Weak Sister Science

Before the week is out a council of twelve, ten of them leading experts in special academic fields, will meet to determine peacetime uses for the University's mechanical calculator. Still under contract to the U.S. Navy, the "mechanical brain" which proved its applicability to the problems of death throughout the war is now to be turned to the uses of life. The faculty committee, named yesterday and headed by Provost Buck, is charged with deciding whether the peacetime occupation of the device will be in the social or natural sciences. Represented in the group are the fields of astrophysics and economics, engineering and social relations, as well as mathematician and laboratory director Howard H. Aiken.

When the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, the resulting explosion touched off not only the most efficient mass slaughter in written history, but a profound if remote jolt to the student of social science. No one needed further proof that the technical genius of man had far outrun the knowledge of his own perversity. The science of the twentieth century laboratory had left the science of the social thinker in the stone age. The committee membership cannot help but recognize this fact.

The social scientists are not entirely to blame for the gap between these two broad areas of knowledge, for their brethren have had the early advantage of precise mensuration not to mention far more liberal public endowment. While the lab technician can talk in milligrams and light years, the economist still grapples with unmeasurable concepts like "marginal utility."

Because the natural scientists have always dealt in quantitative terms, they are chafing at the bit to get at the most advanced calculator in existence. "Physicists know what they want to do with it," observes committee-member Samuel A. Stouffer of the department of Sociology, "whereas we will know much better what to do with the opportunity a year from now."

In their eagerness to put the calculator to work, the committee should not let the preparedness of the physicists outweigh the need of the psychologist. The latter must be given a little grace to reorient his thinking. As Professor Leontief, also a member, of the committee, points out, his fellow economists have intentionally pursued their investigations in broad, vague terms, because of the tediousness and expense of dealing mathematically with the voluminous statistics confronting them. The genius of the calculator is that it can deal with many variables operating simultaneously. In the fluid and changing battleground of economics, sociology, and social relations, one or two unknowns added to the equation render it practically insoluble by pencil and paper. For perhaps the first time the social scientist has the opportunity to face, instead of "assume" the conditions of his problem. Just because he never has struggled with precise reality before is no reason why the Provost's committee shouldn't give him a chance--on the calculator.