"G. Peyton Wertenbaker - The Man From the Atom" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wertenbaker G. Peyton)

The Man From the Atom
G. Peyton Wertenbaker
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Science and Invention, August 1923

IF you are interested in Einstein's Theory of Relativity, you cannot afford to miss this story. It is one of
the big scientific stories of the year and is worth reading and rereading many times. If the Theory of
Relativity has been a puzzle to you, this story, written in plain English, cannot fail to hold your interest
from start to finish. The thoughts expressed in this story are tremendous. It will give you a great insight,
not only into the infinitely large, but also the infinitely small. Better yet, relativity is brought home to you in
a most ingenious and easily understandable manner.—EDITOR.

I
I AM a lost soul, and I am homesick. Yes, homesick. Yet how vain is homesickness when one is
without a home! I can but be sick for a home that has gone. For my home departed millions of years ago,
and there is now not even a trace of its former existence. Millions of years ago, I say, in all truth and
earnestness. But I must tell the tale— though there is no man left to understand it.

I well remember that morning when my friend, Professor Martyn, called me to him on a matter of the
greatest importance. I may explain that the Professor was one of those mysterious outcasts, geniuses
whom Science would not recognize

because they scorned the pettiness of the men who represented Science. Martyn was first of all a
scientist, but almost as equally he was a man of intense imagination, and where the ordinary man crept
along from detail to detail and required a complete model before being able to visualize the results of his
work, Professor Martyn first grasped the great results of his contemplated work, the vast, far-reaching
effects, and then built with the end in view.

The Professor had few friends. Ordinary men avoided him because they were unable to understand the
greatness of his vision. Where he plainly saw pictures of worlds and universes, they vainly groped among
pictures of his words on printed pages. That was their impression of a word. A group of letters. His was
of the picture it presented in his mind. I, however, though I had not the slightest claim to scientific
knowledge, was romantic to a high degree, and always willing to carry out his strange experiments for the
sake of the adventure and the strangeness of it all. And so the advantages were equal. I had a mysterious
personage ready to furnish me with the unusual. He had a willing subject to try out his inventions, for he
reasoned quite naturally that should he himself perform the experiments, the world would be in danger of
losing a mentality it might eventually have need of.

And so it was that I hurried to him without the slightest hesitation upon that, to me, momentous day of
days in my life. I little realized the great change that soon would come over my existence, yet I knew that
I was in for an adventure, certainly startling, possibly fatal. I had no delusions concerning my luck.

I found Professor Martyn in his laboratory bending with the eyes of a miser counting his gold over a tiny