A. A. A. S. at Atlantic City

At the august American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Atlantic City last week Dr. William Francis Gray Swann, 48, president of the American Physical Society, director of the Franklin Institute's Bartol Research Foundation, played his 'cello. Professor Dayton Clarence Miller, 66, played several of 40 flutes he brought from the Case School of Applied Science. Professor David Eugene Smith, 72, of Columbia, mathematician, told about the Oriental books which he collects as a companion hobby to his other hobby of historical, mathematical and astronomical instruments. Dr. Clarence N. Flickman, who researches for Bell Telephone Laboratories as he used to do for American Piano Co., shot arrows from a bow. Austin Hobart Clark, 52, regularly looks after the starfish and sea urchins in the U. S. National Museum and the press service of the A. A. A. S. Last week he appeared with his beloved butterflies to help the other four entertain their fellow scientists.

Laureate v Laureate, The study of cosmic rays is "a whining brat which knows no law, is against the government, and has no real friend except his mother," began Dr. Robert Andrews Millikan. At the platform's left stood two glistening spheres on stark pedestals, capable of generating a million & a half volts of artificial lightning. From the shadows glowered the vast skeleton of a plaster dinosaur. All along the walls lay the paraphernalia of modern science. In every seat sat a scientist tensely waiting to hear how oppositely the two U. S. Nobel Laureates in Physics explained cosmic rays--Dr. Millikan, 64, preacher's son, head of California Institute of Technology; and Dr. Arthur Holly Compton, 40, preacher's son. professor at the University of Chicago. Although the Laureates spoke alternately, their speeches had the effect of dramatic dialog.

"Nothing has happened which alters in any essential way the views expressed in my last comprehensive report," said Dr. Millikan stridently. What had happened included: Dr. Millikan's sending electroscopes by airplane to measure cosmic rays over Peru, the U. S., Canada; Dr. Compton's journeying with an electroscope around the Pacific and over North America from Mexico City to north of Churchill on Hudson Bay; two young men killed carrying a cosmic ray scope up Mt. McKinley; Professor Auguste Piccard & aide ballooning into the stratosphere ten miles above Switzerland; Professor Erich Regener sending a free balloon with an electroscope 17 1/2 miles above Stuttgart.

Dr. Millikan's persistent view after 15 years is that cosmic rays are photons, or particles of light. He believes they originate from the creation of matter between the stars. But where they originate was not the nub of last week's symposium. What they are was the point. Dr. Compton declared again that they were electrons (and/or photons) coming to earth from beyond the atmosphere, or originating at the top of the atmosphere. When a photon hits an atom in the atmosphere, the atom emits an electron. When an electron hits an atom, the atom emits a photon. Dr. Millikan declares that photons appear first, Dr. Compton that electrons appear first.

Laureate Millikan: "At sea level under no conceivable circumstances could the secondary rays [electrons in his theory] make their effect felt save as they had energies greater than a billion volts, and no appreciable number of such energies were [or are] now thought to exist. . . . There is no doubt at all about the abundance of secondary charged particles up to energies of 500,000,000 volts."

Laureate Compton: "If the rays consist of electrons, [they enter] the earth's atmosphere in two energy groups. One of these is of such great energy . . . 30 billion volts . . . that it might be classified as photons. The second represents particles of about seven billion volts."

Laureate Millikan: "If others who have duplicated our technique claim to measure energies higher than a billion volts . . . this merely means that they are less cautious in their estimates . . . have had less experience."

Electrons from outer space would congregate more thickly around the Magnetic Poles than around the Equator. This effect Dr. Compton thinks he has discerned. Dr. Millikan contrariwise argues that if electroscopes were floated high enough above the Magnetic Poles, the effect of his photons in creating electrons in the atmosphere would become clear to everybody. Precisely such an accent is what Professor Piccard, who sails for the U. S. this week to lecture on his stratosphere flight, hopes to have accomplished next summer.

Laureate Compton (concluding): "I find no way of reconciling the data with the hypothesis that any considerable portion of the cosmic rays consists of photons."

Laureate Millikan: "If the time ever comes in which I should wish to ... change ... I hope I may be generously given the privilege without being too seriously pilloried or being subjected to too public an exposure of the fallibilities of my judgment."

The audience sighed. Dr. Millikan sat with his arms clenched across his chest. Dr. Compton scowled darkly. Laureate Compton (to a questioner): "Don't bother me!"

Laureate Millikan: "No controversy!" Pulsating Universe. While cheerful Professor Albert Einstein steamed through the Panama Canal last week on his way to California Institute of Technology, Caltech's optimistic cosmologists were at Atlantic City--Dr. Millikan fighting for his cosmic ray theory (see above). Dr. Richard Chace Tolman presenting a reasonable picture of a pulsating universe. It is true, reasoned Dr. Tolman, that the stars are blazing into heat & light, that as far as we can see the universe is expanding, and some eon may become dull chaos, as the Cambridge physicists reason. But, if we use Einsteinian concepts, we realize that heat & light are ponderable, that the heat & light of an airplane in flight differ subtly from the heat & light of a household furnace, that gravity may entrain the heat & light emitted by blazing stars. In such case, gravity catches hold of the whole expanding universe, pulls it together until constrained energy becomes too tense to hold. Thereupon a new cycle of expansion ensues. No reason to doubt this Einsteinian possibility, commented Dr. Tolman. After all, our only sure knowledge comes from "that small sample of the actual universe which lies within the range of some 100,000,000 light years."

Technological Unemployment. The scientists pondered technological unemployment (see p. 23), invited specialists to advise, made no attempt at conclusions,

Professor Walter Rautenstrauch, Columbia Technocrat, reasoned that machines have made "the substitution of kilowatt hours (energy hours) for man hours . . . inevitable." Dr. John Pease Norton, Suffield, Conn, financial writer, called for the use of an "Edison dollar"--one "Edison dollar" to equal 40 kilowatt hours. General Motors' Charles Franklin Kettering (see p. 55) cried: "We haven't 'overproduction' so bad as you think--every one of you wants a great many things he hasn't yet. But there really is 'under-circulation.' We have been measuring too much in terms of the dollar. What we should do is think in terms of useful materials. Most of our difficulties are just too much bookkeeping."

Cornell's Dean Dexter Simpson Kimball called for "balancing production and consumption through mutual agreements of producing and marketing groups, [which] may mean a modification of the antitrust laws." General Electric's President Gerard Swope advocated insurance, jointly paid for by employer & employe, to provide adequate food, shelter and clothing in times of no work.

Human Hybrids-Howell S. England of Detroit told the unbelieving A. A. A. S. that, secreted in Russian Turkestan where people with sensibilities cannot interrupt them, Dr. Elie Ivanoff and two other Russian biologists are trying to cross humans and apes by artificially impregnating female chimpanzees. "At any time we may learn that he has produced the first hybrid," cried Howell S. England.

Six years ago Serge Voronoff, gland transplanter, tried to get a child from Nora, a chimpanzee into whom he had sewn human ovaries. For a time Nora seemed gravid. But nothing came of the experiment (TIME, Feb. 14, 1927). The present Russian effort is to produce creatures who, like mules and catalos (cattle-buffalo), are more primitive than their primevally related parents. If by improbable chance any of the Ivanoff children are fertile, they may yield generations to visibly bridge the gap between man and ape.

Sapient Destroyers-Mild-mannered. quietly humorous, far removed from the cave man is Paleontologist William King Gregory (Columbia, American Museum of Natural History) whose discourse on mankind's past and future was a high spot. Excerpts:

"Anthropoids have a passion for tearing things apart, but in point of destructiveness they are bungling amateurs compared with their big-brained relative, man. . . . For untold millions of years the long line of vertebrates that led toward man was of unblushing thieves and robbers. Even now, the human face beneath its smiling mask carries the old mammalian trap set with sharp teeth. ... No wonder we suffer from grafters, gunmen and racketeers. The wonder is, not that so many of us find ourselves in prison, but that any of us have learned to keep out. "As soon as apes began to go in families and hordes . . . unselfishness of mothers, devotion of fathers and disinterestedness of friends began to operate. Such a patchwork is homo sapiens. It is hard to imagine any purely terrestrial epidemic or insect scourge that would wipe him out. . . .

"Man, with his high mental development, may well be an early stage in the start of a new class of vertebrates. . . . Taking the available evidence into consideration, it seems safe to predict that homo sapiens will survive this depression and many others."

Kudos-The $1,000 prize for the best paper presented at the meeting went to Dr. Henry Eyring, 32, research associate at Princeton, for smart use of Nobel Laureate Max Planck's Quantum Mechanics to explain how the elements hold together in chemical combinations. By mathematics he has shown how to make light hydrogen atoms spin clockwise or counterclockwise at will, how to introduce bromine into organic compounds most easily. By mathematics he has proved that pure fluorine is the least active of the halogen group of elements (fluorine, chlorine, bromine, iodine), a fact which controverts accepted chemistry.

Johns Hopkins' Pharmacologist John Jacob Abel, 75, assumed the A. A. A. S. presidency, succeeding Columbia's Anthropologist Franz Boas, 74. For 1934 president the Association chose Princeton's Astronomer Henry Norris Russell, 55, after he had presented his interpretation of starlight. The light might be the effect of 1) hydrogen and the lighter elements synthesizing into heavier elements, or 2) heavy star material burning to nothing. Professor Russell prefers the synthesis theory, for burning "would not happen except at temperatures of many billions of degrees," whereas "heat should be produced [by atomic synthesis] fast enough to keep the stars shining at temperatures of about twenty million degrees," the apparent temperature of most stars.

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