Soapsuds & Sunspots

The semi-annual meetings of the National Academy of Sciences resemble a five-ring circus much less than do the gatherings of the less exclusive American Association for the Advancement of Science. But the Academy meetings are by no means sideshows. With a membership limited to 300, the academy enrolls the cream of the nation's men of science. For three days last week this cream and a few distinguished visitors assembled at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, read 45 papers in Eastman Lecture Room.

Universe. Belgium's Abbe Georges Lemaitre, astronomer and relativist, once thought of the universe as cosmic shrapnel --fragments still receding violently from the explosion billions of years ago of a single primordial atom. In Pasadena last winter he explained to a respectful listener named Albert Einstein how this picture accounted for cosmic rays (TIME, Jan. 23). One dilemma his picture did not resolve. The observed rate of recession of the farthest visible parts was so fast (12,000 to 15,000 mi. per sec.) that it made the universe seem unreasonably young. Last week, backed by intricate mathematics and Harvard Observatory's mass of photometric records, plump, bespectacled Abbe Lemaitre and his collaborator, Harvard's sprightly, peripatetic Astronomer Harlow Shapley, stepped forth at Cambridge with the shrapnel universe dramatically modified into a soapsuds universe.

The suds, explained the Belgian scientist, are in disequilibrium, some whipped by a cosmic repulsive force (expressed by the constant lambda), some clutched at by the attractive force which earthlings know as gravity. While some bubbles swell and others contract, still others, unstably balanced between the two forces, are in a state of stagnation. Within some regions where expansion is the rule, there are collapsing systems flying headlong away from one another. Also, in slowly collapsing regions are to be found a number of rapidly collapsing systems. Such a system is the Milky Way, the galaxy to which Earth belongs.

Man. Consensus of scientists has therefore been that the forbears of Amerindians straggled into Alaska some 15,000 years ago, that prior traces of man on this continent should be viewed skeptically. Thus the academicians in Cambridge pricked up their ears last week when Dr. John Campbell Merriam, paleontologist, geologist, president of Washington's Carnegie Institution, said he believed man in the U. S. to be at least 100,000 years old, possibly 1,000,000. This conviction he owed not to the evidence of any single find but to the accumulated evidence of many finds. In several places in the West and Southwest, he pointed out, human remains and crude implements had been found in association with certain species of ground sloths, musk oxen, elephants, all long extinct. Weather, Dr. Charles Greeley Abbot, slow-spoken, thin-faced secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and famed sun observer, flatly affirmed before the Academicians that weather repeats itself in cycles of 23 years. All the assembled scientists realized that this hard & fast pronouncement was not based on sheer theory but was solidly documented by weather records for months, years, decades. Dr. Abbot studies solar radiation from his Washington station while his men study it from such farflung vantage points as Table Mountain, Calif.; Mt. Montezuma, Chile; Mount St. Catherine in the Sinai Peninsula. With the help of a "brass brain" (a periodometer or mechanical calculator) which he invented to co-ordinate chaotic masses of data, he delved into the temperature and precipitation records of Bismarck, N. Dak., far back into the last century. In them he looked for cycles of 22 years, because that length of time represents two eleven-year sunspot cycles, or one complete magnetic cycle. He found something like the weather cycle he was seeking, but quickly saw that it was of 23 years, not 22. He perceived that a number of periodicities in solar variation which he had discovered years ago were all sub-multiples of 276, the number of months in 23 years. Dr. Abbot plotted the 1875-98 weather cycle at Bismarck against that of 1898-1921, found that they almost coincided, as did the eleven years that have elapsed of the present cycle. Records from other parts of the world gave equally encouraging confirmation. In Central India, for example, the 1865-70 rainfall picture was the same as that for the corresponding period 23 years later--three years of heavy winter rains spaced by periods of subnormal precipitation.

One flaw which Dr. Abbot regretted was an occasional unexpected lag in expected variations, ascribed to irregularity in sunspot development. With long-range weather forecasting as his great goal, he is now preparing temperature & precipitation predictions "for numerous stations in all parts of the world for many years in advance."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.