Science: Understanding Without Stars

One of the imperative tasks of our day is to interpret the purposes, methods and results of science in such wise that this greatest adventure of the human spirit may be “understanded of the people.” Science needs to be made use of, but understanding of it must precede complete utilization. . . .

Four distinguished U. S. scientists, Arthur H. Compton, Geologist Kirtley F. Mather, Astronomer Harlan T. Stetson, Psychologist Edward L. Thorndike, uttered hosannahs of approbation for a book The Advancing Front of Science* by George W. Gray, from which the above words are taken.

The interpretation of science to laymen is a different thing in Britain and the U. S. In England star performers, brilliant writers, more or less celebrated scientists with strong personal views have borne the load. The best known books of Eddington, Jeans and Bertrand Russell are as much treatises on their personal philosophies as they are skilled explanations of Relativity and quantum mechanics. Biologist Julian Huxley, brother of Novelist Aldous Huxley and grandson of the late great Evolutionist Thomas Henry Huxley is noted for his opinions about Science & Society, and for exposing the anthropological fallacies of Nazi Aryanism, although he has written (with a collaborator) two general books for laymen. Simple Science and More Simple Science. Burly Geneticist John B. S. Haldane fills his books with pungent gibes, epigrams, jocund disclosures of his own idiosyncrasies.

In the U. S., few celebrated scientists lave written popular books about their own specialties. Anthropologist Earnest Albert Hooton (Up from the Ape) and Astronomer Harlow Shapley (Flights from Chaos) are exceptions. But in general relatively obscure men, journalists with solid scientific backgrounds or university scientists with a flair for journalism have taken the job of making science “understanded of the people.” Among such U. S. interpreters of science three men are particularly outstanding.

Gray. At the University of Texas 34 years ago there was a freshman, George W. Gray, who entered every science course open to freshmen and after only a year’s study was removed from college by a severe attack of malaria. Afterwards he became a newspaper reporter, and although he took time out to finish his education at Harvard, he continued to hold jobs in newspaper offices and publishing houses. Seven years ago he published his first scientific article in the Atlantic Monthly. Today, a small, ruddy, cheerful, white-haired man with a southwestern drawl he has a less effulgent reputation than any one of half-a-dozen British luminaries but he is probably one of the ablest popularizers of science writing in English.

Last year Gray published his first book, New World Picture. It described current developments in physics from the inside of the atom to the bounds of the universe, traced their beginnings back to the stagnant period at the end of the 19th Century, won the approval even of such tough-minded critics as Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Review. In The Advancing Front of Science, Gray does not confine himself to physics. It is, he says, “an attempt to report news rather than summarize history.” In it readers will find such various nuggets as the heredity map in the giant chromosomes of the salivary glands of the fruit fly; the pros & cons of the expanding universe; sensitizing dyes, such as kryptocyanine, which make photographic emulsions sensitive to light far beyond the bounds of the visible spectrum; the measurement of the proton-proton reaction within the atom—the force which binds the world by holding atomic nuclei together; researches at Columbia on the effects of calcium, of vitamins A and G upon longevity. In gathering this material Popularizer Gray visited dozens of laboratories, then checked back what he wrote with the scientific makers who knew it firsthand.

Jaffe. Gray’s The Advancing Front of Science is probably one of the two best books recently published in the U. S. on contemporary research. The other is Outposts of Science (1935) by Bernard Jaffe, over which many a reviewer turned somersaults of admiration. Born in New York City 41 years ago, Jaffe studied chemistry at C. C.N. Y. and Columbia, went abroad with the A. E. F., made a brief venture into business, turned to chemistry teaching, is now chairman of a high-school science department, has never held a post of high scientific distinction. Yet in 1930 he won the Francis Bacon Award for the Humanizing of Knowledge with Crucibles, an account of the lives and work of great chemists.

In compiling the material for Outposts of Science, Jaffe was Gray’s predecessor in the technique of laboratory contact and checking at the source. He first read bales of information in fields outside his own specialty, then spent four years visiting some 50 workshops and talking to scientists. Once at Mt. Wilson Observatory he found a Hollywood actress among a group of visitors looking through a telescope at star clusters, saw her turn away from the eyepiece, heard her snort, “aw, nerts.” Not for Hollywood actresses, but for the intelligent public, he undertook in Outposts of Science to cover genetics, anthropology, physical and mental disease, glands, vitamins, insects, matter, radiation, astrophysics, star-galaxies, weather.

Lemon. Another who in youth tried his hand at business (insurance, banking, cost accounting) but turned back to the laboratory is Physicist Harvey Brace Lemon of the University of Chicago. A onetime student of the late great Albert Abraham Michelson, now a bustling, stout, pink-faced professor of 54, Lemon tracked down the cause of bands in comet tails, designed the spectrophotometer which bears his name, adapted coconut shell charcoal for gas masks during the War. President Hutchins told him off to design a survey course in physical science which would attract rather than repel students majoring in other fields. Believing that most survey courses were “not worth the powder to blow them to hell,” Dr. Lemon authored a new kind of textbook, From Galileo to Cosmic Rays. Written with insight and humor but with scientific integrity, it was illustrated with sly drawings by Artist Chichi Lasley, one of which showed a student fleeing in horror from a blackboard covered with difficult equations.

Hailed as a “great textbook,” this volume was so successful in & out of the university that other faculty members followed suit: Walter Bartky with Highlights of Astronomy; Mayme I. Logsden with A Mathematician Explains; Geologists Carey Croneis and William Krumbein with Down to Earth. Pioneer Lemon, who thus has the distinction of starting a whole popularization movement within his university, now plans to write a few serious publications to satisfy sticklers among his colleagues, spend the rest of his life composing “funny books” like From Galileo to Cosmic Rays—one of them, soon to be published, a breezy discussion of atom-smashing.

* Published last week by Whittlesey House ($3).