British Association

Apparently few journalists or scientists have read General Jan Christiaan Smuts's conception of the universe, which he published five years ago. For when he repeated his thesis as his presidential address before the British Association for the Advancement of Science in London last week, he inadvertently obscured all the technical discussions of the assembly and overshadowed reports thereof in the Press. In essence General Smuts believes that the entire universe is degenerating except for its most magnificent phenomenon-- man's mind.

Although not all of his London hearers would agree with his conclusions, they were amazed at his scientific erudition. They knew him historically as a Boer lawyer who bitterly fought the English subjugation of South Africa in 1900-02, who so made the best of defeat that his home land became a British Dominion and he eventually its Prime Minister and Empire privy councillor. In the World War he generaled a British Army. After the War he suggested the idea of the League of Nations to Woodrow Wilson, helped make the peace treaties. "Slim Janny" and "Happy Warrior" have long been his nicknames.

For many, General Smuts's scientific philosophy is comfortingly anthropocentric. The universe of 20th Century physics he accepts completely. It is for him a stupendous organization of atoms, electrons, protons, radiations and quanta. From this "uncertain nebulous underworld, there seems to crystallize out, or literally to materialize, the macroscopic world. . . . We rise to new levels as later on we pass from the physical to the biological level, and again from the latter to the conscious mind. But--and this is the significant fact--all these levels are genetically related and form an evolutionary series; and underlying the differences of the successive levels, there remains a fundamental unity of plan or organization which binds them together as members of a genetic series, as a growing, evolving, creative universe. ... If matter is essentially immaterial structure or organization, it can not fundamentally be so different from organism or life, which is best envisaged as a principle of organization; nor from mind, which is an active organizer. Matter, life and mind thus translate roughly into organization, organism, organizer."

While the "stream of physical tendency throughout the universe is on the whole downward, toward disintegration and dissipation, the organic movement, on this planet at least, is upward, and life structures on the whole becoming more complex throughout the course of organic evolution. From the viewpoint of physics, life and mind are thus singular and exceptional phenomena, not in line with the movement of the universe as a whole. . . . Perhaps we may even say that at the Present epoch there is no other globe where life is at the level manifested on earth. ... I suggest that at the present cosmic epoch we are the spectators of what is perhaps the grandest event in the. immeasurable history of our universe. ..."

Such reasoning drives General Smuts to an emotional conclusion: "Great as is the physical universe which confronts us as a given fact, no less great is our reading and evaluation of it in the world of values, as seen in language, literature, culture, civilization, society and the state, law, architecture, art, science, morals and religion. Without this revelation of inner meaning and significance the external physical universe would be but an immense empty shell or crumpled surface. The brute fact here receives its meaning, and a new world arises which gives to nature whatever significance it has. As against the physical configurations of nature we see here the ideal patterns or wholes freely created by the human spirit as a home and an environment for itself.

"Among the human values thus created science ranks with art and religion. In its selfless pursuit of truth, in its vision of order and beauty, it partakes of the quality of both. More and more it is beginning to make a profound esthetic and religious appeal to thinking people. In deed, it may fairly be said that science is perhaps the clearest revelation of God to our age. Science is at last coming into its own as one of the supreme goods of the human race."

This year is both the British Association's 100th birthday and the 100th anniversary of Michael Faraday's discovery of electromagnetism. Faraday (1791-1867)* found that a magnet induced an electric current in a wire, that an electric current in a. wire magnetized a piece of iron. From the complementary relation ship of magnetism and electricity came the dynamo, a multitude of other de vices, and a new tempo to civilization.

In Faraday's commemoration, all London has been floodlighted for weeks, giving money-worried Englishmen a bright diversion. In Albert Hall the convening scientists last week found a large statue of Faraday surrounded by his personal relics and devices built on his discoveries. Prime Minister MacDonald made an intercontinental radio talk in Faraday's memory, as did Sir William Bragg, Senator Guglielmo Marconi, Louis-Victor Due de Broglie, Professor Elihu Thomson. President Frank Baldwin Jewett of Bell Telephone Laboratories telephoned his transatlantic respects from Manhattan.

Whelk, Trifling incidents make comedy at such serious gatherings. Professor Henry Hurd Swinnerton needed to display a whelk, a kind of sea snail, during his zoological lecture. He could not find his whelk. He searched his coat and waistcoat pockets, crawled under his lecture table, peered around the platform. He finally found the whelk in his hip pocket. Mountaineering Etiquet, Climbing Mt. Everest where atmospheric oxygen is so scant that mountaineers faint, is largely a matter of respiratory engineering, of providing light-weight tanks of oxygen for the climbers. Captain N. E. Odell, survivor of a tragic, ineffectual attempt up Everest in 1924 (TIME, July 14, 1924), last week objected "that if a mountain is worth climbing at all, it is worth climbing without these adventitious aids, or with at least as few as possible." This roast-beefy sporting attitude vexed Dr. Raymond Greene who just climbed Mt. Kamet. Cried he angrily: "If oxygen will help us to reach a summit, we are not justified in adding to the roll of those who have already died on Everest."

Population Standstill, Populations tend to become stationary, anthropologists have observed. Professor Julian Sorell Huxley noted that "deliberate birth control is the largest limiting factor. It is confined to humans. But postponement of marriage and permanent celibacy also contribute." Professor Lancelot Hogben is worried about "what extensive change in family economics and social organization will be requisite to create new incentives to parenthood to insure against gradual extinction." Professor Edwin Canaan assured him that there will at least be food sufficient for all. Dr. Shepherd Dawson consoled him with the checked fact that children of small families are on the whole more intelligent than children of large families.

Stereoscopic Cinema, Dr. Robert T. A. Innes, Johannesburg astronomer, announced that he could project cinema pictures to give the impression of depth as well as height, width and movement-- something photographers have long sought. He said that all that was needed was a special optical device near the projection screen. With no details of Dr. Innes' method at hand, Dr. Herbert Eugene Ives of the Bell Telephone Laboratories, foremost U. S. authority on the matter, was incredulous. At a meeting of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers at Swampscott, Mass, next week Dr. Ives will explain what is needed for stereoscopic cinemas, why they cannot be realized with industry's present equipment.

* Joseph Henry (1797-1878) at Albany independently discovered electromagnetism in 1829.

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