THE ARTIST AND THE ATOM — BLANC 437 



resort to action, searching the void : De Kooning, Pollock, Tomlin, and 

 Tworkov, to name but a few among many. In the works of all these 

 painters we find a network of lines, black or white, which give the 

 impression of darting about the canvas. They are not contours of 

 objects, they do not model form, they are not mere decoration. Their 

 quality is movement. More than anything they suggest the track 

 of some moving object — the wake of a ship, the path of a rocket, the 

 vapor trails left by an airplane. In sculpture, Lassaw's "Milky Way" 

 is roughly analogous. There arc not many such phenomena in nature. 

 But one man-made product of the twentieth century seems closer in 

 appearance and in spirit to these paintings than any other. It leads 

 us back to the atom. 



No man has ever seen an atom, much less an electron or any other 

 subatomic "particle." But the movements of the "particles" through 

 space, their collision with atoms or parts of atoms, and the explosive 

 disintegration of the atom when a head-on collision occurs have been 

 observed and photographed thousands and thousands of times by 

 means of an apparatus developed by C. T. R. Wilson. This device, 

 commonly known as the cloud chamber, is simply a box filled with 

 moisture-saturated air and provided with a glass panel through which 

 the interior of the box may be observed. When a stream of alpha 

 rays or other subatomic "particles" is shot into the chamber, sooner 

 or later one of them is bound to collide with an electron or with the 

 nucleus of one of the millions of atoms of which the air inside the 

 chamber is composed. The passage of the "particles" through the 

 chamber and the consequent fragmentation of the atom produces trails 

 of gaseous ions on which the excess moisture in the chamber deposits 

 as a result of condensation. The paths of the "particles" and the 

 constituents of the shattered atoms are thus defined by chains of 

 microscopic drops, much as a cannon ball fired through a field of wheat, 

 though never visible itself, will leave a plainly visible track. 



The variety and intricacy of the cloud-chamber tracks are inde- 

 scribable and far surpass any display of fireworks or any natural 

 phenomenon of this type, and the closeness of their resemblance to the 

 paintings of the artists mentioned above speaks for itself. The same 

 darting quality, the same intricacy of movement and surface confu- 

 sion, and the same underlying suggestion of pattern and organization 

 appear in both. 



The Wilson cloud chamber and the photographs obtained by its use 

 have received widespread publicity for several decades, for it is 

 perhaps the most import<ant aid to the investigation of the atomic 

 structure of matter that the twentieth century has developed. 

 Such chambers were demonstrated in elementary physics courses at 

 leading universities at least as early as 1930, and sample photographs 



