Science: Science Hush-Hushed

> The National Academy of Sciences, the senate of U.S. science, called off its annual meeting for 1942. Reason: most of its members are too busy with vital wartime research; and the closely guarded Academy Building, close to the War and Navy Departments in Washington, is overcrowded with military projects.

> Not a word about chemistry or physics (mostly war secrets), but a great deal about archeology, was heard at last fortnight’s meeting of the American Philosophical Society, most venerable U.S. scientific body.*

> Only 50 papers, instead of the usual 150 or more, were read last week at the American Physical Society’s Baltimore convention.

> Reports on explosives, plastics, rubber technology were omitted at the American Chemical Society’s Memphis meeting (TIME, May 4). The history of chemistry was largely discussed. Attendance was poor.

> Even at biological conferences, research reports were vague and evasive. Scientists who wanted more details were told again & again, “Sorry, but I can’t answer that question without giving aid & comfort to the enemy.”

>Completion of the giant Mt. Palomar telescope, which will increase the visible universe eightfold, has been postponed for the duration. Reason: the necessary technicians have been transferred to military work.

> Exploration of the atom—chief interest of physicists —has come to a stop. “The only cyclotrons operating now,” says Dr. Edward U. Condon of Westinghouse, “are those being used to prepare artificial radioactive materials for medical research.”

Such facts as these add up to the biggest scientific news of 1942: that there is less & less scientific news. Technical journals are thinner by as much as 50%, and they will get more so: much of the research now published was completed a year ago before the conversion of U.S. science to wartime uses had reached all-out proportions. A year ago one out of four physicists was working on military problems; today, nearly three out of four. And while news from the world’s battlefronts is often withheld for days or weeks, today’s momentous scientific achievements will not be disclosed until the war’s end.

Military Secrecy. Negro soldiers stand guard over the laboratories at M.I.T., outstanding center of war research. FBI agents loiter inconspicuously about the University of Chicago campus, where scientists have shelved 90% of their peace time projects and now file their current research in code. Armed police bar visitors from General Electric’s laboratories, 100% converted to direct war work. The entire University of Washington campus (with its great wind tunnel) is closed off and guarded at night.

Like troop movements, the shuttling of scientists from campus to campus, plant to plant, is kept quiet—almost absurdly so: Harvard faculty wives are no longer given lists of visiting scientists who can be invited to tea parties. Letter slots were cut in certain important doors at Bell Telephone’s Laboratories so that nobody can peer inside. Old colleagues no longer know what their pals are working at. And after hours—which are late and long—they make heroic efforts not to talk shop.

Busiest Physicists. “The need for physicists in all war work is growing at a rate of between 1,500 and 2,000 a year, yet the schools are not turning out more than 500,” says Director Henry Askew Barton of the American Institute of Physics. “The last war put chemistry on the map. This is a war of physics.”

No longer do nations boast, as the French Revolutionists boasted when they sent Chemist Antoine Lavoisier to the guillotine in 1794, “The republic has no use for scientists.” No longer do nations waste their resources by sending their best scientists to the battlefields instead of to the laboratories—as the British in 1915 sent the 20th Century’s most promising physicist, young Henry Moseley, to Gallipoli, where he was shot through the head.

No longer do scientists refuse to drop their own work and devise weapons, as Lord Rutherford in World War I at first refused to work on submarine detection because he was on the verge of splitting the atom—an achievement, he insisted, more important than the war itself. Now that war is total, and mechanized to a degree that would have astounded bicycle fantasists of 75 years ago (see cut), scientific knowledge is military power, i.e., the means of survival.

Behind the curtain of secrecy great discoveries are piling up. They will burst upon the post-war world with an incalculable impact. Is war’s diversion and stimulus of research for better or worse? Scientists disagree. “If the war lasts for two more years,” said a University of California scientist, “much of the progress in the various fields of research will be the equivalent of ten years of peacetime work.”

Yet Bell Telephone’s scientists, for example, point out that, war or no war, the peacetime research which many industries had to shelve would have precipitated great advances within five years. And other farseeing scientists like Vannevar Bush concede a short-term gain for applied science but a long-term loss, for the ultimate wellspring of technological progress is in fundamental, “pure” research, far from the gadget factory.

Pure research is not secret now. In most sciences it no longer exists.

* Which originated in Benjamin Franklin’s “Junto” club in 1743, when physical science was called “natrual philosophy”