278 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1931 



going on for millions upon millions of years and is presumably 

 going on now. This tended to direct attention away from the Deus 

 ex machina, to identify the Creator with His universe, to strengthen 

 (he theological doctrine of immanence, which represents substan- 

 tially the philosophic position of Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, New- 

 ton, Francis Bacon, and most of the great minds of history down 

 to Einstein. 



Neither evolution nor evolutionists have in general been athe- 

 istic — Darwin least of all — but their influence has undoubtedly been 

 to raise doubts about the legitimac}^ of the dogma of the Deus ex 

 machina and of the correlative one of the heat-death. This last 

 dogma rests squarely on the assumption that we, infinitesimal mites 

 on a speck of a world, know all about how the universe behaves in 

 all its parts, or more specifically, that the radiation laws which 

 seem to us to hold here can not possibly have any exceptions any- 

 where, even though that is precisely the sort of sweeping generaliza- 

 tion that has led us physicists into error half a dozen times during 

 the past 30 years, and also though we know quite well that condi- 

 tions prevail outside our planet which we can not here duplicate or 

 even approach. Therefore the heat-death dogma has always been 

 treated with reserve by the most thoughful of scientific workers. No 

 more crisp or more cogent statement of what seems to me to be the 

 correct position of science in this regard has come to my attention 

 than is found in the following recent utterance of Gilbert N. Lewis, 

 namely, " Thermodynamics gives no support to the assumption that 

 the universe is running down. Gain of entroj)y aVicm/s vieans loss 

 of information and nothing more.^'' 



The fourth discovery bearing on our theme was the discovery 

 that the dogma of the immutable elements was definitely wrong. By 

 the year 1900 the element radium had been isolated and tlie mean 

 lifetime of its atoms found to be about 2,000 years. This meant def- 

 initely that the radium atoms that are here now have been formed 

 within about that time; and a year or two later the element helium 

 was definitely observed to be growing out of radium here and now. 

 This raised insistently the question as to whether the creation, or 

 at least the formation, of all the elements out of something else may 

 not be a continuous process — stupendous change in viewpoint the 

 discovery of radioactivity brought about, and a wholesome lesson 

 of modesty it taught to the physicist. But a couple of years later, 

 uranium and thorium, the heaviest known elements, were definitely 

 caught in the act of begetting radium, and all the allied chain of 

 disintegration products. Since, however, the lifetime of the parent 

 atom, uranium, has now been found to be a billion years or so, we 



