law of gravitation which would be .87 of a second.