Science: Pacific Palaver

• Share

Many a Pacific Coast professor who cannot afford to travel East for the big shows of Science last week got a view of such proceedings when the American Association for the Advancement of Science met at Berkeley, Calif, for a light summer session. Important attractions for Easterners were Dean Gilbert Newton Lewis' supply of heavy water at the University of California, and Professor Ernest O. Lawrence's magnetic generator of 5,000,000 volts. Notable among the general palaver of A. A. A. S. members were the following points made by the following men:

Business Prophecy. There are two fundamental ways of looking at the future of business: 1) it is all a matter of chance; 2) what has happened is apt to recur. Economist Irving Fisher of Yale, an advocate of prophecy in business, contends that prosperity and depression repeat with mathematical regularity. Against this contention argued Mathematician Edwin Bidwell Wilson of Harvard. "An economist can find periods in anything if he uses the right system. But those periods would be but figments of the imagination." To prove his point Professor Wilson showed that an array of business statistics which displayed periodicity also obeyed the laws of chance. Then he jumbled the statistics and demonstrated that an apparent regularity existed in the jumble.

Diet & Acidosis. Acidosis, or the loss of alkaline substances from the body, is not a disease but a serious condition which aggravates pregnancy, infantile diarrhea, infectious diseases, diabetes, kidney and heart troubles. People who diet are apt to develop it, especially women. The women's risk, said Professor Harry James Deuel of the University of Southern California, "is associated with the inability of women to oxidize fat during starvation as completely as males. For this reason, an accumulation of incompletely oxidized end products, which are organic acids, occurs in the female.''

Heat & Cold. Dissipation of body heat through the skin pores of itself may produce a common cold, declared William John Kerr and John B. Lagen of the University of California. They agree with other investigators that the environment in which a person happens to be and the way he reacts to that environment are more significant than the germs which enter his system. Also attributable to environment, said the investigators, may be an attack of pharyngitis, laryngitis, bronchitis, even pneumonia.

Fancy Hole. President Carl Ewald Grunsky of the California Academy of Science died last week just before he was to suggest that, if all mankind cooperated, they might dig a hole through the 200 miles of earth's crust and tap tremendous heat and gas imprisoned under 900,000 Ib. pressure per square inch.