Science: Detour

The "forced draft of war" is popularly supposed to have produced great advances in science. A vulgar error, says Professor I. I. Rabi, Chairman of Columbia University's Physics Department. In the current Atlantic Monthly, Professor Rabi looks gloomily back at the last five years —and gloomily ahead at the immediate future:

"The same profound questions which furrowed the brows of physicists before the war . . . are still with us. The physicist returning from the war has no vast amount of literature to digest. . . because his own dusty files contain virtually the last words written upon the subject.

"With atomic...

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