European Atom

Lieutenant Colonel John Theodore Cuthbert Moore-Brabazon is a distinguished British authority on aeronautics, ''First Englishman to Fly in England," past president of the Royal Aeronautical Society. In his Who's Who entry, Colonel Moore-Brabazon lists his recreations as "golf, tobogganing, yachting." Last week he was engaged in another kind of recreation which took the form of a very pleasant altercation--not only typically British but typical of the well-ballasted wit of the man of science anywhere--with Professor Edward Neville da Costa Andrade, F. R. S.. F. Inst. P., D. Sc., Quain professor of physics at the University of London, editor for physics of Encyclopedia Britannica, author of The Structure of the Atom, The Atom, The Mechanism of Nature. Professor Andrade lists his recreations as "golf, poetry, collecting old scientific books and useless knowledge."

Colonel Moore-Brabazon is fascinated by the news of the atom's interior and behavior which trickles out of the cloister into the writings of such interpreters as Jeans, Eddington and Professor Andrade. But he is also somewhat annoyed by the paradoxes and abstractions which result from the fact that atomic behavior cannot be visualized or represented by commonplace physical analogy. In a letter printed by Nature last month he drew up a polite bill of complaint against the physicists. A chief item was that after laymen have learned to regard protons, electrons and other charged particles as nothing but electricity, the physicists adduce the neutron which has no charge and therefore cannot exist--although a stream of neutrons will knock the living daylights out of a block of paraffin. With equal politeness Professor Andrade replied, declaring in effect that it was really not the physicists' fault if atoms behaved in a way not explainable "in anthropomorphic terms of likes and dislikes," that physicists were not trying to be confusing but to obtain the best possible description of what Lord Rutherford called "a world of its own"--the atomic nucleus. "Now, perhaps," concluded the professor, "Colonel Moore-Brabazon will give me a logical statement of British foreign policy in the last ten years, which has puzzled me as ;much as the nuclear mechanics of the last ten years has puzzled him."

Last week witty Colonel Moore-Brabazon came back with a reasonably logical statement of British foreign policy and a picture of Europe couched in the physicists' own terms, as follows:

"Europe may be looked upon as a nucleus composed of individual protons, not, however, all of the same size or power, mixed up with a few neutrons of no charge and little mass. This is kept together by a strong force which prevents them flying apart, known as geography. This nucleus is not symmetrical as, included on its western edge, is a particularly powerful proton (Britain) that has 'wave characteristics' of a definite type peculiar to itself. In the south there is what might be called a neutrino (Italy). This has, some think, also wave mechanic aspirations. It is peculiar in this respect that its core is eternal (Rome) but its surround, some think, is ephemeral.

"Now the real trouble is that just as in the atom there are electrons in their orbits far away from the nucleus, so in this case there are colonies also revolving. These used to be attached, so to speak, to separate protons, but some years ago the nucleus was subjected to a terrific bombardment which shifted these electrons from belonging to one proton to another. One very powerful proton, in mathematical language generally designated thus /-, suffered severely in this respect, with the result that the nucleus as such is no longer stable. It has been found, however, that if the western proton adds to its charge (by re-arming), although a state of strain between the two protons is introduced, the nucleus qua nucleus becomes more stable.

"I hope I have put this very difficult problem in simple terms for the physicists. . .'."

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