Science in Context 18(2), 309–315 (2005). Copyright C  Cambridge University Press doi:10.1017/S0269889705000499 Printed in the United Kingdom The Poetry of Relativity: Leopoldo Lugones’ The Size of Space Diego Hurtado de Mendoza and Miguel de As´ ua Universidad Nacional de San Mart´ ın Form was the essential thing in him. His reasons were hardly ever reasonable; his adjectives and metaphors almost always. Jorge Luis Borges, “Leopoldo Lugones” As in other countries, the public in Argentina became aware of the existence of something called “the theory of relativity” only after November 1919. Although the news of Arthur Eddington’s eclipse expedition, which provided the first confirmation of Einstein’s theory, was poorly reported in the newspapers, by the end of 1920 Einstein had become a household name for the educated middle class of Buenos Aires, the capital city of the country. This was in great measure the result of the activity of a few enthusiastic lecturers. Significantly, none of them belonged to the prestigious Institute of Physics of the University of La Plata, which during the decade of the 1910s was considered the most important center of physical research in Latin America. 1 Between July and August 1920 the Spanish physicist Blas Cabrera – perhaps the greatest popularizer of Einstein’s theory in Spain – visited Argentina and talked about relativity. 2 In September Georges Duclout, a French engineer who had graduated from the Zurich Polytechnic and by then was professor of applied mechanics at the School of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences (FCEFyN) of the University of Buenos Aires, also gave a series of conferences on the subject. That same month Jos´ e Ubach, a Jesuit astronomer trained at the Ebro Observatory in Spain, and established in Buenos Aires, 1 A complex process of “transplantation” of German physics to Argentina took place during the first decade of the twentieth century. The main outcome of this episode of imperial expansion of German science to South America was the creation of the Institute of Physics at the University of La Plata (situated 30 miles south of Buenos Aires). Emil Bose – a collaborator of Walther Nernst – was its first director, from 1909 to 1911. He was succeeded by Richard Gans, who stayed until 1925. Many German physicists migrated to Argentina, like Konrad Simons and, since 1912, Jakob Laub, the first one to publish a collaborative paper with Einstein (Pyenson 1985, 153–85). 2 Cabrera was far from being the most adequate person to comment on the theory of relativity (Glick 1986, 115). In a lecture given at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Buenos Aires he refers to a dubious “philosophical principle of relativity of knowledge, which in the last analysis has been the main incentive in Einstein’s thought” (Cabrera 1920, 266, 272).