Academicians in Washington

Last week the National Academy of Sciences, most select of national scientific bodies, gathered in Washington to elect 14 new members, make Dean Frank Ratray Lillie of the University of Chicago's Division of Biological Sciences its new president, read some 50 papers. Newsworthy discussions:

Einstein Confirmation. Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity (1915) contained two statements based on the premise that light had mass. One was that starlight passing close to the sun should be bent by the sun's gravitational field. That was confirmed in 1921 by Dr. Robert Julius Trumpler of California's Lick Observatory, who produced photographs taken during a solar eclipse showing stars near the sun's rim appar-ently displaced from their true position. The other statement was that light moving against a gravitational field should be "stretched" by the strain--i. e. suffer an increase of wavelength, which should displace spectrum lines toward the red (long wavelength) end. Thus, light winging away from a heavy star should show a definite redshift. Obstacle to confirmation was that another and unrelated spectrum shift existed (the Doppler effect), due to the motion of the star away from or toward the observer. Last week the same Dr. Trumpler announced that he had solved the difficulty by measuring the redshift of nine "O" stars (hottest, brightest, heaviest in the sky) moving along in clusters with other stars. The redshift of these nine showed a marked excess over that of their companions which could not be due to dissimilar motion, must therefore be due to the restraining effect of their powerful gravitational fields on their radiated light.

Radiant Copper. Dr. Ernest Orlando Lawrence, 33, wears octagonal spectacles and harries the atom with an 85-ton electromagnet in a ramshackle old building on the University of California's campus. Dr. Lawrence and his associates have done the most intensive work in the U.S. on artificial radioactivity. Lately the young physicist succeeded in inducing radioactivity in sodium. Since common salt contains sodium, the prospect immediately arose of injecting harmless but radioactive saline solutions into the human body as a cancer remedy. Few weeks ago Dr. Lawrence was appointed a research consultant of Columbia University's Crocker Institute for Cancer Research.

Last week Dr. Lawrence reported that, by whirling deutons (heavy hydrogen nuclei) between the poles of his magnet, he had induced radioactivity in copper, heaviest of the dozens of elements in which this behavior has been observed. In so doing he observed a curious effect which he could only interpret thus: The flying deuton, as if daunted by the massive copper nucleus and its powerful positive charge, split just outside it into a neutron and a proton having no charge to encumber it, the neutron slipped into the nucleus, leaving the proton outside.

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