Mysterious Phenomenon Research Articles

Desires as Causes of Actions

It is not easy to explain how people know what they are going to do. The phenomenon occurs: obviously we often do know what we are going to do; but its explanation is less obvious. When I say this, I do not mean that we have some mysterious method by which we discover what we are going to do, like forecasting tomorrow's weather. Usually we know without any investigation, and without the use of any method of discovery. You know some of the things that you are going to do tomorrow immediately – i.e. you know them without the mediation of any evidence. This is a rather mysterious phenomenon, and it is not at all easy to classify it. How is it possible for there to be any immediate knowledge of something which lies in the future? Is it like the kind of immediate knowledge of the past which is supplied by memory? If so, does this analogy help us to understand our knowledge of our own future actions? Or is memory equally mysterious?

Chemical Carcinogenesis and Cancers.

This rather large reference text is devoted to one aspect of the general field of cancer research. The senior author has published a similar text in 1942 entitled Occupational Tumors and Allied Disease and is currently chief of the Environmental Cancer Section of the National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Md. The text is well supplied with detailed classification tables (158) and the 15 chapters are well indexed and supported by 2,472 references including 209 of the authors'. The reader will find in this text a very complete review of one aspect of cancer study which unfortunately is not well correlated with the many other avenues of cancer research such as immunology, viruses, or biochemistry. A portion of the first chapter that reflects much of the philosophy of the text is as follows: Cancers, like all other diseases, are not mysterious phenomena of spontaneous creation, but are the result of actions of

The theory of gas discharges with extraneous ion supply

It was suspected for some time that the ion current J i required for establishing a cathode sheath and drawing out an electron current J e is less than the value (m/M) 1 2 J e required by Langmuir's [1] theory. This has now been proved experimentally. In the experimental device the main discharge space between emitter and collector was supplied with ions through the meshes of a metal gauze, from an auxiliary glow discharge. Probe measurements indicate electron temperatures of the order of 0·15–0·25 V in an argon discharge, confirming that all ions are introduced through the gauze. By multiple collisions almost perfect temperature equilibrium is established between ions and neutrals. The small ion drift current could be calculated from the measured electric and density gradients, with known values for ion mobility, and was found, in an example, about 100 times smaller than required by Langmuir's theory. The average energy of the ions at the emitter was calculated as about 0·5 V. This leads to the conclusion that ions of such low energy are not absorbed by the emitter, as was hitherto assumed, but are reflected with a high probability. The ion space charge in the cathode sheath is in fact very nearly as required by Langmuir's theory, but it is produced by ions which are reflected about 50 times at the emitter before they are absorbed. In the experiment given as an example it was found that somewhat less than half of the ions are thrown back from the cathode sheath into the plasma, and are pendulating between the plasma and the emitter, while the greater half is trapped, because they lose energy during their repeated passages through the cathode sheath, partly by collisions with gas atoms, partly by collisions with the emitter surface, so that they pendulate inside the cathode sheath, without reaching the plasma edge. This suggests that trapped ions may play a great part also in the hitherto mysterious phenomenon of the cold cathode spot in arcs. The reflection of very slow ions at the surface of solids is theoretically not quite unexpected, as these ions have insufficient energy to climb over the potential barrier, and may be returned in the first layer of atoms at the solid surface.

Symposium on chemical carcinogenesis. I. Environmental and occupational cancer hazards.

Cancer, like all other diseases, is not a mysterious phenomenon of spontaneous creation but the result of the action of definite chemical and physical, animate and inanimate, endogenous and exogenous pathogenic agents. It should therefore be possible to eradicate cancer hazards and cancer by preventive and therapeutic measures. Although both methods will have to be applied to achieve a reasonable degree of cancer control, it is obvious that for humane and economic reasons, the use of effective preventive procedures is preferable to curative procedures.

Feeding of Bamboo Flowers to Laboratory Rats and Mice

ACCORDING to a popular myth there is a baffling connexion between the flowering of bamboos and the appearance of rat hordes which spread around destroying crops and eating chickens, puppies and even babies1. The present inquiry is an attempt to explain the mysterious phenomenon of an abnormal increase in field rats associated with the flowering of bamboos as recently witnessed in North-east Frontier and Tripura areas. The problem was approached from the point of view of evaluating the palatability, the œstrogenic activity and the reproduction stimulating values of bamboo flowers for rats.

Cosmical Electrodynamics

The spectacular results of radio astronomy have increased interest in the broader field of electromagnetic phenomena in cosmical physics. This subject is introduced here by a discussion of the various possible types of disturbance which may propagate in a magneto-ionic medium. The results are then applied in some regions of interest, particularly those from which nonthermal radio emission takes place. In the solar atmosphere many otherwise mysterious phenomena are explained as electromagnetic effects: the heating of the corona to 10°K, flares, the violent motion of the gases and emission of radio waves, as well as X rays and the corpuscles which cause magnetic storms. Interstellar space, the interior of a mysterious nebula and radio source (the Crab nebula), and interplanetary space provide more examples of electromagnetic phenomena. One of the most fundamental problems concerns the origin of cosmic rays, now believed to result from electromagnetic processes. Evidence is provided of an even more fundamental process: the creation of magnetic field on such an enormous scale that nuclear energy sources are indicated.

Logic and Mystery in the Quarta Via of St. Thomas

LOGIC AND MYSTERY IN THE QUARTA VIA OF ST. THOMAS IT may seem that the demonstration of the existence of God has been treated so often that very little remains to be exposed by students of natural theology. By the very fact that these arguments lie in the realm of demonstration we recognize that every normal adult using his power of reason can discover, in one way or another, the necessity of God in the universe, In general, the words of St. Paul to his Greek converts, " The invisible things of God are made known to us through the created universe," 1 can be admitted by all. Though granting this unquestionably, we must concede that the formal logical process for the complete demonstration is beyond the ability of many ·people untrained in logic and philosophy. The five demonstrations employed by St. Thomas to reach a first mover, necessary being, first efficient cause, absolute maximum perfection, and first intellect or designer of the universe are powerful accomplishments in the fields of logic, philosophy of nature, and metaphysics yet to be surpassed by the philosophers of any era. St. Thomas was gifted with a mind that seemed to have no difficulty in grasping clearly the relation of the proper to the common, the specific to the generic, the single aspect to the whole. He was able to reconcile extremes and contraries within what is common or total. He resolved those problems which for more limited minds constituted paradoxes and seeming contradictions because he knew how to distinguish, analyze, compare, identify and unite better than most minds. Above all he recognized and admitted where mystery enters, marking the boundary line for mere reason. There is a medieval saying, "Omnia exeunt mysterium,"all things pass into mystery,-which seems to have been given more consideration by St. Thomas and many of his contem1 Romans 1: !tO. LOGIC AND MYSTERY IN THE" QUARTA VIA" OF ST. THOMAS 23 pora:ries than it has by most modern and contemporary philosophers . It is actually the quasi-mysterious thing that leads us on towards the more complete mystery-somewhat as the partial leads to the whole, and the limited to the unlimited. It is a fact that the intellect would not even begin to search logically or analogically for the completely mysterious cause of the universe unless it had first perceived a relationship (afterwards discovered to be necessary) between some mysterious phenomena in the universe of nature and this unknown Principle . Surely no one is so rash as to claim that he thoroughly and clearly understands such naturally mysterious phenomena as movement (as yet undefined essentially by either science or philosophy), derived or participated being, secondary efficient causes, essentially diversified transcendental perfections, and the ordering to ends found in finite beings. H anyone makes such a daim he is either so nai:ve as to be " skirting around " the question or incapable of catching the mysterious elements which have baffied great minds for centuries. Josef Pieper has recently emphasized the fact that the beginning of philosophy lies in man's ability to find wonder, " to marvel at " mysterious reality, so glibly taken for granted by the superficial minded. He points out that the capacity to wonder is one of man's greatest gifts and he deplores the fact that modem philosophy has substituted doubt for the normal movement of wonder.2 "Wonder signifies that the world is profounder, more all-embracing and mysterious than the logic of everyday reason had taught us to believe. The innermost meaning of wonder is fulfilled in a deepened sense of mystery. It does not end in doubt, but is the awakening of the knowledge that being qua being is mysterious and inconceivable, and that it is a mystery in the full sense of the word." 3 Peiper goes on to show that in the state of wonder one is not in a state of resigned ignorance, but searching for truth and on the way to it. One does not know fully or conceive satisfactorily some truths because, as St. Thomas reminds us, " the cause of our • Josef Pieper, Leisure, The Basis of Culture (New York, 195~), p. 133. • Ibid., p. 135. SISTER...

The Religion of the Hebrews

rTHE civilizing process may be briefly defined as the human quest for a more satisfactory adjustment to the universe. A civilization, to us, means a definite phase of that quest, the whole distinctive art of living achieved by a certain section of the race in some definitely defined range of time. Religion is habitually described rather as a quest for God than for a manner of living, a habit of thinking or believing rather than an art of conduct. Even to say that religion is a quest for God in human life is not a sufficient approximation to the truth as the records of religion reveal it. Religion is rather a quest for a way of life made with special reference to the possibilities which lie in the mysterious and inexplicable phenomena of environment. It is, broadly speaking, life lived under the stimulus of curiosity about the universe. Religion and the civilizing process are related as the part to the whole. It is entirely unnecessary, for our purposes, to fall into the extravagant error of those who, on the one hand, claim that religion is the civilizing process, or, on the other, that it is merely an excrescence of the civilizing process. We make no claim for the religion of the Hebrews other than the modest contentions that it was, first, an integral part of their evolving civilization; and, second, an influential part of it.

The Annual Meeting: Beyond Physics

Had I been asked any time last century to discourse to philosophers on a subject entitled “Beyond Physics,” I should have taken it as meaning “Metaphysics,” and have declined on the ground that they knew more about it than I did. But now that the subject has been suggested to me in the second quarter of the twentieth century, I realize that a certain number of physicists, especially mathematical ones, have gone beyond themselves in a semiphilosophical direction, have thrown our old physical ideas into some confusion, and have devised a number of complicated abstractions which they seem able to deal with by recondite methods invented for other purposes by the pure mathematicians. Of these they do not attempt to form any mental image, and do not encourage us to try to do so. They mistrust the method of physical imagery, or what they call “models,” which constituted one of the main methods of investigation in the nineteenth century; they are content to deal with abstract symbols, which presumably represent something real, though they mistrust the term “reality,” and decline to define it. The younger modern physicists are content to work in a nebulous region of unknown and perhaps unknowable entities, remote from our ordinary conceptions and everyday experiences; so that, whereas the old idea of explanation consisted in trying to express mysterious or recondite phenomena in terms of something with which we were more familiar, they now point out that our apparent familiarity with those simpler things was more or less of an illusion, that they furnished no valid explanation at all, and that the physical and engineering conceptions or habits of thought on which we depended were largely misleading.

On some basic laws of the origin, development and extinction of epidemics

One of the characteristic signs of infectious diseases, signs that allowed medical thought long before the discovery of the kingdom of microbes to single out infectious diseases into a special, peculiar group of diseases, is the fact that these diseases become widespread from time to time when we talk about the presence of an epidemic. The repeated observation that one sporadic case is often followed by mass diseases, just as from one thrown spark a huge fire spreads over a vast territory, made it possible for scientific thinkers of ancient times to say that the cause of infectious diseases is something that capable of development and reproduction, or, more simply, must be a living being. This truth, as everyone is well aware, has become a scientific property only since the time of the brilliant works of Pasteur and Koshʹa, whose name is associated with the emergence of medical microbiology as an independent scientific discipline of medical knowledge. The brilliant discoveries of the pioneers of medical microbiology brought extraordinary inspiration to the mood of those who were busy with the idea of ​​penetrating deeper into the mysterious phenomena surrounding the question of the nature of infectious diseases. Since then, the study of infectious diseases, which has made in a very short period of time a number of extremely important discoveries of both theoretical and practical nature, has been concentrated mainly in the laboratory, largely obscuring the methods of clinical and epidemiological analysis of phenomena for a short time. The enthusiasm for the successes of experimental bacteriology was so great that it seemed to many that the mere fact of the discovery of the causative agent of the disease was enough to consider the question of this infection almost settled. The persistent pursuit of the discovery of new pathogenic microbes was largely fueled by a one-sided idea of ​​the role of a pathogenic agent in the emergence and development of a disease: the presence of specific bacteria was considered the only necessary and completely sufficient condition for the origin of infectious diseases. Soon, however, when the first frenzy of discovery dissipated, when our knowledge of infection and pathogens increased significantly, we, says Muller, became much more humble. Where it seemed to us that we clearly see all the details, many new tasks arose: many clinical data, which during the first bacteriological enthusiasm were almost handed over to the archives, came into their own again, and, recognizing the extraordinary progress to which we owe to the discoveries of Koshʹa and his disciples, we must nevertheless admit that we are still very far from the goal that we considered already achieved." Both from the data of experimental bacteriology and from everyday observation of the occurrence of infectious diseases, it became clear that, in addition to the absolutely necessary presence of a pathogenic microbe, other conditions must also be met for an infectious disease to develop. These conditions, first of all, must be sought in the properties of the infected organism, and therefore we must consider infectious diseases as a biological phenomenon, which is a function of the interaction of two living beings on each other. And since the properties of a macro- and microorganism do not represent a constant value, but change sharply depending on external conditions, in the final analysis, when studying infectious diseases, we must reckon with 3 factors: 1) the totality of the properties of a macroorganism, 2) the properties of a pathogenic microbe and 3) a set of external conditions under which the influence of both creatures on each other occurs. These three main lines determine the ways of studying infectious diseases, and for the success of a comprehensive knowledge of these diseases, all these lines of direction turn out to be equally valuable and necessary. These provisions, however, do not determine the immediate tasks facing medical thought in the study of infections. The individual tasks of this vast branch of medical knowledge turn out to be very different depending on the goal that the researcher sets for himself, as well as depending on the approach to such a complex biological phenomenon as infectious diseases. The clinic predominantly has in mind the goal of practical servicing of a diseased organism in terms of treatment, diagnosis, proper care, etc. infection, to study the protective forces of the macroorganism, which it has in the fight against infection, the mechanism of recovery and immunity, in other words, to study the intimate picture of the combat between the macro and the microorganism.

Mysterious Acoustic Phenomena in Yellowstone National Park

Mysterious Acoustic Phenomena in Yellowstone National Park

EXPERIMENTAL STUDIES IN ARTERIOVENOUS FISTULAS

In 1890, Harris H. Branham 1 of Brunswick, Georgia, described an aneurysmal varix of the femoral vessels following a gunshot wound, and concluded his article with this comment: The most mysterious phenomenon connected with the case, one which I have not been able to explain myself or to obtain a satisfactory reason for from others, was slowing of the heart's beat when compression of the common femoral was employed.... This began to be noticeable after the wound had entirely healed and became more marked until pressure of the artery above the wound caused the heart's beat to fall from 80 to 35 or 40 per minute, and so to remain until the pressure was relieved. Compression of the artery of the sound limb produced no such effect. Attending the slowing of the heart was a slight dizziness and some dyspnea. Examination of the heart showed it to be free from

The bionomics of Glossina; a review with hypothetical conclusions

There are certain frequently observed and rather mysterious phenomena associated with the bionomics of the better known species of Glossina; such, for example, as the local disparity between the sexes and the apparently arbitrary distribution of the fly. It is difficult, if not impossible, to explain these, or at least no explanation has yet been put forward which is wholly in agreement with all that has been recorded of the subject. It appears necessary in consequence to consider some part of the generally accepted bionomic history of these liies as being based on insufficient evidence.

Gain of Definition obtained by Moving a Telescope

MR. M. E. J. GHEURY concludes a note in the issue of NATURE of March 27, relating to the gain of definition obtained by moving a telescope, with the words: “Perhaps some of your readers have noticed something similar and could throw a little light on this mysterious phenomenon.”

“Barisàl Guns” and “Mist Pouffers.”

IN the delta of the Ganges, dull sounds, more or less resembling distant artillery, are often heard. These are called “Barisàl guns”; but I do not know the meaning of the term.1 The object of this note is to draw the attention of the readers of NATURE to this mysterious phenomenon, and to the similar “mist pouffers” of the Belgian coast.