Science: Wiggling Knottiness

Britain’s William Lawrence Bragg once described the atom as “like someone’s head [i.e., the nucleus] with a cloud of mosquitoes [i.e., electrons] buzzing around it.” Sir Arthur Eddington confessed that he pictured electrons as little red balls. But physicists have long since stopped trying to visualize the atom. As understood today the electron has become almost a dreamlike abstraction. It does not obey the laws of cause and effect. Nevertheless, even in quantum mechanics, the abstruse mathematics of the atom, the electron is assigned a constant electric charge, e, and a constant mass, m. Thus it becomes a charged particle of some sort.

Last week suave, British-born William Francis Gray Swann, director of the Franklin Institute’s Bartol Research Foundation in Swarthmore, Pa., suggested that even the notion of charged particles might be jettisoned. He preferred to think of the atom as just a region of “wiggling knottiness,” a something free to behave in any way it likes. In psychology, the behaviorists and mechanists refuse to worry about what the human mind really is, study it as a series of behavior patterns. Dr. Swann fancies atomic behaviorism.

Dr. Swann delivered his harangue for freedom at the autumn meeting of the National Academy of Sciences, held last week at the University of Pennsylvania.

Another convention highlight: Aviators’ Blackouts. After breathing the thin air of high altitudes for a while, fliers sometimes faint when they gulp oxygen from their tanks or dive swiftly to richer air. In other words, their blackout may not be due to too little oxygen but to a sudden supply of too much. Last week the University of Pennsylvania’s Pharmacologist Carl Frederic Schmidt, a top-notch U. S. respirationist, explained.

In normal air, breathing is controlled by the respiratory centre in the medulla, which is part of the brain. But this centre is itself enfeebled by oxygen lack, passes control to secondary centres, the carotid bodies in the neck and the aortic body near the heart. Lack of oxygen stimulates instead of enfeebling these secondary centres, and they send out stronger and stronger impulses to the respiration muscles. If the lungs suddenly get more oxygen, the carotid and aortic bodies rest, turn back control to the centre in the medulla. But that stupefied centre may not be in shape to take over right away—thus, for a few seconds there is no control and aviators faint. It is rather like a fly ball dropping to earth between two baseball fielders because each expects the other to catch it.