Science: Discovery in a Cellar

What pot of gold does science hope to discover at the end of the cosmic rainbow? There could be no bigger jackpot than a single theory which would wrap together, and neatly explain, the basic physical wonders of the universe. Einstein has groped part of the way toward the prize, with an attempt to unify the theories explaining gravitation and electromagnetism (TIME, Jan. 2). Last week the British journal Discovery reported that an eccentric English genius, dead a quarter-century, had produced another “unified field” theory which narrowly escaped rotting away, unrecognized, in a Welsh cellar.

In a Closed Room. Oliver Heaviside is best remembered today as co-discoverer of the Kennelly-Heaviside layer, or ionosphere, which reflects radio waves and thus makes long-distance reception possible. Born in London’s Camden Town in 1850, Heaviside had no university training, taught himself the principles of electricity and higher mathematics, lived out his life in squalor and semi-starvation.

Heaviside’s theoretical work on the transmission of telephone signals and coaxial cables made money for others, but none for him. Deaf and tormented by rheumatism, he rarely left his cluttered, tightly closed room, where he fought off England’s dampness with a gas fire and oil stove.

Under these unpromising conditions, Heaviside wrote a sprawling treatise on electromagnetism. Three volumes were published. A fourth, projected volume had not been published when Heaviside died in 1925. In 1939 his papers, still unsorted, were sent off to an underground shelter in Wales for safekeeping during the war. Soggy and mildewed from the cellar damp, the long-missing manuscript was discovered last year.

“Energy Tubes.” The job of treating and restoring the manuscript, under the direction of British Museum experts, was a long and delicate operation. Many of the sodden pages had stuck together; others were missing entirely. When dried, some of the paper turned to flakes or powder, and many pages were reduced to tiny fragments. Interpreting the restored pages was almost as difficult: a third of them, covered with figures and equations, had been written in pencil (which, though faint, left an impression on the paper), and the rest in faded ink, home-made by Heaviside, with home-made pens. But last week, after a third of the manuscript had been transcribed, Heaviside’s unified field theory was visible in outline.

In essence, the Heaviside theory calls for a universe filled with “energy tubes”—galactic radiation moving throughout space in every direction with the speed of light. A stellar body alone in space would be bombarded equally on all sides and the radiation pressure would be uniform. But two bodies close together (like the sun and a planet) would screen each other from certain galactic rays and they would be propelled toward each other with increasing gravity. To cover nuclear phenomena, Heaviside theorized that his energy tubes or galaxtic radiation could condense into sub-atomic particles and eventually form matter.

Scientists, whose pet theories radiate throughout the universe in all directions with the speed of light, are not likely to be unified in a hurry by Heaviside’s unified field theory.