Science: Holiday

Between Christmas and New Year, when students have gone home for their midwinter frolic, university scientists are accustomed to put down their textbooks and laboratory tools and go on a busman’s holiday. Soberly they attend dozens of conventions, read thousands of papers, talk shop, elect officers, award prizes, take stock of a year’s progress, get their names in the newspapers, mingle with a sprinkling of industrial colleagues. Last week geologists convened in Cincinnati, geographers in Syracuse, mathematicians in Durham, N. C., philosophers in Cambridge, astronomers in Frederick, Md. (see p. 52), anthropologists in Washington, chemists in Manhattan and Princeton. As usual, the biggest and best publicized gathering was that of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which had chosen Atlantic City for a meeting place, and where, if he wished, an ichthyologist could listen to an atom-smasher and a cosmologist to a breeder of fruit flies.

When British scientists get together, they like to speculate and philosophize. take a “broad view,” argue publicly and sometimes acrimoniously. In Atlantic City, A. A. A. S. officers and bigwigs made more theoretical and philosophical speeches than usual last week, but there was a fine display of devices to feed the traditional appetite of U. S. science for neat experiments and clever machines (see p. 50). There was a burglar alarm which fills a room with ultrashort radio waves, so that a person stepping into the room interrupts the waves and actuates the signal. There was a photoelectric meter which determines the Vitamin D content of a cod-liver oil sample by passing a light beam through it.

Dr. James Franklin Yeager of the Department of Agriculture projected on a screen a cardiogram from the beating heart of a cockroach. This was obtained by exposing the heart of the insect and placing on it a minute drop of wax. A human hair inserted in the wax was connected through a lever to a fine wire. The heart beats thus jerked the wire and a light beam passing across it translated them into a pulsating graph. The Department uses this method to study the cardiac effect of insecticides.

Noteworthy discussions:

X-rays v. Cells. Using X-ray bombardments much more prolonged and severe than those employed in medicine, Dr. Hugo Fricke of the Long Island Biological Laboratory arrived at a theory of what happens when an X-ray photon (unit of radiation) is received in a living cell. The high energy carried on the photon swings the electrons of the cell up to correspondingly high energy levels which represent temperatures of 1,000,000°. This lasts for only some .00001 sec., but large protein molecules may be broken up, carbon dioxide and hydrogen given off, and water molecules in the cell oxidized to hydrogen peroxide. The cell may then sicken and die. If it is a cell in the reproductive germ plasm, a mutation or hereditary change may occur.

Cold & Heredity. Not only X-rays but extremes of temperature produce such mutations as abnormal eyes, queer-shaped wings and bald thoraxes in Drosophila melanogaster, the little fruit fly made famous by the genetic researches of Thomas Hunt Morgan. Many a geneticist suspects that the impacts of cosmic rays also start mutations working in the germ plasm. When the National Geographic Society’s balloon Explorer II made its record-breaking flight into the upper air last year, Dr. Victor Jollos of the University of Wisconsin sent jars of fruit flies up with it, outside the gondola. The insects died of cold, but offspring hatched from eggs laid during the flight developed five times the normal number of mutations. Dr. Jollos concluded that some of these were due to cosmic rays, but that the greater number were due to stratosphere cold.

Approach to Unity. Herculean struggle of modern theoretical physics is to find a mathematical system which will handle both the atom and the universe.

As things stand, students of the universe use Relativity mathematics and atomists use Quantum Mechanics. Princeton’s Einstein has promised to devote the rest of his life to the search for and the formulation of a Unified Field Theory which will encompass all Nature. He has laid promising foundations (TIME, July 15, 1935). Other work on the problem has been done by Britain’s Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac, German Exile Max Born, France’s Elie Cartan. Last week another approach was suggested by Dr. George David Birkhoff of Harvard.

In the Birkhoff system, the hydrogen atom is contemplated as a mixture of two “perfect fluids”—the positive electricity of the nucleus, the negative electricity of the surrounding electron. The disturbance created in the fluids by a particle or light rav from outside can be expressed, very roughly speaking, as though they were water rippled by a falling stone. Furthermore, the expression can be formulated in Relativistic terms. Whether atoms with more than one electron can be crammed into the same mold remains to be seen.

Mighty Electron— Dr. Birkhoff, who believes that esthetics is closely linked to mathematics and once read some mathematical poetry of his own composition at an A. A. A. S. convention, was elected next year’s president of the Association.

This year’s president is one of Princeton’s Grand Old Men, Biologist Edwin Grant Conklin. Retiring president is Physicist Karl Taylor Compton, who is also the President of M. I. T. and a brother of Nobel Laureate Arthur Holly Compton.

As a valedictory address Karl Taylor Compton gave a discourse on “The Electron: Its Intellectual and Social Significance” in which, as a lesson in the ultimate value of research in pure science, he pointed out that the invisible electron, once a figment in the mind of physics and later the plaything of a few pioneers, is now the ubiquitous slave of mankind.

Excerpts: “Beginning with the Fleming valve and the Coolidge X-ray tube, we now have an enormous variety of [electronic] tubes for radio sending, detection and amplification, electric power control or conversion from AC to DC or vice versa, lighting devices, sunshine meters, oscillographs. … I take particular pleasure in mentioning these practical values, for even the most unimaginative and shortsighted, hardheaded, practical businessman is forced to admit the justification for the pure re-search—of no preconceived practical use whatever in the minds of those who led in its prosecution.” Bovine Brains. After thorough study of the manners and aptitudes of 72 horses, 48 cows and eleven sheep, Miss Pearl Gardner of Cornell University’s Agricultural School declared her belief that cows are smarter than horses. Horses, she said, trust man more than any other domesticated animal, respond instinctively to human guidance and are good at the more mechanical forms of learning, but frequently behave in ways which do not redound to their own benefit. “Cows,” she continued, “catch on to things quicker, remember better. And strangely enough the cows that give the most milk are the smartest of all cows. But polo ponies make the same mistakes that draft horses do. And sheep, despite their timidity, can be taught tricks, such as taking a handkerchief out of your pocket, rolling a barrel, and shaking hands, just as easily as a horse.”