246 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1960 



Even the periodic table was an unfathomable mystery. Then came 

 the discovery of the electron and the proton, two entities whose exist- 

 ence had not before been recognized, and at least a promise of fur- 

 ther understanding was achieved. It was a faith in this promise 

 wliich caused many to believe that the end of discovery was near. 

 However, a barrier to further progress was soon reached. Many had 

 wished to invoke the possibility of another kind of particle — a neutral 

 particle — but conservative science, having with reluctance accepted 

 two new things, the electron and tlie proton, smaller than the atom, 

 looked with great distaste upon any upstart who wanted m^ore atomic 

 bricks to play with ; and it was not until, through experiment, a neu- 

 tral particle, the neutron, was proved to exist that progress went ahead 

 with leaps and bomids. 



We can readily understand the hesitancy of science to accept a 

 neutral particle. One had almost come to regard as self-evident the 

 principle that all atomic forces were electrical, and how could a neutral 

 particle exert a force on anything or, indeed, how could it be influenced 

 by anything? In the spirit of the times it had to be regarded as a 

 completely dead entity. Perhaps the greatest clash with convention 

 was the recognition of the fact that this entity, dead in the sense of all 

 understandable happenings, could indeed play a part in its own way, 

 a way so foreign to anything which was in the conventional picture. 

 It was not so much by the fact that the neutron represented a new 

 particle that science became disturbed, but rather that it represented 

 a new set of relationships between things, a relationship which was 

 not in the picture before. One had to admit what are called nuclear 

 forces as distinct from electromagnetic forces — a new world of law 

 and order. And what was more astonishing, one had to provide for 

 interlocking relationships between this new domain of phenomena 

 and the old domain which was so unlike it, and which, up to this time, 

 had claimed authority over all nature. 



HARMONIZATION OF THE SCIENCE OF TODAY AND THAT OF TOMORRO\^- 



And so, in contemplating the harmonization of life with what we 

 call the laws of inanimate matter, I expect to find a new set of laAvs, 

 laws which do not deny anything we had before except in the denial of 

 the claim of those laws to finality. And I expect to find these new 

 laws mterweaving with the old knowledge in such a manner as to pro- 

 duce a more comprehensive whole, a whole in which all sense of 

 barriers has become dissolved in an all-embracing harmony. For 

 many purposes it may be convenient to keep the new domain separate 

 from the old, as the maker of spectacles keeps his science of geo- 

 metrical optics separated from the quantum theory of light ; but there 

 will be bridges connecting all parts of the new territoiy with the old 

 domains in such fashion that he Avho travels across these bridges will 



