Evening star., 1936-11-26
What does an electron look like?

What does an electron look like?
What are the politics of microbe?
The two questions are equally SEN
sible. DR.. w. F. G. Swami, former WASH
ington physicist and now director OF the
Bartol Foundation, said in lecture be-
fore the Cosmos Club the other night.
For 80 years there has been an almost
universally accepted picture OF the atom.
1t has been described as an almost in
finitely minute solar system with a
heavy central sun and planets revolving
around it-all within a radius OF few
billionths of an inch and yet with the
interplanetary distances relatively as
great as distances between the sun and
its family of planets.
Nobody, of course, ever had seen an
atom. The picture was purely imaginary.
1t was invented" DR.. Swami explained,
because at the time such an atomic
structure fitted better than any other
the phenomena of light radiation which
physicists were trying to explain. During
the intervening years the knowledge of
the behavior of radiation has become
more and more detailed, with the result
that the solar system" analogy has been
broken down bit by bit until very little
TcmdlUcQ. CNCIy IlluC SOhlCIilluS AiCW
was discovered about radiation the atom
had to be juggled to fit the new knowl-
edge.
1t was like, he said. a speculation on
how certain loads could have been trans
ported through jungle. The thinker,
by a process of elimination of various
methods of transport, comes to the con-
clusion that only an elephant could have
carried them. Therefore, he concludes,
there must be elephants in the jungle.
But then he finds that no animal with
a trunk could have gotten through.
Hence he concludes that these animals
must be elephants without trunks. New
information shows that only an animal
which ate with its feet could have car
ried the loads. Hence a picture of ele-
plants without trunks who eat with
their feet and use their ears for wheels.
Physicists, he said, got themselves into
almost as ridiculous mess in trying to
alter the picture of the atom to flt
changing knowledge-until it finally be-
came such a ridiculous a monstrosity
that nobody could take it seriously any
longer.
A better picture of the atom in the
light of present knowledge, DR.. Swami
said, would be that of an extremely tenn
peramental woman whose behavior can
not be predicted-but it is dangerous be-
cause somebody might epdow a research
to find out what kind of hats the atom
woman" wears. on the ground that it is
absurd to think of q woman who goes
hatless. In the same way, he pointed
out. one might ask the politics of mi
crobes on the ground that it is absurd
to imagine living organism without
political opinions
The long-accepted solar-system picture
OF the atom, he said, was due to pre-.
cisely the same quirk OF human thinking
that led to some Of the most absurd
concepts of the past-the yearning to
fit the unknown into the pattern of the
known. Thus the Egyptians noted the
progress of the sun through the heavens.
They explained 1t in terms Of their own
limited word and pictured fiat earth
surrounded by river upon which the
sun was carried In . boat. This con-
cept appeared very absurd . few thou
sand years later, outside the river-en.