At Harvard

When the late Charles William Eliot resigned the presidency of Harvard in 1909, Harvard stood for Philosophy. Death, desertion and desuetude soon left President Abbott Lawrence Lowell little to boast about in that department. During subsequent periods Harvard has stood for Literature, Freshman Dormitories, Astronomy, House Plan, according to the energy of the faculty or the benevolence of donors. Currently Harvard is beginning to stand for Physics. President Lowell, on the eve of his retirement, apparently has determined that his successor shall not have the props pulled from under that branch of knowledge. If good equipment will keep good physicists at Harvard, they now have it.

This week President Lowell accepted the dedication keys of an astrophotographic building, and turned the establishment over to Professor Harlow Shapley, director of the Astronomical Observatory. The building has fireproof stacks to hold 800,000 photographic plates of the heavens. Harvard already has 400,000 such plates. They are in famed and patient Dr. Annie Jump Cannon's care. Harvard astronomers began taking occasional pictures in 1850. Every clear night for the past 40 years they have been adding to the collection until now it is a permanent record of things understood or obscure beyond the night. It is a towering compendium of dots and streaks in photographic gelatine which, to the theoretical physicist, suggest the whence and the whither of all things. By means of the Harvard plates three-fourths of all known variable stars have been discovered, the majority of new stars recognized, the spectra of a million stars recorded.

To view the collection the International Astronomical Union, it was announced this week, will meet at Harvard Sept. 2-9. It will be the Union's first meeting in the U. S. Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington is to be there, to deliver an address on "The Expanding Universe."

Visitors will also see something new in Science--organized research in geophysics. The Rockefeller Foundation gave $50,000 and Harvard is raising another $50,000 for a five-year investigation of how the earth is built, how it crackles in quakes and upheavals, how minerals were formed and where they are.

Last week a committee of five professors started work--Professors Reginald Aldworth Daly, geologist; Percy Williams Bridgman, physicist; Louis Caryl Graton, engineer; Harlow Shapley, astronomer; Donald Hamilton McLaughlin, geologist.

This unique research will start on the elastic and other properties of rocks. For example, how do rocks under great pressure conduct heat? This is something fundamental in the study of earth transformations. To prosecute the study Professor Bridgman has some remarkably powerful little machines. They consist essentially of thick, steel-jacketed cylinders carefully cast and precisely machined. The hydraulic pressure which oil puts against pistons in the cylinders is presumably less than the pressure upon things deep within the earth. Yet the man-made pressure changes the nature of elements. Thirty-nine of 48 pure metals which Professor Bridgman has squeezed become better conductors of electricity the greater the pressure. Iron becomes more rigid, glass less rigid. Zinc crystals compress seven times as much in one direction as in another. Most compressible of metals is cesium, presumably because its atom is highly complex. The greater the pressure on rocks, the greater the heat needed to melt them.

Harvard alumni were piqued three weeks ago when the American Physical Society and the Optical Society of America met at Cambridge (TIME, Mar. 7). In the excitement of dedicating Massachusetts Institute of Technology's new spectroscopic laboratory, the visitors paid scant attention to the dedication of the last section of Harvard's group of buildings for the study of Physics. Between the Jefferson Physical Laboratory (Professor Theodore Lyman, director) and the Cruft High Tension Electrical Laboratory (Professor George Washington Pierce, director) with its two 100-ft. wireless towers--between them was a space, which now has been enclosed by a connecting wing of workrooms.

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