Flights From Chaos

THE MAN of the MONTH

[Whittlesey House, $5.50]

A GROUP of European scientists were discussing contemporary discoverers, and the name Shapley was mentioned. ‘You mean the astronomer?’ asked one. ‘No, I mean Harlow Shapley, the entomologist,’answered the other, a biologist. ‘But Harlow Shapley is the astronomer/ insisted the first, who was aware only of the Harvard Observatory director’s contributions on stars, and knew nothing of his painstaking and adept studies of ants.

In this new book, Flights from Chaos, one gets an even wider range of interests. It dissects the universe down beyond ants to the ultimate corpuscles of matter; and, working toward a synthesis, it sifts the clouds of witnesses that illumine our sky to plot the all-inclusive system which is the world.

Of the meaning of this physical world, Dr. Shapley ventures no explanation. His book is a project in classification, an attempt to show the material order of things.

It is a heterogeneous world with which he begins. Take, as a sample, that small quadrilateral known as the howl of the Big Dipper. The four bright stars which mark this familiar sky figure stake out only about one thousandth of the dome of heaven. With prolonged observation the unaided eye may discern a dozen faint pin pricks of light in this seemingly barren area. I nder the telescope the number increases, until, with the most powerful photographic telescope, 150,000 individual stars may be counted here. Scattered among them are about one hundred hazy patches which the astronomer identifies as outside galaxies, each a system of millions or billions of suns. All are in motion; Whirl is king here. There is hardly a direction in which stars are not speeding at miles and hundreds of miles a second, approaching, receding, pulsing, glowing steadily, giants, dwarfs, some doubles and a few triples vastness in such variety and intricacy that it seems indeed chaos.

To measure these immensities the astronomer must utilize light energy quanta generated by those smallest of all known physical things, electrons and protons. Thus the investigator of grand affairs, ‘big stars, long times, great spaces, is perforce associated also with a realm of littleness — the subatomic activities of protons, electrons, and quanta,

These are the most minute measurable units known at present; but the author questions whether there may not exist even smaller units of which our coarse-grained tools are unable to inform our coarse-grained minds.

‘It is a singular fact,’he remarks, ‘that electrons, in diameter, are just as much smaller than a man as he is smaller than a supergiant red star, the biggest body he measures. The observer is thus geometrically near the middle of the range. ... If the observer were as large as Befelgeu.se, might he fail in his survey to reach objects smaller than the meteors and moons, but perhaps go far beyond our metagalactic system in the direction of things extensive? Or, if he were of the dimensions of a bacterium, might not the sub-electronic world open up easily, though he fail to comprehend or measure the stars and larger parts of the sidereal universe? ’

Allowing this possibility, I Dr. Shapley begins his classification with a blank yet to be filled in — which may be interpreted as both a confession of ignorance and a challenge to the atomic researchers. From this starting point lie ranges upward, to corpuscles, to atoms, to molecules, to molecular systems, to colloidal and crystnil io aggregates, and so to star stuff, which ranges (through twelve major groups) from meteor streams to the Universe.

In building this classification the author weaves in a fascinating account of recent discoveries and speculations of astrophysics. Particularly interesting is his account of the supergalaetic theory, to which his own researches have contributed; and the explanation of the Milky Way as a galaxy of galaxies, rather than as a single sidereal system, with all galaxies gathered into a supersvstem, the Metagalaxy.

Even this does not classify all material, outside are cosmic wanderers, star dust, gases, and uncountable tons of radiation. ‘The greatest unsolved mysteries of the physical world probably lie in this realm of unorganized or dimly organized particles and corpuscles that move speedily and perhaps endlessly through intergalactic space,’ thinks Dr. Skaploy. For this vague substratum he suggests the name Cosmoplasma. Inclusive of the loose Cosmoplasma and the organized Metagalaxy is the Universe (space-time complex), with a suggested radius of one million million million million million miles.

Nor does this include all of Shapley’s world. As he begins his classification with a blank and a question mark, to suggest the possibility of something smaller than we now know, so he ends with a blank and a question mark, ‘believing it best, as a precaution, to leave the door open when there is so much fire among the colloidal aggregates.’ And the colloidal aggregates, one must add, include Dr. Shapley, you, and me.

GEORGE W. GRAY

A NEWS note from Harcourt, Brace, the publishers of Sinclair Lewis, states that the Nobel Prize was not awarded for Babbitt or any particular novel, but for his work in general. The exact translation of the citation on the Diploma of the Nobel Institute which was given to Mr. Lewis, together with the check for $46,350 and a gold medal, is: ‘The 1930 Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded to Sinclair Lewis for his powerful and vivid art of description, and his ability to use wit and humor in the creation of original characters.'

It is interesting to weigh these words against some of the fiction of the New Year,