Summer Scholars

At Cooper Union's engineering campus in northern New Jersey, 29 high school seniors learned about semiconductors by building their own transistor radios. At the University of California at Los Angeles, 20 straight-A secondary-school students filled notebooks with the theory of computers as expounded by visiting Professor Norbert (Cybernetics) Wiener himself. At Northwestern's engineering labs in Evanston, 96 boys and girls studied why quicksand becomes quick, and found out the most economical way of sifting and smelting a pile of copper ore.

Like 5,974 other gifted high school youngsters on 105 U.S. campuses, these teen-agers are going to college this summer. They are the guests of the National Science Foundation, under its new program for stimulating wider and deeper interest in science. The colleges provide the labs and teachers, with the foundation's financial support.

Selected in every case after the keenest competition (the Florida State group, picked from 5,000 applicants, had a median IQ of 138), the seniors get no credit, in some cases not even exams. But the pace is such that Cooper Union President Edwin S. Burdell, a sociologist, walked out of a class last fortnight, saying: "It's over my head." Said Northwestern's lanky Timothy Brown, 16, who comes from Lexington, Neb.: "I only wish I could be five people so I could take it all in." The thing all the youngsters like best is the grown-up atmosphere in the labs. "It's not like high school, where the teachers are standing over you and threatening," said Edward M. Chait, 17.

At Florida State's "Math Camp" in Tallahassee, the boys took time for dormitory bridge. One evening David Hackney, 14, of Daytona Beach, after bidding seven spades, laid down his 13 spades. The ensuing uproar was capped when Edward Root, 16, of St. Petersburg, jotted a formula on the blackboard, ran some figures through a table computer, did some paper work and announced that a bridge player could expect such a hand once in 635,013,559,600 deals.

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