High Talk

Boston, which fancies itself the Athens of America, was crammed to its Beacon Street attics with scientists: 5,000 members of the Triple-A S (American Association for the Advancement of Science) in convention assembled. There were psychologists, mycologists, physicists, ecologists, and other genera. They jammed hotel lobbies, mystified the indigenous fauna with polysyllabic shop talk.

There were also admirals and generals, whose military money now shapes much U.S. research. To this first A.A.A.S. convention of the Atomic Age, the brass spoke reassuring words, on the social aspects of science. They were talking, they knew, to the men who would win future wars.

The scientists listened. Some were impressed. Others felt like Little Red Riding Hood. "What big teeth you have, Grandma!" they muttered; then they sneaked away to specialized meetings where they felt they were among friends.

Owls & Mice. At 300 sessions, 1,335 papers were read, on everything from owls to unborn stars. An owl-man, Dr. Lee R. Dice of the University of Michigan, described experiments on the survival value of protective coloration. He sprinkled a laboratory floor with soil. He populated the area with deer-mice, half of which matched the soil in color; half of which did not. Then he loosed owls, turned down the lights and retired. Over a series of such experiments, the owls, ate 24 to 29% more contrasting mice than matching ones. This, said Dr. Dice, illustrated the biological mechanism by which meekly dressed mice inherit the earth.

Shaken Oysters. Dr. Victor L. Loosanoff, biologist of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, was also concerned with survival. He froze live oysters solid, kept them frozen ten months, thawed them out happy and healthy. But if he shook them while frozen, they thawed out dead. A frozen oyster, said Dr. Loosanoff, is mostly ice. Shaking breaks him up.

Other icemen: Dr. Irving Langmuir and Vincent J. Schaefer of General Electric, the only men who have done anything about the weather. On Nov. 13, they proved that they could turn a cold cloud into snow by sprinkling it with dry ice (TIME, Nov. 25). Last week, Schaefer told of a further triumph. He walked into a cold ground fog swinging a wire basket of dry ice round his head. The fog parted, leaving a lane, as the Red Sea water parted for the Children of Israel.

Far from such fun & games was a grisly speech by Major General Curtis E. LeMay, Deputy Chief of Air Staff for Research and Development. The future looked black to General LeMay, except for deadly flashes of atomic light. "Our frontier now lies across the Arctic wastes of the polar region. . . . The war will start with bombs and guided missiles falling on the U.S. . . . Any of the principal industrial nations can, by say 1950, develop a controlled air weapon that will deliver several tons of explosives with great accuracy over ranges of 3,000 to 6,000 miles. . . ."

Star Facts of Life. Astronomers, meeting at Radcliffe College, in Cambridge, discussed even vaster forces (not yet under human control). They told how stars are formed, over billions of years, out of cosmic gas.

Probably half the matter in the "home" or Milky Way galaxy is not in its stars at all but in tiny solid grains or separate atoms. This is what stars are formed from. According to Dr. H. C. van de Hulst from Utrecht, The Netherlands, the average cosmic particle is about one hundred thousandth of a centimeter in radius and deadly cold, only a few degrees above absolute zero ( -459.72DEGF.). When wandering atoms strike such particles, they freeze and stick tight.

In this way the particles grow at the expense of the separate atoms. They get bigger & bigger. Gradually they drift together. Part of the force which makes them concentrate, said Dr. Lyman Spitzer Jr. of Yale, is gravitational attraction between the particles. More important: the pressure which radiation from the surrounding stars exerts to pack them into a thick, globular swarm.

The galaxy is full of such "globules" or unborn stars, which look like black patches against the starry background. Professor Bart J. Bok of Harvard found 23 of them silhouetted against a single glowing nebula. They probably weigh much less than the sun, but are several thousand billion miles in diameter.

As this thin stuff continues to concentrate, the particles get hotter & hotter. When they get hot enough (after some billion years), a new star shines in the sky.

Plenty of Planets. Harvard's Dr. Fred L. Whipple studied the globules more closely, came up with a cheery idea: within the unborn stars there may be unborn planets. Under proper conditions, said he, a contracting globule may leave parts of its matter outside, to form into separate spheres and revolve as planets.

This was good news for lonely hearts who fear that the human race may be alone in the universe. Life as we know it is possible only on a planet, and planets, until recently, were considered freaks. Their formation was believed to require the near-collision of two stars, an exceedingly rare event.

Whipple's theory changed all that. Contracting globules may have filled the galaxy with millions of circling planets. Many of these may harbor "human races."

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