Highbrows at Harvard

Albert Einstein's wife was ill, so he sent word that he could not attend. He was to have read a paper "On Some Approximate and Rigorous Solutions of the Field Equations." Another Nobel Prizewinner who was expected to attend but did not was cocky young Werner Heisenberg of Germany, author of the famed "Uncertainty Principle" which has severely shaken the rule of Cause & Effect in physical science. Just as he was getting ready to leave Leipzig, at whose university he has been a professor for nine of his 35 years, the Uncertainty Principle's author was ordered to stay home and serve eight weeks in the German Army.

Despite these two absences, and that of Denmark's illustrious Atomist Niels Bohr, Harvard was scarcely more proud last week of its 300 years than of the distinguished company it had gathered to help celebrate that milestone. Summoned to the two-week Harvard Tercentenary Conference on Arts & Sciences were 2,500-odd savants, among whom 72 first-magnitude luminaries were to read papers. On hand were no less than 1 1 Nobel Prize-winners.* Purpose of this great galaxy of learning was to survey the present state of the physical, biological and social sciences and their impact on man. The 72 discourses were to be recorded on 150 phonograph records, filed away in the Harvard archives.

The scholars had no reason to complain of lack of public attention. Scripps-Howard's glib Columnist Westbrook Pegler wrote two pieces about what he referred to as "Highbrows' Old Home Week." A new extension of geometry which made it appear that the whole is not equal to the sum of the parts (see below) served as a pat allusion for an editorial writer commenting on the cordial meeting between Alf Landon and Franklin Roosevelt (see p. 13), for a sportswriter gloating over the winning spurt of the New York Giants. A letter arrived from the editor of Beauty Shop News requesting that a conference be held on "The Relation of Beauty to Human Behavior." The New York Times'?, gnomish, imaginative Science Writer William L. ("Bill") Laurence outdid himself by coining a word, "macroscope" (opposite of microscope) by which he imagined the 72 combined brains focused as one instrument upon Man and the Universe. Platoons of newshawks backed stammering notables into corners, pressed them for one-syllable explanations of profundities expounded from the platform.

Numbers. Last week's discussions were mainly mathematical and astronomical. Mathematics is the purest of pure sciences, because its devotees may juggle their symbols without regard to reality. But: "It may happen that the mathematician will pass on a theorem to the physicist, who uses it and passes it on to the chemist, who in turn uses it and passes it on to the biologist. Ultimately, the cure of a disease may result. . . . Sir Isaac Newton to a large extent worked on calculus to explain some phases of astronomy, but his findings now--more than 250 years later--are applied to calculating width of a brake lining to stop a motor car of a certain size at a certain speed at a given time."-- Professor Mark Hoyt Ingraham, University of Wisconsin.

Professor Elie Joseph Cartan of the University of Paris delivered an important paper on "The Extension of Tensor Analysis to Non-Affine Geometries." Speaking in French, bouncing with animation, gesturing with vehemence, this tanned, fox-bearded little man suggested a new mathematical approach to the great problem of a unified field theory which would embrace both the atom and the universe--a theory for which Professor Einstein has long been the No. i searcher. Roughly speaking, "non-affine" space is undistorted space. Dr. Cartan finds that some of the "vectors" with which Relativists play have a dual existence--in distorted Einstein space and in undistorted Euclidean space. These amphibian vectors may be links between cosmos and microcosmos. In Dr. Cartan's audience reporters could not find a single mathematician who could explain his method in layman's language. Dr. Cartan tried himself, conscientiously, through an interpreter. Presently all hands admitted defeat, disbanded.

Professor Edward Kasner of Columbia University announced that he had measured and bisected the "horn angle" -- the angle between two curves tangent to each other. The ancient Greeks decided that the horn angle was a zero, could therefore be neither measured nor bisected; Isaac Newton and his successors, having no luck with the problem, were constrained to agree. Dr. Kasner solved the problem with four unreal numbers. When the angle is bisected in his geometrical system, the sum of the halves is greater than the whole. And if one of the curves is considered to be a straight line, each half is equal to the whole.

In a discourse on "Uncertain Inferences" Professor Ronald Aylmer Fisher of the University of London, onetime investment statistician, conveyed the idea that, though mathematical logic may compress uncertainty into a small area, the smaller the area the greater the uncertainty. He gave a problem which, if it were not for the uncertainty of inferences, would be readily solvable: "The agricultural land of an Egyptian village is of unequal fertility. The fertility of every portion is known with exactitude, but the height of the Nile affects different parts of the territory unequally. It is required to divide the area between the several households of the village, so that the yield of the lots assigned to each shall be in pre-determined proportions, whatever may be the height to which the river rises."

Heavens. Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, Cambridge University's brilliant astronomer and popularizer, arrived from England to read a technical paper on the constitution of the stars, give an evening lecture on his old favorite, the expanding universe and its cause, the mysterious antithesis of gravitation called lambda. For some time Sir Arthur has cherished a number which he believes represents the total number of subatomic particles in the universe. It is approximately 10 to the 79th power multiplied by 3.145 (3145 followed by 76 zeros). Coming up from Quarantine on the Georgic, Sir Arthur humorously told Manhattan ship reporters that he could not recall the number offhand, that he did seem to remember the final digit as a 6. At Cambridge, Mass. Sir Arthur gave his latest figure, reached by theoretical means, for the speed at which the outer nebulae are retreating: 432 kilometers per second (964,800 m. p. h.) for each 20 million million million miles by which the nebula is distant from Earth. This is somewhat faster than the apparent speeds arrived at by observation. "It is too bad," Sir Arthur likes to say, "that the observations are so poor."

Shown one evening were motion pictures of "fireworks" on the sun, taken from the new solar observation tower of the University of Michigan's McMath-Hulbert Observatory. "We see for the first time," explained Dr. Heber Doust Curtis, "the continuous development and change of such great solar storms--motions of streamers reaching 100 miles or more per second, great fiery jets of matter shooting out from sunspots or other disturbed areas at these high speeds one after another, like the successive discharges of a Roman candle. We see great areas of lower-lying prominences perhaps 5,000 miles high, where they are blown sidewise by some gust or attraction like a fire in a field of wheat. We see clouds of calcium gas that seem to develop high up in the solar atmosphere to descend in great streamers from 100,000 miles up."

Professor Antonie Pannckoek of the University of Amsterdam explained a new technique for calculating star temperatures. When starlight is split up in a spectrum, thousands of lines due to the presence of iron become visible. Study of these lines indicates what percentage of the iron atoms in the star are in high (excited) and in low (unexcited) energy states. The hotter the starstuff, the greater the proportion of excited atoms. Preliminary results obtained in this manner indicate a surface temperature of 8,000DEG C. for Sirius--3,000DEG cooler than the figure obtained by other methods.

About 300 stars in the sky are known as Cepheid variables. Some internal pulse causes them to vary in brightness, in cycles of a few days or a few weeks. Most of them are hot, yellow, supergiants. Harlow Shapley at Mount Wilson worked out a relation between their luminosities and variation periods which yielded clues to shape and dimensions of the whole Milky Way (TIME, July 29, 1935). Last week Dr. Shapley, now director of Harvard Observatory, described the first known star to become a Cepheid while under observation. Ten years ago it began to pulse every two weeks, the period gradually lengthening to three weeks. Discoverer was not Dr. Shapley but another able member of the Harvard staff: Miss Henrietta Hill Swope, 33, daughter of General Electric's President Gerard Swope.

*Physicists Arthur Holly Compton and Robert Andrews Millikan, Physiologist Karl Landsteiner of the U. S.; Chemists Hans Fischer and Friedrich Bergius, Physiologist Hans Spemann, Biologist Otto Warburg of Germany: Physiologists Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins and Edgar Douglas Adrian of England: Centrifugist Theodor Svedberg of Sweden; Physiologist August Krogh of Denmark.

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