April, 1024
INDUSTRIAL AAtD EhTGINEERING CHJCMIXTRY
greater public appreciation would enlarge their power of acSOCIETY may complishment, and our AMERICAN CHEMICAL well give itself the task of bringing about a wider acquaintance with the achievements of our science, in order that our citizens may come to look upon the work of the chemist as having equal importance and merit with other work the methodci of which they better understand. L. H. BAEKELAND
It Pays to Attend Meetings ANY of our readers again come to the question, c8n I afford to attend the approaching meeting of the AMERIC~N CHEMICAL SOCIETY? The real question is; can you afford not to do so? We recently heard a man who attends svlch meetings with regularity and whose interests are so broad that he attends many divisions, say that a t the Pittsburgh meeting he heard a paper and the discussion which followed on a subject somewhat remote from his own, and while he listened to the discussion he realized that a similar attack could be made upon another problem. The result htts been thousands of dollars spent by outside interests upon research in his laboratory. As has been repeatedly emphasized, the discussions in the meetings, in the hallways, and in the lobbies of hotels cannot be adequately reported, and most of them never find their way into print. They are, however, invaluable to the man who would keep abreast of his science. The indications are that the Washington meeting will be the largest in the history of the SOCIETY.The people with whom you want to discuss B troublesome point will be there. The meeting has been so arranged that there will be time to confer with people, to see the wonderful laboratories in Washington, and to make of that week a combination of business and pleasure which cannot Eail to make large returns upon your investment of time and money.
Settled by Decree CCORDING to the daily press, the governor of North A Carolina does not believe that man descended from the monkey or any other animal, and therefore a decree has gone forth that evolution as it is popularly understood shall not be tiaught in the schools of North Carolina. Notwithstanding this decree, we surmise that the development of the higher from the lower forms of life will continue, and perhaps may even reach the place where evolution will be properly understood by those who now refuse to give the subject sufficient study to enable them to discuss it intelligewy. At all times men have been wont to settle things by decree, quite without regard to natural laws. There is the instance of a state legislature the lower house of which passed a law that thereafter x should be 3 and not the 3.1416 which the mathematicians insisted upon. These instances are in a class with the act of another state legislature, which refused to grant an appropriation for the purchase of books for the state library on the logical ground that no one had yet read all the books in the library. Then there was the congressman who was firm in his belief that lime juice is made from lime water. But if we continue the examples further some one will accuse us of perpetrating old jokes. Some things simply oannot he settled by decree. The lbws of science are among them.
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Encouraging Signs LTHOUGH there are still people who will argue that as A soon as scientific work begins to yield results that appear practicable it should be discontinued, and we have those who have no patience with research that is not directly aimed a t profit-producing results, it is becoming increasingly evident to all that industrial progress depends upon the cumulative value of those various small bits of truth gradually added to the whole by so-called pure research. While it may be that if theories are of any value they will ultimately lead to some practical use, we all rejoice that the campaign on behalf of fundamental work is constantly bringing fresh results that are most encouraging. A short time ago a gift of the General Electric Company to the Cavendish Laboratory to aid in pure research was announced and applauded. Now comes an appropriation by the International Education Board, one of the projects of tho Rockefeller interests, to the laboratory at the University ol Copenhagen, where Niels Bohr has done his remarkable work upon the structure of the atom which bids fair to revolutionize many of our scientific theories. Heretofore the Danish Government and a group of private individuals have maintained the institute. The forty thousand dollar appropriation was voted following a series of lectures by the eminent physicist a t Yale University. The money is to be used in adding about ten rooms to the buildings so that the institute may be in position to receive and offer proper working conditions to such foreign physicists as are qualified and may be accepted to workunder Dr. Bohr’s direction. It will also supply the means whereby equipment for the further investigations of Dr. Bohr upon the infra-red region of the spectrum and the investigation of X-ray spectra may go forward. Physicists from the United States, India, South Africa, and Australia have already applied for permission to work under Dr. Bohr when the laboratory is enlarged. There comes, then, to the Institute for Theoretical Physics of the University for Copenhagen support for the work of a man who is an acknowledged leader in his field. And the endowment of an individual, so to speak, who thus shows his qualifications for leadership, is quite in line with what scientists have constantly urged. We all know men who are required to teach or to perform some special work in an industrial laboratory who would constitute one of the best investments that could be made if supplied with funds and facilities and given carte blanche to go their own way. While the importance of pure research has long been acknowledged in England and other foreign countries, we are gradually approaching a time in our own country when such work will be adequately endowed. When R. A. Millikan was recently awarded the Edison Medal of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, he took occasion to emphasize the trend toward the recognition of fundamental work, in the follo~~-ing words: For, in the last analysis, the thing in this world which is of most supreme importance, indeed the thing which is of most practical value to the race, is not, after aU, useful discovery or invention, but that which lies far back of them, namely, “the way men think”-the kind of conceptions which they have about the world in which they live and their own relations t o it. It is this expanding of the mind of man, this clarifying of his conceptions through the discovery of truth which is the immediate object of all studies in the field of pure science. Behind t h a t object, however, is the conviction that human life will ultimately be enriched by every increase in man’s knowledge of the way in which nature works, since obviously the first step in the beneficent control of nature is a thorough understanding of her.
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And if you wish to see the practical result of ‘ think,” look a t the difference between our own ci
