Bachelor of Science

(See front cover)

One evening last week people began to fill up the ornate Gothic chapel of the University of Chicago. They kept streaming in after every seat was occupied, stood in massed ranks at the back, trickled into the high galleries over the arches. They stormed applause when a stooped, smallish man with wide thin shoulders and greying hair appeared. They waited in silence while he adjusted the pince-nez balanced precariously on his narrow, prominent nose, ruffled some papers covered with fine, precise handwriting, began to speak in a clear, pleasant voice.

This was no economist with a Message for the 2,000 packed listeners, but a scientist. More strange, he was there to talk on a subject in which nine-tenths of the audience had had no prior interest: "The Expanding Universe." But he was Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, M. A., D. Sc.. LL. D., F. R. S., Plumian Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge University, Director of Cambridge Observatory, metaphysician extraordinary of modern physics.

That afternoon Sir Arthur had been interviewed by newsmen who found his reticence almost impenetrable. He answered questions in hesitant monosyllables between puffs at his pipe. But now, speaking to 2,000 auditors, he was self-assured, whimsical, almost pontifical.

"I don't wish to be unduly alarmist." said he, "but the farthest nebulae are doubling their distance from us every 1,300 million years and astronomers will have to double the apertures of their largest telescopes every 1,300 million years simply to keep up with their recession. I'm glad that you in America are planning to replace your 100-inch telescope by a 200-inch way ahead of time.''

Sir Arthur had slipped into the U. S. from S. S. Britannic when she touched at Boston last fortnight. For a day or two no one, not even his Manhattan publishers, seemed to know where he was. Then he had stepped off the 20th Century Limited in Chicago, gone straight to a new dormitory at the south edge of the University campus with his three well-worn suitcases. He was using Chicago as a quiet base at which to prepare for his main mission in the U. S., the delivery of Cornell University's Messenger Lectures for 1934. Besides his ''Expanding Universe" talk he gave Chicago, while he was there, his more metaphysical lecture, "Science and Experience." He dined with President & Mrs. Hutchins, met a few socialites, congratulated his fellow-scientist Dr. Arthur Holly Compton on the latter's appointment, announced from London last week, as next year's visiting professor at Oxford in the chair endowed by the late Cameraman George Eastman. He found time to motor out and visit his old friend Director Otto Struve of the Yerkes Observatory at Williams Bay, Wis. With his early Cornell lectures already composed, the rest of the time he devoted to interviews, informal lectures.

The Messenger series at Cornell was made possible by the late Dr. Hiram J. Messenger (Cornell 1881) "to provide a course of lectures on the evolution of civilization, for the special purpose of raising the moral standards of our political, business and social life." The first series was delivered in 1925 by Chicago's Archeologist James Henry Breasted. Subsequent lectures have included physicists, psychologists and geneticists. In calling another physicist to deliver the Messenger messages, instead of a great economist as "our political, business and social life" of .today might have suggested, Cornell's officials had profound considerations. Not the least profound was their chance to get Sir Arthur Eddington, whose position approaches the unique.

Captains of Curiosity. Forty years ago when Science was called "stinks'' by schoolboys and signified invention to most grownups, physics, chemistry and astronomy were distinct branches. Today physics not only encompasses the whole of the other two sciences but has confiscated and developed for its own purposes a third--pure mathematics. Modern physics is the spearhead of man's effort to discover and describe the essential nature of the universe.

The spearhead is triangular. The two faces which meet at the attacking point are experimental physics and mathematical physics. Men on the experimental front are generally grouped under captains. A British veteran of 30 years and the accredited proponent of matter's electrical structure is the captain of Cambridge University's famed Cavendish Laboratory, Ernest Rutherford, ist Baron Rutherford. The two great U. S. captains are Caltech's Robert Andrews Millikan and the University of Chicago's Arthur Holly Compton, cosmic ray specialists and milestone men in the history of the electron. France's No. 1 team of subatomic investigators is a devoted, captainless couple: Irene Curie-Joliot and Jean Frederic Joliot, daughter and son-in-law of Marie Curie.

On the mathematical front, the work is being done mainly by European theorists working alone. In splendid isolation at the top stands Albert Einstein. From his special theory (1905) and general theory (1915) spring a line of relativity logicians who include notably Max Born (currently a refugee from Nazi Germany) and Belgium's Abbe Georges Lemaitre. At the other end of theoretical analysis, Denmark's Niels Bohr has taken the quantum principle advanced by Germany's Max Planck and used it to describe the possible energy states of orbital electrons.

Interpreters-- Third side of the physical spearhead is the clouded, retreating face seen by the world of common men. Here are ranged the handful of interpreters who tell plain citizens what is going on up near the attacking point. Some are lay observers with scientific grounding like Bertrand Russell and J. W. N. Sullivan. Now and then physicists on one battlefront or another pause to deliver philosophical interpretations. Thus on the mathematical front Dr. Planck, now an enthusiastic Nazi, year ago published a book on the nature and limitations of physical science. On the experimental front pious Dr. Millikan, who believes the cosmic rays are by-products of the creation of matter in interstellar space, argues that "the Creator is still on the job," that Science and Religion do not conflict. Dr. Compton has lately been brought to a similarly reverent attitude by the "free will" behavior of electrons and photons. But there are two men who are at home on both the mathematical and experimental fronts and who, on the interpretative front, lift highly articulate voices to trace for interested laymen the whole reach of modern physics and to discuss its philosophical repercussions. They are Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington and Sir James Hopwood Jeans.

Sir Arthur and Sir James are, at first glance, as like as two peas. They are both practicing astronomers of great renown. Astronomers value the Eddington work on the internal constitution of the stars, the Jeans's work on stellar dynamics. Theorists prize Eddington's Mathematical Theory of Relativity, Jeans's Dynamical Theory of Gases and Mathematical Theory of Electricity and Magnetism. For popular consumption they both write with clarity and grace. The Mysterious Universe by Sir James has sold 123,000 copies in Great Britain, 39,000 in the U. S. The Nature of the Physical World by Sir Arthur, a fatter and costlier tome, has sold 20,000 copies in Britain, 33,000 in the U. S. Both books have been translated into a half-dozen languages. Aware that Einstein considers Eddington the foremost exponent of Relativity, many an impartial appraiser is inclined to give Eddington a slight edge over Jeans as a pure scientist. But the difference between Jeans's influence on the lay world and Eddington's is not in any small disparity of scientific reputation. Prime difference is that they see God differently.

Since nature conforms to intricate mathematical equations, Sir James sees its Creator as a pure mathematician. Since mathematical equations are only collections of symbols, Sir Arthur denies the ability of science to provide any but a symbolic or partial knowledge of reality, argues for a sort of intimate knowledge by which human consciousness, a phenomenon outside science's domain, senses the unseen world of significances, values, God.

That is mysticism: Sir Arthur, a Quaker without a creed, admits it and explicitly defends it as such. But to illuminate his philosophical conclusions as favorably as possible, he first explains what modern physics asserts. He reassures his public by admitting that he himself cannot help visualizing the electron as a tiny red ball, the proton as a neutral grey. With resources of style, humor and imagination that would do credit to a novelist, he leads readers and listeners deeper & deeper into the mystery. He pictures an apple holding a conversation with Isaac Newton. He calls Einstein gravitation "a fastidious tailor"; he compares the physical world to a pig which most people know only as rashers of bacon. To laymen he thus imparts the gratifying feeling of having understood the most recondite concepts of relativity and quantum theory, which irritates his critics, one of whom has said: "For many philosophers, for most journalists and novelists, modern physics is simply what Sir Arthur Eddington says."

Some beliefs which Cornell's lecturer will present to those who listen to him:

The End of the World is foreseen by Sir Arthur as the far-off but inexorable result of the Second Law of Thermodynamics: that the energy of the universe (or of any closed system) must continually pass from a higher state of organization to a lower. Thus a falling stone represents organized energy of motion; when it strikes bottom the energy is dissipated in all directions. A familiar example of energy disorganization is the exchange of heat between hot and cold bodies. This constant shuffling of energy must eventually reach a point where no further shuffling is possible. The universe will then be a "uniform featureless mass in thermodynamic equilibrium," a clock run down. Time will not cease to exist, but it will no longer have any meaning.

The Expanding Universe. The theory of Relativity requires that in addition to gravitational attraction there should be a force of cosmical repulsion. This repulsive force is small enough to escape observation in the solar system; but it must tend to drive apart spiral nebulae separated by millions of light years. It is on this hypothetical force, not on observation, that Willem de Sitter and Abbe Lemaitre base their expanding universe theories. Telescope men find on the spectra of the most distant nebulae a shift toward the red end which indicates a receding velocity of 15,000 miles per second--so rapid that some astronomers doubt whether the redshift can be depended upon for a measure of the recession.

The Decline of Determinism is close to the heart of Eddington philosophy. The Battle of Determinism v. Freewill was already old when Spinoza made his famed comparison of man to a stone which, rolling downhill, suddenly became conscious and decided that it was moving of its own accord. As science discovered more & more apparently inflexible laws of nature, it became more & more deterministic. Then it was discovered that electrons jump from orbit to orbit by what seemed to be whims of their own. In 1927 Werner Heisenberg announced his famed Indeterminacy Principle, which holds that it is impossible to determine both the position and the velocity of an electron.

Sir Arthur, who has always disliked the idea that rigid laws of cause & effect control the course of events, seized upon these discoveries with both hands. He announced, in effect, that science had now withdrawn its support of determinism, was prepared to accept free will in nature as well as in man.

This is the assertion that draws the most hostile fire from Eddington critics. Gist of their fire: There is no reason to say that certain phenomena of quantum mechanics are uncaused simply because they are unpredictable. Physicists are simply unable for the moment to get to the bottom of atomic behavior. Soon or late they will, and scientific faith in determinism will be restored. The Eddington critics point out that an overpowering majority of scientists, including Albert Einstein, are still determinists.

Parson-Person. Arthur Stanley Eddington was born 51 years ago in the little town of Kendal in Westmoreland, where his father was a Quaker schoolmaster and where famed Chemist John Dalton was a Quaker schoolmaster a half-century earlier. Young Arthur was quite sure he wanted to be a scientist, went to Owen's College in Manchester, thence to Cambridge where he found time to play a little soccer. He was Senior Wrangler in 1904, Smith's Prizeman three years later. For seven years he was Chief Assistant at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. He was appointed to his present professorship in 1913. Director of the Observatory a year later. Since then, except for elections to posts of honor in scientific societies, events in his life have been few. Two things happened in 1930: he was knighted, and at the Berlin Power Conference he made a sensational speech on the utilization of subatomic energy. In Chicago last week he told a reporter that he was no longer sure that tapping subatomic power would be a good thing for mankind.

Sir Arthur seldom plays golf, but likes swimming, bicycling. He used to pedal all over England in the summers. He frequently has Sunday night supper with his good friend Lord Rutherford, quarrels amiably with him over the merits of experiment and theory. "Rutherford," he says, ''likes to pull my leg." He rarely has his trousers pressed, never drinks anything alcoholic. He lives with a sister, eats whatever is in front of him. He once explained why he had never married: "Falling in love is one of the activities forbidden that parson-person, the consistently reasonable man."

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