Big Wicks

"What the world needs is ... more light to illuminate what is obscure, more light to enable us to reorganize our intellectual and social and political lives. No one is wise enough to tell the source from which illumination will come. . . Thus spoke Dr. Abraham Flexner last week, making formal announcement that Dr. Albert Einstein had accepted appointment with the (Bamberger-Fuld) Institute for Advanced Study (TIME, Sept. 5). Dr. Flexner is the Institute's director, is seeking with his $5,000,000 endowment to make it a post-postgraduate school where Ph.D.'s will be understudies to the biggest wigs of learning.

Dr. Einstein will be professor of mathematical " theoretical physics "for life." He will continue to have his devoted Dr. Walter Mayer as assistant. As with the late great Charles Proteus Steinmetz whom General Electric provided with all monies he ever required for livelihood and experiment. Dr. Einstein's "salary" will be all he ever wants. He will be provided a home at Princeton, will work (beginning next autumn) only from Oct. 1 to April 15 for the rest of his active life; will teach only what, when, if and as he pleases; will spend his summers sailing his little boat on Berlin's Wannsee. Exclaimed Dr. Einstein when all this scholastic luxury became certain: "This is Heaven!"

Temporary shelter for the Institute of Advanced Study will be Princeton's new Henry Burchard Fine Mathematical Hall, a red brick & grey limestone collegiate Gothic structure. Its stained glass windows record the Einstein relativity formulas. Over a fireplace in the common room is engraved in German an Einstein epigram "God is clever, but not dishonest."

Another light of learning already with Dr. Flexner's Institute is Professor Oswald Veblen, Princeton's mathematician. Mathematics is a brace for holding apparently unconnected phenomena together. For ordinary purposes three prongs of that brace suffice--length, breadth, height. But for profound science more grips on reality are needed--a variable time, for example And not only many grips are needed, but flexibility in their operation. The mathematical machine, most solid of the sciences, is constantly acquiring new links and kinks. One of its cleverest engineers is Professor Oswald Veblen, 52.

When definite news of the new light at Princeton reached Pasadena, hearts burned among the staff of California Institute of Technology. Caltech was built to be the greatest lamp of Science in the U. S. Lumber, oil and electricity provided the fuel. Biggest wicks are Robert Andrews Millikan (Nobel Laureate, physicist), Arthur Amos Noyes (chemist). Thomas Hunt Morgan (geneticist). Astronomer George Ellery Hale gleams on Mount Wilson nearby. The late Albert Abraham Michelson (Nobel Laureate, physicist) used to measure light's speed a few miles to the south. Other brilliant scientists frequent Caltech for work & consultation, among them Albert Einstein. Last week Caltech made sure, and announced that Dr. Einstein would again spend several weeks there, beginning some time in December. His visit is to factualize by more measurements of nebulae speeds his present theory that the Universe has been expanding--as he told a popular Berlin audience last week--for ten billion years, "quite a tidy bit of time."

Caltech had something else to report last week. John Burdon Sanderson Haldane, English biochemist, physiologist, geneticist, mathematician, who had gone to the U. S. to attend the International Congress of Genetics at Cornell (TIME, Sept. 5), was at Pasadena to get a few jars of vinegar flies from Dr. Morgan. Professor Haldane planned to take the flies to England to study the mathematics of their heredity.

Genetics has grown up in a frame of mathematics since Johann Gregor Mendel's first observations on garden peas. Mendel's "Law of Segregation" notes that if a dominant characteristic (as red flowers) is crossed with a recessive characteristic(white flowers), all of the first (F1) generation of hybrids will be red. When these hybrids interbreed, one-fourth of their children (the F2 generation) will be truly dominant, one-fourth truly recessive The remaining two-fourths of this F2 generation will seem to be dominants, but will reproduce just as did their F1 parents --getting one red. one white, and two seemingly red children. A more per spicacious "Law of Independent Assortment" points to some form of a 9:3:3:1 ratio of inheritance.

By calculating the inherited characteristics of hundreds of generations of vinegar flies (ancestors of the ones Professor Haldane had in jars last week). Caltech's Dr. Morgan reached his theory of genes. Each gene in a germ cell controls, in the Morgan theory, certain specific characteristics of its plant or animal. A gene is too small to be seen by a microscope. On the other hand it is probably larger than a large molecule. The genes apparently lie like links in a chain the length of the chromosomes (48 chromosomes in the human cell). When two germ cells unite, chromosome chains of genes meet, mingle. When the united parent cell subdivides and begins forming an embryo, the mingled chromosomes regiment themselves, separate into companies for each daughter cell. Some of the daughter-cell chains are arranged exactly like chromosomes in one or the other parent. Other of the new chromosomes are random collections of separate links and short lengths of parental chromosomes. Much of this Dr. Morgan has been able to describe mathematically. Professor Haldane believes that mathematics can describe the whole complex process.

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