436 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1951 



Schrodingcr, Heisenberg, Dirac, Bohr, and others advanced theories 

 supported by mathematical and experimental data which reduced 

 even the tiny floating specks of matter left by Rutherford to insub- 

 stantiality. Their conclusion was that what the world still conceived 

 to be material points were in fact nothing but wave systems, "storm 

 centers of waves or ripples in an imaginary sub-ether." Matter had 

 become synonymous with energy. Thus, after a hundred years, the 

 last trace of Dalton's hard, solid, indestructible atom disappeared, 

 and in the scientific world the concept of substance ceased to exist. 



Even more puzzling, by 1927 it was found that although the velocity 

 or momentum of one of the centers of energy to which the electron 

 had been reduced could be experimentally established, and its position 

 separately determined in independent experiments, no method of 

 simultaneously determining position and velocity was available, nor 

 was any method of accomplishing this conceivable. After a quarter 

 century, science has still made no advance toward the solution of this 

 problem. Indeed, scientists have come to believe that the association 

 of exact position with exact momentum can never be discovered be- 

 cause there is no such thing in nature ; and this result has been accepted 

 as the "Principle of Uncertainty." The electron, the minutest of 

 the old material particles, has become merely "something unknown 

 doing we don't know what." 



A similar impasse has been reached by way of Einstein's theory of 

 relativity, in which the only meaning of matter is a region in the 

 space-time continuum where the paths through space are curved. 

 Today science informs us that we live in a world of shadows so 

 abstract as to make it impossible to form any mental picture of what 

 is really happening. Indeed, as Harvey-Gibson says in "Two Thou- 

 sand Years of Science," "The further science probes into the hidden 

 recesses of the atomic world, the more obscure and shadowy does ob- 

 jective reality seem, the less material and tangible does Nature 

 appear to be." 



Consequently it seems altogether natural that contemporary paint- 

 ing should depict a shadowy and insubstantial world in which 

 amorphous objects hang suspended in a state of watchful expectation 

 and uncertainty. Miro, Gorky, Baziotes, Stamos, the early Matta, 

 Kothko, and others exhibit quite consistently an extreme state of sus- 

 pension, and even in sculpture this quality is evident in such work as 

 Calder's mobiles. Indeed, suspension in some degree is a chief char- 

 acteristic of twentieth-century painting, for the solidity of the ground 

 under one's feet is a sensation which science has proved meretricious. 

 The only certainty left to man is that in this universe there exists 

 some kind of mysterious activity and some even more mysterious 

 equilibrium. In contrast to those who float and contemplate, others 



