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Did Einstein know too much? Historians
of science have often puzzled over the fact that Einstein, in developing his
theory of special relativity, appeared to rely mostly on his intuition and very
little on the work of his predecessors. It is well known that Einstein often
referred to God as the "Old One" and to his own work as an attempt to
discover the "secrets of the Old One". The conventional-minded have
seen in this only an indication of the great physicist's sense of poetry and
humor, but we who are students of the Cthulhu Mythos, knowing the sort of
horrors that probers of the universe have heretofore stumbled upon, may well
wonder. How much of these dark matters did Einstein really suspect?
Professor Arvid Reuterdahl of St. Paul,
who spent many years trying to refute Einstein's relativity theory, might have
known --- but he died under puzzling circumstances on January 13, 1933. H. P.
Lovecraft would have been interested in those circumstances and may even have
read of them. According to the Minneapolis Journal of January 14,
Professor Reuterdahl dropped dead at the corner of Hennepin Avenue and Sixth
Street in downtown Minneapolis while admiring "some object in an art store
window". The paper went on to state that he had organized the International
Theistic Society "to prove the existence of God by scientific means",
had done an oil painting of mystical Masonic significance and had investigated
spiritualist phenomena.
Though no Lascars or nautical-looking
Negroes were reported near Reuterdahl at the time, one cannot help but compare
his demise with the mysterious deaths of Professor George Gammell Angell and
Second Mate Gustaf Johansen in Lovecraft's tale "The Call of Cthulhu".
When one realizes that Reuterdahl was heavily into the study of relativity and
quantum mechanics as well, one thinks also of the fate of Walter Gilman in
"The Dreams in the Witch-House". In short, the real-life Reuterdahl
would have made a fine protagonist for a Lovecraftian horror tale.
Not that the Twin Cities professor's
death in 1933 could have influenced "The Call of Cthulhu" or "The
Dreams in the Witch-House", for Lovecraft wrote these tales in 1926 and
1932 respectively. Yet it is just possible that Reuterdahl may have met and
influenced the young Lovecraft in Providence, for it was in that city that the
professor studied physics and eventually became a mathematics instructor at
Brown University.
Arvid Reuterdahl was born at
Karlstad,
Sweden, on February 15, 1876, and came to the United States with his parents in
1882. His father, Jonas, was a naval officer and mathematician; his mother
Christina's maiden name, coincidentally, was Johanson. Despite some lack of
early formal training Arvid did well at Brown University and received his
Bachelor of Science there in 1897, then his Master's in 1899, and finally taught
mathematics at that institution for several years. Lovecraft would have been in
his teens much of that time and, considering his precocious interest in
astronomy and his frequent visits to the university observatory and library, the
two could well have met.
Then in 1905 --- the year Einstein
published his Special Theory of Relativity --- Arvid Reuterdahl departed and
took an engineering position in Spokane, Washington, a city nearly as far from
Providence as one can get in the 48 States and still not be near any seacoast.
He stayed there for about a decade, then heId a position at Kansas City
Polytechnic Institute until finally, in 1918, he became dean of architecture and
engineering at the College of St.Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. It was in the
next year, on May 29, that two British expeditions performed experiments during
a solar eclipse to measure the bending of starlight passing close to the sun.
These famous experiments established that light bends in a gravitational field
in accordance with the predictions of relativity theory. Most people do not
realize, however, that the star field in which the eclipse took place was the
Hyades --- a sinister fact indeed in light of the Lovecraftian revelation. I
wonder if the world has been told the full details of these
"experiments"!
The media made much of this
confirmation of relativity. Then about eight and a half months later, Professor
Arvid Reuterdahl aired his views on the matter in an interview for the St.
Paul Pioneer Press. The edition of Sunday, February 15, 1920, burst forth
with a long article head-lined: AUTHORSHIP OF THE FAMOUS THEORY OF BENDING LIGHT
CONTESTED BY ST. PAUL SCIENTIST; LOST PAPER IS KEY. Evidently Reuterdahl, who
had kept silent until now, had decided for whatever reasons that it was time to
counter the ever-increasing publicity about relativity.
Reuterdahl claimed in this and a
subsequent article ("Getting Ahead of Einstein", Minneapolis
Journal, October 24, 1920) that his own work had anticipated much of
relativity theory. He pointed out that his April 1902 paper "The Atom of
Electrochemistry", published (while he still lived in Providence) in the Transactions
of the American Electrochemical Society, had predicted the absence of a
cosmic ether. His "lost paper", titled "Space-Time Potential: A
New Concept of Gravitation and Electricity", copyrighted February 19, 1915,
had been sent for perusal to Professor Mittag-Leffler, a Stockholm
mathematician; it contained, said Reuterdahl, material which Einstein could have
used to develop relativity theory. Postal records showed that it was
subsequently "in the hands of a German professor". Late that year
Einstein had announced to a correspondent that he had made a
"breakthrough" and in early 1916 he published his General Theory of
Relativity.
The scientific world paid little
attention to Reuterdahl. Then, in April of 1921, Einstein visited the United
States. His main purpose was to help drum up support for Zionism, but the
newspapers were more interested in pumping him on relativity. Reuterdahl
responded immediately with a series of interviews in the Minneapolis Tribune
(April 10, 16, 18, 19, and 24) in which he repeated the implication that
Einstein had plagiarized his "lost paper". However, a new debunking
note enters, Reuterdahl now contending that relativity is grounded on
"fallacious assumptions". Was the St. Paul savant's desire for
recognition --- perhaps triggered by Einstein fame --- now at odds with the
caution that had kept him silent for so many years?
Once again the public controversy,
though bitter enough, evoked little response from scientists, who perhaps
thought Reuterdahl a crank with a dash of anti-Semitism thrown in. The dust
gradually settled and the St. Paul professor faded into obscurity, though he
continued to work on his theories. His "Space-Time Potential" article
had already been found, recovered, altered and worked up into a book which was
published in 1920 under the title Scientific Theism Versus Materialism.
This would be followed in 1928 by a second book, The God of Science, but
in the meantime Renterdahl also started, in 1922, a periodical called The
Theistic Monthly. All these publications were devoted to his Theory of
Interdependence, which maintained that all things are interconnected in the mind
of an Absolute Principle (God), and which thereby did away with the need for a
mechanistic "cosmic ether". A "Theocosmic Diagram" facing
the title page of The God of Science shows in elaborate detail how the
universe is so sustained.
Yet in all these writings Reuterdahl is
careful to insist that "Einsteinism" is a farfetched theory unworthy
of consideration. Why this change of heart, after apparently at first wanting to
take credit for much of relativity? Had the professor decided that his earlier
reticence, despite his desire for due recognition, was justified? Had the fate
of Professor Angell in Providence perhaps given him pause?
And had he, in his last years,
corresponded with Walter Gilman in Arkham, who was finding such dark
implications in the study of quantum physics and Riemannian equations? For
Reuterdahl, too, had studied much in these areas, and in 1923 had been awarded
the Doctorate in Science by the Academy of Nations for his work toward finding a
"physical meaning" of Planck's constant. In this area alone he seems
to have agreed with Einstein, who maintained to the end that Heisenberg's
uncertainty principle could not be an ultimate law of the universe and that
causal "hidden variables" in subatomic events would eventually be
found to prove it. Seems to have agreed with Einstein, I say, for here
again Reuterdahl may have been covering up. Did he feel that scientists were
learning too much?
If so, then alas for
Reuterdahl! ---
for relativity has proven out in experiment after experiment since his day. So
has quantum mechanics, and the "uncertainty principle" now stands as
one of the few certainties. Recent work suggests that space-time may be like a
lattice, with "lumps" of space at the intersections, and that matter
within a collapsing star might wind up "among the points of the lattice, inside
space-time" (Science Digest, May 1982, p. 32). One recalls Alhazred
on the Old Ones: "Not in the spaces we know, but between them, they
walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen." Then, only last
year, came proof of ultimate uncertainty in the form of two experiments
performed in Paris (near the Rue d'Auseil) showing beyond doubt that there can
be no causal "hidden variables" behind the randomness of subatomic
phenomena (see Science, September 23, 1983, p. 1251). Relativity had
already shown our universe to be "unimaginable" by human minds and now
quantum mechanics has shown it to be ultimately due to unpredictable events that
can be described only by the mathematics of chance.
Schroedinger had in 1925 discovered
that the orbit of an electron could be described by the same equations as those
which describe the resonances of "a drum, a wind instrument, or any other
acoustical instrument" (Einstein and Infield: The Evolution of Physics,
1938, p. 303). As Nevil Kingston-Brown has pointed out (Crypt of Cthulhu
#4, 1982), it all reminds us of that Being who lurks beyond space-time with
. . . a cracked flute clutched in a
monstrous paw
Whence flow the aimless waves whose chance combining
Gives each frail cosmos its eternal law.
We might ask: How did Lovecraft, an
avowed mechanist-materialist, come to the insight that the universe is somehow
sustained by the "aimless waves" produced by the "drums and
flutes" of Chance?
And what of Reuterdahl? Did he ever
suspect that his Absolute Principle of Interdependence might in reality be the
Ultimate Chaos Azathoth? If so, he must have realized that his claim for credit
concerning relativity had been unwise. In pointing out, for instance, the
curious fact that Einstein cited few predecessors who had aided him toward his
unprecedented insights, Reuterdahl may have inadvertently shown Others that he
knew too much. Though he tried to cover up by claiming that Einstein had
plagiarized from others besides himself --- Maxwell, Lorentz and Planck, for
instance --- scientists knew better. They could see that Einstein's ideas owed
little to these predecessors --- and so, perhaps, could Others.
And now, where is modern physics
leading us?
Reuterdahl spent his last years
studying spiritualism and the mystic Masonic symbolism of the Illuminati. Was he
trying to protect himself? If so, did he succeed only until the day he saw that
"object" in a Minneapolis art store? We may never know.
After Professor Arvid Reuterdahl
dropped dead (did Einstein's "Old One" draw his soul into the
"object"?) his funeral was held in the Scottish Rite Temple of
Minneapolis and he was cremated at the elegant Lakewood Cemetery. Lovecraft
would surely have appreciated the fact that one of the professor's pallbearers
was a Dr. (T. V.) Moreau and another one Herman Moe (related to Maurice?), both
of Minneapolis. But Lovecraft himself would die only four years later.
In view of the foregoing facts --- far
too striking, surely, to be mere coincidence --- I wrote several weeks ago to
the distinguished Lovecraftian scholar S. T. Joshi, asking him to find out what
he could about Professor Reuterdahl's tenure in Providence. So far I have
received no reply. Did Mr. Joshi indeed investigate? If so, I do hope that he
has come to no harm because of my request. . . .
But --- what is that sound I now hear
outside my window, like wet raincoats flapping in the wind? That scratching at
the sill . . . Great Gugs! That glowing, glowering, tow-headed parallelopipedon
--- no! Stay away! YAAEEEEE!
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bernstein, Jeremy. Einstein. New
York: Viking Press, 1973.
Clark, Ronald W. Einstein: The Life
and Times. New York: World Publishing, 1971.
Davies, Paul. The Edge of Infinity.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981.
Eddington, Arthur. Space, Time and
Gravitation. New York: Harper & Brothers,
1959.
Einstein, Albert and Leopold Infield.
The
Evolution of Physics. New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1938.
Kingston-Brown, Nevil. "The
Cosmology of Azathoth", Crypt of CthuIhu No. 4, Eastertide 1982.
Pagels, Heinz R. The Cosmic Code.
New York; Simon b Schuster, 1982.
Rohrlich, Fritz. "Facing Quantum
Mechanical Reality", Science, September 23, 1983.
Tierney, Richard L. "Relativity:
Was Einstein First?", Hyst'ry Myst'ry Magazine No. 1, Garnerville,
NY, 1983.
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