“We owe to Sir Ernest Rutherford [the great English physicist] what is basic in our actual ideas about atoms,” says Urbain.[102] This savant was once a pupil of Pierre Curie, discoverer of radium, and speaks with authority. And he asks: “As to the atom, have we attained something real, or only a model, symbolic of observed phenomena?” He then answers his own question by declaring that “it is difficult to say.... Rutherford allowed the electrons [in the atom] to radiate, since it was supposed that the model must obey the standard laws.” The difficulty was that such an atom as Rutherford’s ought, all agreed, to be luminous. And all atoms are not luminous. Another difficulty was this. “Each outer electron must gradually approach the central nucleus,”--I still quote from Urbain--“finally falling into it, which means death.” Presumably it is not intended to be implied that the same electrons which were allowed to radiate ended by falling into the thing they radiated from. Anyway, Urbain continues: “We might have accepted the death of the stars ... but we cannot that of the atoms. That would mean a definite death of the universe.” For once, even scientists were appalled. What was to be done? Something, evidently. So an astronomer named Bohr rose to the occasion. He constructed--not another atom, but another “model.” This one was guaranteed to last forever, and if real atoms would only conform to it all would be well. “Bohr’s atom,” says Urbain, “is not a clear explanation, for the privileged orbits [he gave the electrons ‘privileged orbits’ to keep them contented without either flying off into space or into the deadly nucleus] are not understandable in themselves; neither are the quanta of energy set free by the electrons in leaping from one privileged orbit to another.... Bohr’s models have their own laws with no necessary relation to the law of ordinary experiments, and he thus turned scientific thought into a new and unknown direction.... In the future are theories to be built upon such contradictions?” Apparently they are. We have now observed so many things that it is flatly impossible to grapple with them, or to find out which ones are so and which are not. The “new and unknown direction” into which scientific thought has been turned is clearly that of imagining artificial working-models known to be at variance with reality, getting what satisfaction can be had from the models, and leaving reality to shift for itself until some really serious collision with fact damages the model beyond repair. It is not such a new direction, after all, but merely a new frankness which acknowledges the shortcomings of a hypothesis from the start without a period of pretending that it is a genuine “explanation.” Every new discovery makes the universe--not easier, but more difficult to explain. Progress uncovers our ignorance much faster than it brings us knowledge--arm-chair progress, of course excepted.