Medalists

An anecdote which Sir James Hopwood Jeans told in Philadelphia last week when he received the Franklin Medal perhaps explains why the late great Albert Abraham Michelson dumped all his medals into out-of-the-way receptacles and why Sinclair Lewis tried to get Yale's Library to guard his Nobel Prize medal. Just before Sir James left England for his current U. S. visit he attended medal ceremonies at a small school outside Cambridge. The mayor was giving prizes to the children. To console losers the mayor announced: "When I was a schoolboy I never got a medal. The boy sitting next me got many. His name was J. Thomson. Did any of you ever hear of him? No. And look at me, I'm the mayor."

J. Thomson became Sir Joseph John Thomson, physicist, 1906 Nobel Prize winner.

Sir James's work is not quite the sort which wins a Nobel Prize in physics nowadays. The Nobel tendency in recent years has been to reward workers with the sub-atomic--X-ray effects (Taman, Compton), wave mechanics (de Broglie), electron count (Millikan), atomic structure (Bohr), quantum hypothesis (Planck), forces (Einstein). Sir James has the mathematical baggage and creative imagination requisite for joining that group. But he applies himself to descriptions of the universe and its relatively minute stellar components. It was for that work that the Franklin Institute deemed him worthy of U. S. Physics' top medal.*

In Philadelphia last week Sir James repeated his theory of the solar system's development: the sun and another star once upon a time passed close to each other, a rare celestial occurrence. The passage caused enormous tides in the gaseous sun. Streamers of sun material sped into the void, broke away from the sun, coalesced into planets.

This theory duplicates in large part the planetary theory of the late Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin and Forest Ray Moulton of the University of Chicago. Professor Moulton, now director of Utilities Power & Light Corp. (Chicago), some time ago flayed Sir James for not giving due credit to Chamberlin. Last week Sir James alluded to that attack by indicating that his and the Chamberlin-Moulton theories did differ. In what, his audience did not much care. They were there primarily to look at great men of science.

Another figure present was Professor Willis Rodney Whitney, nonresident professor of chemical research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, director of General Electric's research laboratories. Professor Whitney also received a Franklin Medal. The burden of his talk (he is a diffident speaker, Sir James a fluent one) was that there are infinite opportunities for useful and amusing work in industrial laboratories for willing young men.

Willard Gibbs Medal. If Professor Whitney had not been busy getting his Franklin Medal in Philadelphia he would have tried to be in Chicago where the Willard Gibbs Medal, which he already has, was being bestowed by the Chicago section of the American Chemical Society upon Dr. Phoebus Aaron Theodore Levene. Dr. Levene, 62, Russian-born, has been a member of the Rockefeller Institute since 1907. He began as a doctor of medicine, changed quickly after his emigration to the U. S. (1893) to the chemistry of living material. As a biochemist he ranks with the world's best. He berates in other scientists their feeling that life is inscrutable. Cried he last week: "Shall chance, probability, indeterminism become the foundation of the philosophy of biology as they are of the philosophy of the physical world? Shall 'life' forever remain a word without an accurate definition? . . . Step by step one mystery of life after another is being revealed. Whether the human mind will ever attain complete and absolute knowledge of and complete mastery over life is not essential."

*Samuel Insull, Chicago utilitarian, in 1914 gave the Franklin Institute (of the State of Pennsyvlania for the Promotion of the Mechanical Arts) funds to pay for the Franklin Medal and traveling expenses of the medalists. Sir James's expense check approximated $5,000.

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