Philosophers in Philadelphia
The world may come to an end next year, next month or next fortnight. This possibility arises from a plain fact of astronomy. Last December an almost unknown star on the fringe of the constellation Hercules, far below the range of naked-eye visibility, was observed in the midst of a flaring explosion which in nine days increased the intensity of its radiation 200,000 times and placed it among the twelve brightest stars in the sky (TIME Dec 31). Only last fortnight did Nova Herculis 1934, on the downgrade to its onetime obscurity, become again too dim to be seen without a telescope. Astronomers do not know why occasional stars blow up, venture only the vaguest guesses. But in recent years no less than 65 novae have been discovered on photographic plates, and if this is a fair measure of frequency, it seems reasonable to suppose that every star becomes a nova at least once in the hundreds of billions of years of its life. If the Sun took its turn next year, next month or next fortnight, the start of the performance would promptly scorch every living thing on Earth to a crisp.
Such a catastrophe, however, would be a purely local one confined to the solar system. Philosophizing cosmologists are not much concerned with the fate of a trivial cluster of peewee planets. When they speak of The End of the World," they mean the death of the whole Universe. The Universe is being done to death, slowly but implacably, by the Second Law of Thermodynamics: The sum total of energy in Nature is continually passing from a higher degree of organization to a lower. A speeding train, a hot coffee pot, an inflated toy balloon represent organized energy; when the train stops, when the pot grows cold and the balloon is deflated, energy is scattered, dissipated, disorganized. Small reorganizations of energy are possible but always at the expense of a little greater disorganization. In such wise the total energy must go on being shuffled until no further shuffling is possible and its distribution is completely chaotic. Then the Universe will be a "uniform featureless mass in thermodynamic equilibrium"--a warmish, formless soup of aimless atoms and radiation in which nothing ever happens and Time, having lost every shred of meaning, rolls wearily on to infinity.
Thus the cosmologists. Sir Arthur Eddington has done more than anyone else to bring home to laymen the terrible significance of the Second Law. But nimble Sir Arthur, having reduced the Universe to a featureless mass, refuses to let it stay in that condition forever. He shows that the Second Law is, after all, only a statistical law, a mountainous piling up of probability. There is no reason why, sometime, a number of air molecules rushing helter-skelter about a room should not --just by accident--rush into a toy balloon and blow it up. It does not happen because it is too improbable. But the infinity of Time gives the most fantastic improbabilities a chance to happen. Thus, in a featureless Universe existing in infinite Time, it should eventually happen-- just by chance--that organized bundles of energy take form, features take shape, new stars and suns come to birth, new life arises and evolves.
Last week in Philadelphia Dr. William Francis Gray Swann, director of the Bartol Research Foundation and able popularizer (The Architecture of the Universe), took a group of distinguished hearers for a ride on the Second Law, got the Universe into an even worse state than Eddington's featureless mass, finally resurrected it. In Dr. Swann's vague soup there was not a particle of matter, all of it having been turned into radiation according to Einstein's sinister little equation, E = MC2. His thermodynamic-equilibrium Universe was therefore a vast sea of electromagnetic vibration, nothing more.
To get out of this abyss, Dr. Swann had recourse to modern laboratory experiments which show radiation transformed back into matter. Every physicist under 35, he declared, would agree with him that such demonstrations are valid. What apparently happens is that the quantum of radiation, scoring a hit on an atomic nucleus, vanishes and gives birth to an electron and a positron--i.e., particles of matter. The quantum of radiation is "mathematically irritated" by the atomic nucleus into giving up its existence. Here Dr. Swann ran into the difficulty that in his sea of radiation there would be no atomic nuclei to provide irritation. He wiggled out of it by supposing that in such a sea unsuspected irritations might exist. Then, once the reconstruction of matter was started, only Time and the free play of chance would be necessary to build new stars and suns and new cosmologists to explain them.
Dr. Swann's address was appropriately delivered at a meeting of the American Philosophical Society, oldest learned body in the U. S., founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1727. Its membership (435) and preoccupations are mainly scientific but not exclusively so, as it proved last week by electing to membership Frederic A. Delano, onetime Federal Reserve Board member and uncle of President Roosevelt, and Playwright Eugene O'Neill. Twenty-four other new members were elected. Four years ago the Society was bequeathed $4,225,000 by the late, scholarly Richard Penrose, brother of the late G. O. Politician Boies Penrose. The income from this fund the Society parcels out in grants to aid research. Twenty-four new grants were announced last week.
Other topics discussed at the Philadelphia meeting:
P:Henri Bergson's sense of motion and change led to the elan vital theory which presents a mysterious, inward, upsurging force as the driving influence of evolution. Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet Lamarck propagated a theory that acquired characteristics could be inherited. Most modern students of evolution take little stock in either Bergsonism or Lamarckism. Yet last week Dr. Ales Hrdlicka, famed anthropologist of the Smithsonian Institution, presented a view which seemed to flirt with both. Whereas primitive organisms are bundles of inherited reaction patterns and higher animals are resultants of heredity plus environment, Dr. Hrdlicka believes that man can promote or suppress the unfolding of his heredity by acts of volition. This may lead to actual physical or chemical changes in the germ-plasm, in the operation of the genes, carriers of heredity. "Such changes," said Dr. Hrdlicka, "if benign, may start differentiation, and under special circumstances, conceivably, evolution."
P:That the dark side of the crescent moon is faintly visible to man is due to light from the sun which reaches Earth and is reflected back to the moon. By spectroscopic analysis of this "earthshine" and by inferring additional details from the known phenomena of optics, astronomers can form a plausible idea of how Earth looks from other planets. Last week Director Vesto Melvin Slipher of Lowell Observatory (Flagstaff, Ariz.) told how Earth must look to Mars. The Martian astronomer sees a planet bluer than Venus and bigger. If he looks sharp he can see the polar caps shrinking and spreading with the change of seasons. Through rifts in the cloud veil, he discerns great blue-black patches which by spectroscopic analysis he finds, with croaks of envy, to be oceans of water. Heavily wooded areas look dark to him and he has difficulty distinguishing them from the oceans. The Sahara and Arabian Deserts look fairly bright, the clouds three times brighter still. In the African spring he sees the Nile valley turn dark with new vegetation. But unless his instrument is considerably more powerful than telescopes on Earth, he can see of man's handiwork not a trace.
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