Freedom to inquire into the nature of things is a rewarding privilege granted to a few by a permissive society. In telling something of the inquiry, I hope to be reasonably perceptive in reflecting the tenor of a time by de scribing a broader scene than my efforts encompassed. The telling centers personal concern, if perip heral and meandering, with several aspects of physical sciences that bear on biology, before eventually turning to plant physiology and agriculture. I hope neither to get lost in apparent complexity of nature nor to be simplistic to a fault. The main theme is on order in nature. My time is the 20th century to 1970 with personal involvement, since 1920, somewhat near many major changes in the passing scene. The turn of the century was a transition time between classicism and the future. The quantum theory was then formulated by Max Planc k to overcome a failure of classical statistics to predict radiation distribution in a cavity. Postula tion of quanta was disquieting to Planc k as well as others of his day in seeming to challenge so much of the firmly established concept of the con tinuum of classical theory. The quantum concept, however, was soon given a wider implication by Albert Einstein, who used it to express the dualism of the photon as a particle in the photoelectric effect and a wave in diffrac tion displays. Einstein also recognized photochemical equivalence; namely, each molecule in a reaction induced by light reacts by asborbing one quan tum of radia tion, or E=c/JNhv. Einstein, above all else, saw the necessity of relativity as a departure from Newtonian mechanics. His special theory of relativity led to the expression for the equivalence of mass and energy, E=mc2• The benign efforts of many in research, even including something so distant as my work on plants, has origins in these two simple expressions. The future of society for beneficent power or corruption by war depends