Kinds of Scientists 55 



that has long puzzled the biologist. The neatness and order 

 that have been the hallmarks of physics and chemistry 

 have suddenly disappeared in a welter of what are seriously 

 referred to as "strange particles." In one of those ironies 

 which makes the pursuit of science a sure guide to Christian 

 humiUty, this embarrassing shower of inexplicable particles 

 came out of the atom just when men had begun to feel that 

 they had solved the problems of the structure of matter. 



A few years ago, because of the remarkable advances 

 that the past fifty years had brought to the understanding 

 of matter, physicists were on the point of deciding that their 

 science had reached the kind of semipermanent plateau 

 which Newtonian physics had inhabited for 200 years. 

 Further experiments were expected to tie up a few loose 

 ends and uncover a few more particles which would fit 

 into the theory already worked out to receive them. But the 

 experiments proved to be far more productive of new par- 

 ticles than anyone had predicted.^ Worse than that, it has 

 proved very difficult to fit these unexpected items into any 

 reasonable theory. How devastating this has been to the 

 physicist's traditional sense of simplicity, order, and beauty 

 may be judged by a remark made by the great Enrico 

 Fermi. Shortly before his death a few years ago, he was 

 overheard to say that if he had known what was going 

 to happen to physics, he would have gone into botany 

 instead! 



Oddly enough, just as physics seems to be losing its 

 orderly simplicity, botany and biology generally seem to 

 be gaining it. As a result, many former physicists are actu- 

 ally abandoning physics and going into what is now known 

 as the field of molecular biology. Even more young men 

 and women, who might twenty or even ten years ago have 

 chosen physics or chemistry as a career, are now electing 

 biology instead. 



