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An  Epoch-Making  Discovery. 
{  \m.  Jour.  Pharm. 
t     January,  1921. 
The  continuity  of  scientific  effort  in  any  single  direction  is  more 
evident  in  our  era  than  at  any  previous  time  in  the  world's  history. 
More  than  two  thousand  years  elapsed  between  the  crude  steam 
appliances  of  Ctesibus  and  Hero,  and  the  steam  engine  of  James 
Watt,  and  outside  of  one  experiment  of  Leonardo  de  Vinci,  most 
of  the  developmental  work  occurred  in  the  century  in  which  Watt 
himself  lived. 
It  took  comparatively  few  years  for  the  discovery  of  the  Hert- 
zian waves  to  find  their  practical  application  by  Marconi,  and  yet 
Hertz  and  his  co-workers  never  dreamed  of  such  a  thing  as  wireless 
telegraphy,  nor  profited  by  their  work  except  in  reputation. 
The  work  of  Albert  Einstein,  which  deals  particularly  with 
space  and  time,  and  which  concerns  itself  in  reality  with  a  method  of 
interpretation  of  old  rather  than  the  promulgation  of  new  principles, 
is  looked  upon  as  epoch-making  in  its  possibilities  by  some  of  the 
mathematicians,  physicists  and  philosophers,  who  are  in  close  enough 
touch  with  the  subject  to  be  able  to  judge  thereof  intelligently. 
For  the  individual  not  actively  engaged  in  the  fields  of  work 
most  directly  affected  by  Einstein's  observations,  articles  have  ap- 
peared; lectures  have  been  delivered  and  books  have  been  written 
for  the  purpose  of  stopping  down  the  high  voltage  of  the  original 
communication  to  a  lower  potential  which  will  not  burn  out  the 
mental  coils  and  fuses  of  the  average  intellect.  Dr.  Leffmann  has 
humorously  and  approximately  correctly  translated  the  Einstein 
idea  into  the  epigrammatic  form  that:  "You  cannot  tell  where  you 
are  unless  you  know  what  time  it  is  and  you  cannot  tell  what  time 
it  is  unless  you  know  where  you  are." 
In  Euclidean  geometry,  as  taught  in  our  elementary  schools, 
descriptions  of  events  in  space  presuppose  the  existence  of  a  rigid  or 
invariable  body  to  which  such  events  may  be  referred. 
No  cognizance  is  taken  of  differences  of  values  in  observation 
due  to  the  fact  that  one  observer  is  in  motion  while  the  other  is  at 
rest,  nor  of  differences  in  interpretation  due  to  time  discrepancies. 
In  physical  science  data  have  long  been  accumulating  for  which 
no  use  could  be  found  in  the  calculations  of  three  dimensional  or 
ordinary  space.  By  the  introduction  of  the  time  factor  a  four 
dimensional  space-time  combination  becomes  possible  and  these 
hitherto  unused  data  are  said  to  find  a  place. 
In  the  Einstein  method  of  interpreting  mathematical  and  physi- 
cal data  the  length  of  a  measuring  unit  or  the  duration  of  an  event 
