Einstein and the universe

Have you read Baruch?” La Fontaine used to cry, enthusiastically. To-day he would have troubled his friends with the question “Have you read Einstein?”But, whereas one needs only a little Latin to gain access to Spinoza, frightful monsters keep guard before Einstein, and their horrible grimaces seem to forbid us to approach him. They stand behind strange moving bars, sometimes rectangular and sometimes curvilinear, which are known as “co-ordinates.” They bear names as frightful as themselves—“contravariant and covariant vectors, tensors, scalars, determinants, orthogonal vectors, generalised symbols of three signs,” and so on.These strange beings, brought from the wildest depths of the mathematical jungle, join together or part from each other with a remarkable promiscuity, by means of some astonishing surgery which is called integration and differentiation.In a word, Einstein may be a treasure, but there is a fearsome troop of mathematical reptiles keeping inquisitive folk away from it; though there can be no doubt that they have, like our Gothic gargoyles, a hidden beauty of their own. Let us, however, drive them off with the whip of simple terminology, and approach the splendour of Einstein’s theory.