Science Explores the Universe and the Atom
As the Depression wore on, financial support for pure scientific research (as opposed to applied research, which has practical applications) from the federal government and private foundations, dwindled. Nonetheless, there were enough funds to keep small groups of researchers busy at various universities and private research institutions across the country.
Pioneering work being done at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, for example, gave American researchers worldwide prominence in such fields as biochemistry, atomic physics, radiation, physiological chemistry, and astronomy. In this latter field, important work was also being done in other parts of the country. In 1930, at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, astronomers discovered Pluto. At the Mount Wilson Observatory in California, a nebula was detected traveling at twenty-four thousand miles per second, that is the greatest velocity ever known for a solid object.
At various laboratories around the country, scientists were busy reexamining the concepts of classical physics, such as space, time, matter, and electricity, in light of Einstein’s theory of relativity. Other scientists advanced our understanding of cosmic rays.
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Albert Einstein. (1879-1955) |
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"What is really beautiful is science!" Albert Einstein once exclaimed. "It is a great gift if one is permitted to work in science for his whole life." That is exactly what Albert Einstein, known as the preeminent theoretician in twentieth-century physics, did. Yet despite his devotion to physics and higher mathematics, he also found room in his life for other interests: playing music, especially the violin and piano; raising money for the victims of World War II; and taking long, leisurely walks around Princeton, New Jersey, where he lived and worked. He was a familiar sight, with a knitted cap pulled down over his long wavy white hair. Born in Ulm, Germany, Einstein taught himself higher mathematics, gaining admission to the Polytechnic Academy in Zurich, Switzerland, at the age of seventeen. He went on to earn a doctorate from the University of Zurich and, in 1905 at the age of twenty-six, published five papers about the nature of matter and energy that revolutionized the field of physics. His work attracted so much attention that he held the position of professor of physics at several prestigious European universities, ultimately becoming director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. He developed his world-famous theory of relativity, which relates mass, space, and time to one another, and published it in 1915. In 1921, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics and donated the money to charity. He won many other prizes as well, including the Copley Medal of the Royal Society and the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society. Although a heart attack in 1928 led to his resignation from teaching, Einstein continued to be a major influence in the scientific world. In 1933, Adolf Hitler condemned him as a Jew and put a price on his head. Einstein fled from Berlin to the United States, where he settled at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. He was one of many European émigrés to the United States in the 1930s who had a pronounced impact on science and culture. At Princeton, Einstein devoted himself to further research, winning the Franklin Institute Medal in 1935. In 1939, he and a Hungarian émigré physicist, Leo Szilard, wrote a now-famous letter to President Roosevelt, warning about the possibility of the atomic bomb. Noting that German scientists had already accomplished nuclear fission, they wrote that "extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed." Roosevelt’s top military officials dismissed the letter, considering such a possibility unlikely. In 1940, Einstein became a citizen of the United States, saying, "As long as I have any choice I will stay only in a country where political liberty, toleration, and equality of all citizens before the law is the rule."
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Still others conducted important groundbreaking experiments in atom smashing. In 1931, for example, Columbia University physicist Harold C. Urey used a spectroscope to discover deuterium, a heavy isotope of hydrogen, later used in production of the atom bomb. In 1932, Carl D. Anderson of the California Institute of Technology discovered the positron, a twin of the negative electron, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Robert J. Van de Graaff built a machine that shot an atom through a series of electromagnetic fields, thus allowing scientists to isolate particular isotopes. Researchers in several laboratories raced to be the first to create a chain reaction in the fission of uranium.
All of these experiments made the public aware that scientists were on the brink of discovering ever-greater sources of power. However, by the end of the decade, in response to Germany’s aggression in Europe, these experiments became more secretive for security reasons. They did not become public again — but then very dramatically so — until August 6, 1945, with the explosion of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima, Japan, when the after-effects became known.
In the field of genetics, the age-old question of heredity versus environment was given new insight by anthropologists such as Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. They investigated whether people’s behavior and values are influenced more by inherited characteristics or by how they are raised. Cal Tech research on the vinegar fly traced how genes mutate during evolution, leading to new discoveries about genetics and chromosomes.
