Yale University - Banner / Pot Pourri Yearbook (New Haven, CT)

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'N' 'W A I aw ag, In 5 X K N55 392. i . Former University Librarian Iames Babb once confessed to an unfulfilled wish. He thougnt to inscribe over the entrance to Sterling This is not the library, it is within., So also the University is not a name, nor is it any number of buildings. It is people. Yale stands as a university on the contributions of themselves that men have made. For this reason we have chosen to portray a few men of the present. Yet there is a more serious, more personal reason. Students are also maturing men. As such we ask from time to time the question of what makes a man in this world. Professors stand at the pinnacle of the academic world, and are thus legitimate targets of questions. What ideals does a man hold? What fire inspires his actions, and what principles direct them? Perhaps the answers to these questions are more important than the actual information involved. Mutual shyness often inhibits dialogue, and much recent discontent may stem from a sad awareness of this fact. But interaction has not stopped. It is to the view that professors are important as men rather than titleholders, and careers important as develop- ment rather than the accumulation of credentials, that we didicate the pages that follow. O 8 B Q 9 41 'Tm not a positivist, Henry Margenau, Yale's first Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics and Natural Philosophy, firmly asserted- empirical methods are not the only touchstones of truthf' I thought of Newton and the apple, and listened with awakened curiosity in 11 Sloane Physics Lab. According to modern science, truth is not absolute . . . but we are approaching truth asymptoticallyf, Somehow the words seemed out of place within the cold, grey, rigidly commanding stone of the science complex. It seemed only proper that room 112 be pushed down Prospect Street into Harkness Hall, then the proper moral order of education would have been restored. But these were initial thoughts. In 1922 depression swept through Germany and Mr. Margenau left his formal study of the classics to become a farmhand in Nebraska. One year later, as a store clerk, he received an offer to attend Midlands College in Fremont, he graduated the next year with a major in Latin and Greek. Without citizenship papers, however, he was frustrated in his desire to teach Latin and Greek in high school, instead he read physics, became a graduate student at the University of N ebraska, and in his first year proceeded from introductory physics to research in spectroscopy. Yale was impressed and in 1927 Mr. Margenau came east. He began his association with Yale as an associate professor in 1931. The professoris eyes brightened as he related that as an Associate Professor of Physics he had pursued his first academic interest and sought to correlate the truths he found in the classics with the empirical evidence of science. 'R l 9 K A f 2 1