Complementarity in Chicago

There is a general distinction between U. S. and European scientists which became patent last week when five Nobel Laureates from Europe* joined two from the U. S./- at the convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago. Americans work primarily with instruments. Europeans with imagination. Thus Danish Niels Bohr's philosophizing about the unmeasurable duality of Nature before the A. A. A. S. was a fascinating novelty which his audience tried hard to understand.

Professor Bohr, who has invented a very useful description of the atom, first pointed to Professor Einstein's relativity laws which say that we can never measure absolute time. Next he referred to Professor Werner Heisenberg's proof that we cannot measure at the same instant both the speed and the position of an electron, that the more exactly we determine the speed of electrons in an atom the less certain we can be of the position of the electrons in an atom. Thus, we can never say precisely what is Cause or what is Effect. The Heisenberg concept of uncertainty is only six years old. Einstein relativity is only 28 years old. Therefore theorists have been busy applying them to comprehension of the atom. But last week Professor Bohr paused to show how they must apply to everyday existence, where an inch is an inch and a gallon is a gallon.

Relativity and uncertainty are absolute facts, reasoned Theorist Bohr in effect. Through them mathematicians are able to describe the tremendous, strange activities within an atom. But only one kind of activity at a time. For, the essential nature of atomic (or quantum) mechanics is duality. You can determine where an electron is or how fast it is moving, but not both facts simultaneously.

Since this essential duality is true for atoms, reasoned Theorist Bohr, it must be true of all things out of which atoms are made. This general duality he called "complementarity," and proceeded to elaborate his thesis abstrusely. The net of his discourse was that if you live inside a ball, you cannot have any conception of its outside convexity, until you get outside. Then you cannot be sure of the internal concavity. Likewise you never can know all the causes of a specific result or all the effects of a single action. With uncertainty of cause & effect goes uncertainty of free will & determinism in human relations, and the impossibility of ever deciding which came first: chicken or egg.

The A. A. A. S. audience felt better when Professor Bohr, fiddling with a loudspeaker cord, short-circuited the apparatus and made it blare. It was much easier, and more pleasant, to understand round-faced young Professor Ernest Orlando Lawrence of the University of California tell how he transmuted elements with "deuton" bullets.

Two years ago Professor Harold Clayton Urey of Columbia discovered a heavy kind of water. Each molecule contained one atom of oxygen and two atoms of hydrogen, just like ordinary water. But the nucleus of this hydrogen was twice as heavy as the nucleus of ordinary hydrogen. Physicists soon called this newly recognized hydrogen nucleus the deuton. At the University of California Professor Lawrence accumulated a supply of deutons, put them under a tremendous magnet he has, and whirled them until they were going as fast as 2.000,000 volts would have driven them. Then, like a boy with a sling shot, Professor Lawrence slung the deutons at atoms of lithium. The impacts knocked helium nuclei out of the lithium, which to that extent was trans muted. Similarly Professor Lawrence chipped helium out of nitrogen, aluminum, beryllium, magnesium, sodium, calcium, boron. Next he will try to bash deutons against deutons, hoping to create helium in that way.

Man. Though few laymen could fathom the esoteric jargon of the physicists, the report brought from Barcelona by Psychologist Emilio Mira was perfectly understandable to every housewife and office husband. Dr. Mira had asked 578 married couples which of ten procedures they would follow if they found their spouses unfaithful. Most husbands (187) would try to surprise the lovers in flagrante delicto, then seek a divorce. Most wives (185) would leave their philandering mates but would not tell their friends why. Eleven wives would kill the husband, only five would kill his mistress. Twenty-one husbands would kill the wife, eight would kill her lover. Because Spaniards are hot-blooded traditionalists, 49 husbands elected a duel with the interloper. Surprisingly, 18 wives elected the same thing. Nevertheless, Dr. Mira concluded that moral problems are not similarly faced by persons of similar cultural background.

But to cultural background Dr. Mandel Sherman of the University of Chicago found the kinks of mental disease closely related. Among Protestants under his observation, 57% of abnormal hallucinations pertained to religion, among Catholics only 27%, and of the hallucinations among Jews none at all had to do with religion.

Old is the knowledge that music and mathematics are kin; many a famed musician has been handy with figures. The veriest dauber knows about dynamic symmetry which is, in a sense, geometry in art. But Harvard's Professor George David Birkhoff would link mathematical principles to all esthetic appreciation. Last week in Chicago Professor Birkhoff said that primitive man liked to gaze at the full moon because it was a precise geometrical figure. His hearers tittered when he passed from music and the contours of vases to poetry. Suavely Dr. Birkhoff informed them he had written a six-line poem keyed to the mathematical formula. When he had finished his talk, someone called for the poem. Professor Birkhoff shrugged, said: "I dislike to be put in the position of a small boy at school, but I'll read it." He did:

Wind and wind the wisps of fire, Bits of knowledge, heart's desire; Soon within the central ball Fiery vision will enthrall. Wind too long or strip the sphere-- See the vision disappear!

New light on the trajectory of human intelligence after birth came from the University of California's Dr. Harold E. Jones, who stated that people are smartest at the age of 21, after which they grow duller.

In Paris, Psychologist Henri Pieron measured the amount of light which made him see, the amount of noise which made him hear, the amounts of energy which stirred his senses of taste, smell, touch. He examined the brains of beasts and men and concluded, he said in Chicago last week, that for every kind of outside impulse to which man is sensitive there is a particular, infinitesimal cell in his brain. We do not see ultraviolet light or feel infrared heat simply because we have no brain cells to receive those impressions. The impressions which do stimulate our brain affect it by pulsating radiations along distinct nerve cells. Thus "all our sensations rest upon the circulation of electric discharges in cells which stimulate each other" and all we know about existence is only as real as dreams.

Our sense of time also depends upon our sensory experience, added Professor Pieron while he was on the subject. Each individual has an organic rhythm which can be altered. Seconds become shorter for us when we have a fever, and conversely the days grow longer. An experiment on trained bees confirmed this heat-altered idea of time. The bees were trained to get their food at a particular time and place. The hotter the bees became the earlier they appeared for meals.

*Chemist Francis William Aston of Cambridge, England. Physicist Niels Bohr and Neurologist August Krogh of Copenhagen, Neurologist Archibald Vivian Hill of London. Chemist Theodor Svedberg of Upsala.

/- Physicist Robert Andrews Millikan of Pasadena, Physicist Arthur Holly Compton of Chicago.

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