Plenty of Problems

/ do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

--Sir Isaac Newton

Modern scientists still feel as Newton did about the great ocean of undiscovered truth. In Scientific American, some topflight authorities describe the challenging mysteries that keep today's scientists baffled.

The Mystery of Matter. Matter is common stuff, but the scientists do not know what matter is. The more they dig into the problem, the more confused they get. Dr. Erwin Schroedinger, Nobel Prizewinner in physics, points out that light can behave as waves and also as particles. So can electrons, protons and larger chunks of matter.

"A limited volume of gas, say helium," he admits, "can be thought of either as a collection of many helium atoms or as a superposition of elementary wave trains of matter waves." By the same kind of reasoning, a desk, a battleship, or even Dr. Schroedinger himself may be merely a fuss kicked up by conflicting waves.

But Schroedinger is not sure of even this wild idea. He admits that neither he nor anyone else can answer the question, "What is matter?"

The Binding Force. Dr. Hans A. Bethe, head theoretical physicist in the wartime atom-bomb project, is baffled by the force that makes matter hold together. According to all known laws, the particles (or waves) that form atomic nuclei should repel one another. Instead, they cling tightly to one another with a force that is 1037 (ten trillion trillion trillion) times as strong as the force of gravitation. This force, oddly, has only a short range. At a distance of 2.5 x 10-12 centimeters (one four-thousandth of the radius of an atom), it diminishes almost to nothing.

Trying to explain the structure of atoms without understanding this mysterious binding force, says Dr. Bethe, is like figuring out the rules of a baseball game without seeing the ball. But he has a faint hope. The binding force has something to do with mesons, and knowledge of these elusive particles is accumulating rapidly.

Rays from Space. Scientists know that cosmic rays are protons or larger atomic nuclei striking the earth from space with energies up to one hundred million billion electron volts. But they do not agree about where cosmic rays come from or how they get so powerful. Professor Bruno Rossi of M.I.T., a leading authority on the subject, seems to favor, tentatively, the theory that the cosmic ray particles were shot out of stars at moderate speed and were gradually accelerated by magnetic fields in space. But he is by no means sure. "At present," he says, "no hypothesis about the origin of cosmic rays is unequivocally supported by theory or experiment."

Star Whirlpools. Another great mystery of space is why the galaxies often look like spinning pinwheels. Cecilia H. Payne-Gaposchkin of Harvard Observatory has no ready answer. She points out that a great many galaxies (including the earth's) are spirals, but she does not know how they got that way. It may have something to do with the turbulence and viscosity of the thin gases between the stars, or with the magnetic fields that are supposed to permeate space. Astronomers believe that the explanation of the mysterious spirals will tell them much about the history of the universe.

Tangled Proteins. Life has mysteries that are just as baffling as those of inanimate nature. Danish Biochemist Kaj Ulrik Linderstrom-Lang pays his baffled respects to the proteins, of which all living objects are largely made. Living cells, even simple bacteria, make proteins by the dozens, but human chemists so far have not synthesized any. The proteins' molecules probably have long central chains of amino acids. These are coiled like springs, and all sorts of chemical oddments must be attached at precisely the right turns of the spiraling chains.

Biochemist Linderstrom-Lang tells what progress has been made toward disentangling the proteins. Progress thus far is not impressive, and until chemists have mastered the proteins' secrets, they cannot understand how life's chemistry works.

Growing Up. A mystery that has fascinated philosophers for thousands of years is how a complete organism develops out of a single fertilized egg cell. Biologist C. H. Waddington of the University of Edinburgh reports that it is a mystery still. The biologists can bother fertilized ova in all sorts of ways, but they cannot explain how the apparently simple cell can, all by itself, construct something as complicated as a whale--or a man.

Seat of Memory. Some of the biggest mysteries lie in man's own brain. Dr. Ralph W. Gerard of the University of Illinois College of Medicine asks: "What is memory?", and then gives himself an unsatisfactory answer. No one knows how the brain stores its information. It contains about 10 billion neurons (brain cells), but if they worked like the vacuum tubes of electronic computers, there would not be nearly enough of them to store the information in the average, well-furnished brain.

One theory holds that remembered items are stored in the brain as electrical impulses flowing endlessly around closed circuits of nerve cells. This cannot be true, says Dr. Gerard, because animals whose brains have been chilled to stop all electrical activity can still remember. He believes that the brain has some "static" method of storing memories. Perhaps changes in the synapses (nerve endings) between the neurons build up a pattern of information. Then, when the brain wants a bit of information, it may "scan" the synapses electrically and extract the knowledge it needs.

Dr. Gerard is not sure of any of this, but he has a rather frightening project. "I think it is realistic," he says, "to hope for an understanding of memory precise enough to permit experimental modification of it in men."

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