Then he would turn, with his arms raised in a sweeping gesture, and say, “Do you see any hills on this stage? Do you see any slopes that might cause this book to sl-l-l-ide down toward the stage?” Long pause, a few shaking heads. “Do you?”
Some man always shouted, “No!”
“So gravity cannot be a slope, created by curvature. There is no curvature here. Remember this—you can’t have one thing in one part of space and another thing in another part! You can’t say that the universe is curved but this stage”—he stomped his feet—“isn’t, so gravity works one way in one place and another way in another place. Gravity is a force!”
In a talk of an hour (including questions—he was great at answering questions), he demolished Einstein in about ten minutes and spent the rest of the time explaining what the universe was really like. After these talks, men buttonholed Andrew and gave him their own theories, while women patted Margaret on the hand and said, “So brilliant! How fortunate you are to be married to such an interesting man!”
When, much to Margaret’s surprise, Einstein made a well-publicized trip to America, and then, according to Andrew, “went about hawking his crazy opinions everywhere,” Andrew wasn’t as offended as she expected him to be. He just shook his head, and said, “The ignorant and the enthusiastic are impressed, my dear, but see here—no invitation from Harvard, and Princeton has only let him in the back door. I am sure he expected much more, given his connections. My strategy must be to go on as I have begun and put my faith in the inherent good sense of our countrymen.” The only other time he said anything about it was one day in the summer, after reading one of his long-delayed papers from the East. “Here. You see, Patne agrees with me. He maintains that Einstein partook of our American generosity, but now has spurned us. No great loss. No great loss indeed.” At lectures, Margaret noticed that, while Andrew stuck to his usual script, his tone when discussing the fellow was more heavily and openly amused. When Einstein won the Nobel Prize at the end of that year for “The Photoelectric Effect” and not for his “silly theories,” Andrew felt he had been vindicated. He mentioned the prize in one lecture, in Oakland. He said, in response to a question about it, “You see, he might have been an excellent scientist if he had focused his ideas. It is a very sad thing when an intelligent man compounds the demonstrable with the ridiculous.”
At the same time, he dedicated himself to his correspondence. Many of his columns grew out of questions readers wrote in to him: How does ice form on a window? Does whiskey serve to disinfect the body? Did he foresee any imminent earthquakes? The scientific ignorance of the average newspaper reader came as an appalling shock to him, but only redoubled his sense that his newspaper and public-speaking work were important. He composed many more columns than the Examiner published—even without a war, the pages of the paper were filled, unaccountably to Andrew, with many other things besides science.
Little did these small-town lecture and Chautauqua committees who were directed to Andrew by the Examiner know that he would have gladly spoken to them for free. He took what they offered, and some of them were flush and offered as much as a hundred dollars. As she drove along the narrow gravel roads, grateful that they had a Franklin, so easy and reliable (Franklins were some of the first cars to drive coast to coast, Andrew told her), it hardly seemed possible that they would be stranded somewhere and left to die of exposure, and they weren’t. When they got back to Vallejo, she felt, simultaneously, that they had done a very brave thing and a very easy thing.
But even as the lectures were his form of altruism, his absence from the book worried him. Each day, she typed up what he had written the day before—some two or three thousand words—and then he would go over it the next day and the next, changing his ideas and metaphorical illustrations. After he went over it, she retyped it and he went over it again. To have such flexibility—to go into print again and again—was a glory to him. Margaret typed forty and then sixty and then eighty words per minute, just like knitting row after row of garter stitch, and