Survey Discloses 1953 Was Big Year For Intellectuals; Events Include Fakes, Finds

Each year editors of national journals ring in the New Year with memories of the old. These reviews almost always include the year's best kidnap, the annual war news of an outstanding murder, but never do they mention an event from the world of scholars and professors. And each year people continue to wonder, don't the intellects ever do anything?

This year, in an attempt to answer this question, the CRIMSON conducted a survey of the Academic Events of 1953, and hereby wishes to announce that scholars, too, have their days. In fact, Academic 1953 was a big year!

Controversial Diggings

Excited archaeologists from all parts of the world trooped to Eleusis, Greece, last summer to see one of the most litigious excavations of recent years. Archaeologist George E. Mylonas reported he had actually found the grave of Prince Polynecices and his five friends who had been killed, according to Greek mythology, in the attempt to capture the throne of Thebes from Polynecices's brother. The big controversy arose when Mylonas mentioned he had discovered the graves from directions written by the ancient geographer Pausanias who lived about 1,700 years after Polynecices.

Professor Vaclav Hlavaty of Indiana University an authority of multi-demensional geometry thrilled mathematical experts on August 8 when he announced that his spinor theory will solve Einstein's Unified Field Theory. The theory, which makes use of spinors usually used in quantum mechanics, claims the basis of the universe is electromagnetism. Commented Gorrett Birkhoff, professor of Mathematics, "These new things are so complicated it makes you wonder whether there's anything to them."

Surprise in Fine Arts

As the annual battle of fakes and frauds raged on in continental art galleries, the critics themselves became slightly embarrassed when an investigating commission reported that one of the world's most famous and priceless paintings, "The Ghent Altarpiece" by Jan Van Eyck, was not what it seemed to be on the surface. Paul Coremans, director of the Laboratoire Central des Musees de Belgique, said that many of the exquisite features of the painting which everyone had admired as the genius of Van Eyck were really the handiwork of some later dabbler who had painted over Van Eyck's work in an effort to revive the once-damaged painting.

Research experts pushed out another eye-opening original experiment in the field of Biology. Stanley Miler and Harold Usey received the nod for their study dealing with the synthesis of anime-acids in considerable quanities by the passage of an electric spark through a mixture of methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water. This awesome experiment appears to be the first demonstration of the production of organic building blocks from inorganic molecules. "Critically significant," says Carrol Williams, professor of Biology, "because it is the first experiment as to how much complicated molecules required for the evolution of life came into being in the first place."

The most shocking and most publicized news of the scholastic year came with announcement that the Piltdown man, for 43 years a landmark of Physical Anthropology and thought to be the missing link in the evolution of man, was no older than the oldest British citizen or the ape. Dismayed anthropologists found that the Piltdown skull was the concotion of the jawbone of a modern ape with the skull of a modern man--the most colossal fraud over to be executed in the fossil world. Insisted dumfounded Hallam L. Movius, associate professor, of Anthropology: "Most people in the field are virtuous, honest..."

New Life for Philosophy

Philosophy took a new outlook on life and language with the posthumous publication of a book of Ludwig Wittenstein's lecture notes. The book, Philosophical investigations, in already being used in Harvard's course in Epistemology and should, according to Dr. Robert Ziff, instructor of Philosophy, "produce a greater orientation of Philosophy in America in regard to language." Claims Wittgenstein in Investigations: "The work of a philosopher consists of assembling reminders for a particular purpose."

History, too, in 1953 took one of its most adventuous steps forward. After an old Yale alumnus remarked that "since Princeton has its Jefferson, why shouldn't Yale have its Franklin." President Griswold of Yale announced that, in association with the American Philosophical Society, Yale would undertake one of the greatest historical literary ventures of the century--it would collect and edit all the known papers of Benjamin Franklin.