February 1986

Agricultural scientists are marveling as they ~ork on better harvesting techniques of some high-quality plants that have survived unknown for centuries in different parts of the world. The Austrian pea (above), an edible legume, has surprised American farmers who have successfully harvested it as a commercial crop.

The pea grows extremely fast and enriches the ,soil by producing nitrogen. The f()ur-wing saltbush (left) is drought- and salt-resistant, protein-rich and provides good grazing for cattle. Among the better known wonder crops is the amaranth (right), which grows in India . . Its seed averages nearly 16 percent protein arid is also rich in lysine, vitamins and minerals.

Some types can be eaten in salads or cooked like spinach.

Other strains are better suited for grain production. The 2.5meter-tall plant has a bushy head packed with thousands of tiny seeds.

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February 1986

SPAN 2 Making the Familiar Strange

by Doug Stewart

First Person Singular

by Nayantara Sahgal

12 A Bill of Rights

by A.G. Noorani

16 A Painting Comes Home

by Thomas C. Dove

17 Return of the Two-Term Presidency

21 To the Edge of the Universe

by John Noble Wilford

29 Halley's Hello!

30 Making New Connections An Interview with Ambassador John Gunther Dean

32

On the Lighter Side

33 Stalking Intelligence

by Signe Hammer

38 Focus On ...

40

44

An Indian Lawyer Meets Her Honor

by Sunil Gupta

46 Minding Indian Art

by Shehbaz Safrani

Publisher Editor

James A. McGinley Warren W. McCurdy

Managing Editor

Himadri Dhanda

Assistant Managing Editor

Krishan Gabrani

Senior Editor

Aruna Dasgupta

Copy Editor Editorial Assistant Photo Editor

Nirmal Sharma Rocque Fernandes Avinash Pasricha

Associate Art Director

Kanti Roy

Assistant Art Director

Bimanesh Roy Choudhury

Chief of Production

Awtar S. Marwaha

Circulation Manager

Y. P. Pandhi

Photographic Service

USIS Photographic Services Unit

Photographs: Front cover-courtesy Washington & Lee University, Lexington, Virginia. 2-Richard Howard. 3-Mark Kauffman. 5Richard Howard. 8 top-Mark Kauffman (2); bottom-Richard Howard (2). 10 top right-Jill Krementz. 11 top right-Helen Marcus, courtesy Alfred A. Knopf Inc.; bottom right-Avinash Pasricha.

21-Rudolph Schild, courtesy Smithsonian Institution. 24-25-NASA/ Jet Propulsion Laboratory. 28 left-Thomas Stephenson, Smithsonian Institution; top right-Dr. Bradford A. Smith, University of Arizona & Dr. Richard J. Terrile, Jet Propulsion Laboratory; bottom rightRudolph Schild, Smithsonian Institution. 29-courtesy Nehru Planetarium, New Delhi. 30-31-Avinash Pasricha. 33-courtesy Robert Sternberg. 35-iIlustrations by Suhas Nimbalkar. 38 top left-National Bureau of Standards; right-B. Fitzgerald; 38 bottom, 39 left-R.K. Sharma; 39 right-Avinash Pasricha. 40-courtesy Justice O'Connor. 41 bottom-White House. 44-courtesy Sunil Gupta. 46-purchased with funds provided by The Louis and Erma Zalk Foundation and Dr. and Mrs. Joseph Pollock. 47 top left-gift of Mr. and Mrs. Harry Lenart; top right-from the Nasli and Heeramaneck collection; right-gift of Mr. and Mrs. Michael Douglas. 46-48-all photos courtesy Dr. Pratapaditya Pal. Inside back cover-John Littleton except top right and back cover

by Brian Westveer.

Published by the United States Information Service, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001, on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. The opinions expressed in this maga¡ zine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Government. Printed at Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad, Haryana.

Use of SPAN articles in other publications is encouraged. except when copyrighted. For permission write to the Editor.

Price of magazine. one year's subscription (12 issues) Rs.25;

single copy. Rs.4.

For change of address send an old address from a recent SPAN envelope

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Front cover: This portrait of George Washington attributed to American artist Gilbert Stuart was presented to Indian mere chant Ram Doolal Dey in 1801. Today it hangs at Roosevelt House in New Delhi as a symbol of IndoU.S. friendship. See page 16.

Back cover: "Blue Paired Arcs" is a glass sculpture

by Harvey Littleton, the father of the studio glass movement in the United States. See also inside back cover.

I had written a letter for this page some days ago, but when I learned of the tragic accident that befell the crew of the space shuttle Challenger, and then read the transcription of President Reagan's moving message to the American PeOple, I decided to share that with SPAN readers instead: Ladies and gentlemen, I had planned to speak to you tonight to report on the State of the Union. But the events of earlier today have led me to change those plans.

Today is a day for mourning and remembering â&#x20AC;˘ Nancy and I are pained to the core by the tragedy of the shuttle Challenger. share this pain with all the people of our country.

This is truly a national

We knowwe loss.

Nineteen years ago, almost to the day, we lost three astronauts in a terrible accident on the ground. But we've never lost an astronaut in flight; we've never had a tragedy like this.

And perhaps we've forgotten the courage it took for the crew of the shuttle.

But they, the Ghallenger Seven, were aware of the dangers, but overcame them and did their jobs brilliantly.

Wemourn seven heroes: Michael Smith, Dick Scobee, Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Gregory Jarvis and Christa McAuliffe. Wemourn their loss as a nation, together.

For the families of the seven, we cannot bear, as you do, the full impact of this tragedy.

But we feel the loss and we're thinking abol:lt you so very much. Your loved ones were daring and brave and they had that SPecial grace, that special spirit that says, give me a challenge and I'll meet it with joy. They had a hul1ger to explore the universe and discover its truths.

They wished to serve, and they did. They served all of us.

Wehave grown used to wonders in this century.

It's hard to dazzle us. ~ut for 25 years -- the United States space program has been doing just that.

We've grown used to the idea of space, and perhaps we forget that we've only just begun. We're still pioneers.

They, the membersof the Challenger crew, were pioneers.

And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were wa~ching the live coverage of the shuttle's take-off.

I know it's hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery.

It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons.

The future doesn't belong to the faint-hearted.

It belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them. .

I've always had great faith in and respect for our space program, and what happened today does nothing to diminish it.

Wedon't hide our space program. Wedon't keep secrets and cover things up. Wedo it all up front and in public.

That's the way freedom is, and we wouldn't change it for a minute. We'll continue our quest in space. There will be more shuttle flights and more shuttle crews and, yes, more volunteer~J more civilians, more teachers in space. Nothing ends here.

Our hopes and our journeys continue.

I want to add that I wish I could talk to every man and womanwho works for NASA,or who worked on this mission, and tell them, "Your dedication and professionalism have movedand impressed us for decades. And we knowof your anguish--we share it."

There's a coincidence today [January 28]. On this day 390 years ago, the great explorer, Sir Francis Drake, died aboard ship off the coast of Panama. In his lifetime, the great frontiers were the oceans and a historian later said, "He lived by the sea, died on it, and was buried in it."

Well, today, we can say of the Challenger crew, their dedication was, like Drake's, conplete.

The crew of the spa.ce shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives.

Wewill never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved good-bye, and "slipPed the surly bonds of Earth" to "touch the face of God."

Making the Familiar Strange

Challenging students to reason with images instead of words, to think sideways and upside down, schools in America now teach imagination.

Above: From computer cards and staples in a visual-thinking exercise at M IT, Woodie Flowers makes a tower strong enough to hold up a brick.

Right: David Haygood

illustrates the principle of making the familiar strange at Stanford. He holds a chain of paper dolls with one end taped to blackboard, where drawing of arm fools the eye.

J

im Rymarcsuk, decked out in a purple bow tie and bright red boots, trudges across the linoleum floor of a classroom at Stanford University, dragging a large inner tube behind him. The inner tube provides air pressure for a plastic slide whistle attached to his right ankle. Rymarcsuk, a 20-year-old mechanical engineering major, pauses every few seconds to balance on his left foot, which enables him to operate the whistle's slide by raising and lowering his right.

His classmates on the sidelines give him a round of applause after he labors through "Mary Had a Little Lamb."

Rymarcsuk and his fellow students are enrolled in Mechanical Engineering 101, "Visual Thinking," and I'm on hand to see them demonstrate their projects. The assignment has been to design a pair of shoes that plays a musical composition as you walk three or more meters in them, a task that Rymarcsuk has interpreted rather loosely. The project description passed out to students began, "Ever wonder why most people play music with their hands but dance with their feet? What would it be like the other way around?"

That upside-down point of view is at the heart of ME 101 and a growing number of other visual-thinking courses around the United States. If these courses had a motto, it would be, "Make the familiar strange." The goal in each case is to free the eyes and the mind from stereotypes and taboos and to see surroundings in new ways, make connections between unlikely elements, and sketch, tinker and imagine until ideas emerge.

"We'd rather see a spectacular, innovative failure than a tightly developed successful one," says David Haygood, one of ME WI's instructors and an ardent believer in the unexpected.

Before settling on his air-powered slide whistle, Jim Rymarcsuk cruised the local junk stores for several days (the projects have a $20 ceiling), looking at familiar objects and trying to imagine new uses for them. At the outset, the instructors encouraged the class to make lists of ways that instruments could be played (plucked, squeezed, shaken, popped) and ways of moving (crutches, skateboards, pogo sticks), then look for ways to link them. As the demonstration proceeds, most of the students get into the freewheeling spirit of the assignment.

For the project, "shoe" is defined as a device or assembly connected to the leg below the knee. One young man wears a motley pair of bowling shoes with the fronts torn off, the better to articulate trumpet-style keys with his toes. A young woman inches intently across the room, eyes on the floor, as pieces of her mysterious and inoperable machine drop off behind hersome kind of ski tow, by the looks of it. Haygood cheerfully calls out, "Three meters! Three meters!" to cut short the less successful walks.

What is being taught here is not hard-core engineering but something more intangible: imagination. The course is the brainchild of Bob McKim, who wrote the basic text for ME 101, a book called Experiences in Visual Thinking. McKim is a design professor at Stanford, and an informal, easily amused man who himself likes to fiddle with scissors, tape and pieces of cardboard. "Back in the early 1960s here, I was teaching students how to design new products," he recalls. "I noticed that many of our students had trouble generating new ideas.

They'd say, literally, 'I don't have any imagination.' What they'd been rewarded for in school was to manipulate words and numbers and pick single answers on multiple-choice quizzes." They were, McKim decided, visual illiterates.

He b~gan teaching basic sketching skills to his students. He soon realized the students had trouble not only drawing but seeing. They took the objects around them for granted, looking closely enough only to give them labels like "table" and "door" and stopping there. (Quick-without looking, draw your telephone on a piece of paper, letters and numbers in place. It should be easy. You've looked at it thousands of times, haven't you?) One of the exercises McKim recommends is looking around a room and grouping objects by color (rediture) or texture (smoothiture), rather than function (furniture). Viewed in this way, he says, the shapes, colors and patterns of one's surroundings begin to emerge from the shadow of familiarity.

"Visual thinking breaks you out of the mindset of language, which keeps you stuck in a certain way of seeing and expressing the world," McKim says. Images provide a rich, expressive medium for thought that complements analytical reasoning and offers quicker, more unexpected jumps and connections.

To McKim, imagery is more than what your eyes see and your hand sketches. There is also inner imagery, what you see with your eyes closed. One's ability to picture imaginary scenes can be strengthened with practice, he believes. His book is filled with exercises in imagining. Stop reading, for example, shut your eyes, and imagine an apple. What did you see? Most people will summon up a featureless red apple, perhaps even a vague, black-and-white apple. Now, imagine you're actually holding a crisp, ripe apple. Feel its weight, its waxy skin, its coolness. Feel for bruises. Play with its stem. Now imagine biting into the apple. Hear the crunch. Smell and taste its juice.

Who wouldn't conjure up a more realistic, three-dimensional apple the second time around?

Across the continent at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Woodie Flowers teaches a similar classME 2.70, Introduction to Design. Flowers, a Louisiana native with large, sleepy eyes and a twangy voice, readily admits his course is "McKimish." Here, however, as befits MIT's more hard-edged image, students visualize bricks as well as apples.

"The first time the students meet in the lab, we have an easy contest to break the ice," Flowers says, perched on a high stool in his Cambridge office. "We might pass around a brick and say, 'Feel it, remember it.' Then we give everyone some computer cards and say, 'Build a tower at least two card-lengths high that can support the brick!" The winner, Flowers says, is the student with the lowest-cost tower, cost being determined by the total number of cards, folds and staples used. To prevent the students from doing too much testing and not enough visualizing, the brick remains unavailable until each structure is completed.

Such little games are a precursor to a much bigger drama, a two-night trial by fire in which the course's 200-odd students pit their final projects against one another. Using identical kits of ingredients-cardboard tubing, string, parts of Venetian blinds, electric motors-the students build devices designed to perform some specified task such as putting a round peg in a square hole. Each device must carry out its job in 20 seconds while a competing student's device tries to do likewise.

This year's contest is called "The Harvest." The battleground is a 1.25m x 1.75m table with model hills, valleys Right: Professor Ed Zagorski of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign showers in popcorn that a student popped over several days to answer the question: "What is a million?"

and obstacles. Clogging the landscape are 300 Ping-Pong balls.

The machines' function is to gather the balls as quickly as possible.

Squeezing into the auditorium a half-hour before the start of the first night's competition, I'm barely able to find a seat.

Boisterous undergraduates with cameras and noisemakers soon pack the aisles and line the walls. As the elimination rounds proceed, an impressive variety of rickety-looking machines do battle with the Ping-Pong balls and each other-bulldozers, sweepers, scoops, rakes, paddlewheels and assorted hybrids.

One device rolls forward and slips a wide spatula under a mass of balls. The spatula slowly rises and the balls roll back over the device's inclined roof and into the home gutter. A number of machines, including the eventual winner, are low, square tractors that drive over a group of balls, then pull them back using one-way, comblike fingers along the front end.

The Stanford and MIT courses may differ in character, but they share a common goal: to spur students to come up with new ideas. In both cases, the variety and volume of drawings in a student's idea log, or visual notebook, count toward the course grade at least as much as the performance of the student's final device. "If all the projects look alike, then it's a bad contest," Flowers tells me later.

One of the habits that Flowers and his instructors try to discourage is a single-minded infatuation with one particular idea. Author and lecturer Edward de Bono has called this habit "vertical" thinking, akin to digging a hole in one place and, not finding what you're after, digging deeper and deeper. Using "lateral" thinking, on the other hand, you climb out and try digging new holes here and there.

The hands-down crowd favorite in last year's contest, something dubbed the Spinmobile, was a product of lateral thinking.

Its inventor, junior Annabelle' Kim, took the course's ethic to heart, and the Spinmobile was the result of her third trip back to the drawing board in a month. Torque problems and friction torpedoed her first two ideas, a double-ended bulldozer and a two-armed flinger/gatherer.

"With my second idea, I could have messed around, cut springs in half and so forth, but I only had two nights to go at that point, so I just switched my plans and tried to build something really basic," she said.

That something was an ingenious two-wheeled box with short, flexible arms attached at two corners diagonally across from each other. The wheels spin in opposite directions, the box twirls comically, and the two curved arms beat a spectacular barrage of Ping-Pong balls back toward the gutter. Other than its wheels and its motor, the Spinmobile has no moving parts. To standing ovations in round after round, it annihilated tractors and rakes-a victory for lateral thinking.

Despite their different styles, Bob McKim's course and Woodie Flowers' course share a common ancestry as well as a common purpose. The spiritual father of both was an engineering professor named John Arnold. Arnold ran a program in creative engineering at MIT in the 1950s before leaving to start up the design program at Stanford.

Arnold wasn't a selfproclaimed visual thinker, but he was an enthusiastic advocate of yanking students out of the familiar and forcing them into the strange. To this end, Arnold announced the discovery of an imaginary planet called Arcturus IV (there is a real star named Arcturus), where the gravity was 11 times greater than Earth's, the crops grew upside down and the inhabitants had three eyes

and fragile bones; as strange as they could be.

Students were asked to design consumer goods for this world. Arcturan power tools, for example, ended up being cable-driven, their motors on the ground; a conventional drill weighing two kilograms on Earth would have weighed 22 on Arcturus IV, too heavy for a native's delicate arm to support.

Other students designed egg-shaped cars and stereo viewers for' three-eyed heads.

/i.

nold's idea of using outer space as a way to cut students off earthly stereotypes was picked up and embellished by Ed Zagorski, a professor of industrial design at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign. In 1961. following the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) first manned flight, Zagorski dreamed up what has become a classic design problem in engineering schools around the United States: the egg drop.

The idea was to simulate suborbital flight, substituting a raw egg for Astronaut Alan Shepard. Students built containers that could be launched 60 meters into the air by a truck-spring catapult and deposited in the campus reflecting pool-without breaking the egg inside. One student cushioned his egg in a container stuffed with peat moss and gelatin, then used a firecracker to pop open a parachute in midflight. Once the capsule was safely afloat, an aspirin tablet holding apart two electrical contacts dissolved, and a tiny electric motor powered the craft ashore.

"Now that was pizzazz," Zagorski recalls. Zagorski doesn't look like a grand old man of creative industrial design. At 63, he's as athletic as a 40-year-old, as imaginative as a child of 5.

Zagorski stresses ideas, not technique. He recently asked a class to make something that answered the question: What is a million? One student spent several days popping popcorn, then filled a one-cubic-meter box with it. Another read a poem on eternity by James Joyce. "It did feel like an eternity," Zagorski admits. A third built a cardboard cube half a meter on a side with the tips of four corners cut away to reveal clear plastic containers of sewing pins. To complete the illusion of a box full of a million pins, a cinderblock hidden at the cube's center gave the box the proper heft. "To get students to create something original," Zagorski says, "you've got to force them out of the familiar."

A flurry of books and courses have extended visual thinking beyond the classroom, popularizing the idea of left-brain, right-brain duality-the left side said to be verbal and analytical, the right side intuitive and visual. The phrase, "making the familiar strange," in fact, was coined by a business consultant, an impatient, gravel-voiced man named William GO'rdon. As head of SES Associates in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Gordon runs seminars that teach business people to be more creative by making connections between seemingly unrelated images. "The basis of creativity has always been a new connection," he says.

Gordon believes that an inventor's flash of insight is actually a connection drawn between two images. This process, he says, can be studied and practiced instead of being left to chance. The process is illustrated by one of his inventions, Pringle's potato chips. When a potato chip manufacturer came to him with a problem-how to ship their product in a more cost-effective way-Gordon and his colleagues tried to think of natural analogies. Someone recommended raking leaves: how bulky

they were when dry, but how neatly they layered and stacked when moist and all one shape. This led to the answer-making chips the same size and shape, so they could be stacked in cans.

There are a number of other business-consulting firms that preach the virtues of visual thinking, and one of the most successful is Synectics, Inc., headed by Gordon's former partner, George Prince. Its seminars have helped General Electric improve their dishwashers, assisted NASA in coming up with thermometers for astronauts and guided Colgate-Palmolive staff members in designing new tennis shoes.

To generate new ideas, Prince, like Gordon, encourages those who attend his seminars to think visually, conjuring up mental pictures and letting them lead rapidly to new visual associations. To help people keep track of their thoughts, the conference room walls in Synectics' earth-toned Cambridge headquarters are lined with 60-by-90-centimeter sketch pads, and jars of felt-tipped colored markers are everywhere.

"What I like," says Prince, a soft-spoken, avuncular man in his 60s, "is to take an accident and make it a process."

Sometimes during a seminar Prince smears a bottle's worth of ketchup on a piece of newsprint, then hangs the sheet on a wall and asks everyone in the room to write down what they see.

These imaginings are then slowly read aloud as the group continues to write. "Some excursions are morc productive than others," says Prince, "but once you get a group going, almost anything works." he shock of seeing George Prince smear ketchup on a piece of paper, often with his foot, is no doubt heightened by the plush surroundings. At Boston's Charlestown High School, on the other hand, a little spilled ketchup would be unlikely to draw much attention. There, in a sticky-floored classroom overlooking a boarded-up housing project, design teacher Bruce McIntosh is borrowing the techniques of visual thinking to stimulate the imaginations of inner-city high school children.

"If you tell students to build a chair out of cardboard," says McIntosh, "they all build things with flat surf~ces and four legs.

So you don't say 'chair,' you say 'sitting machine.'" To forestall the usual knee-jerk objection that cardboard isn't for sitting, McIntosh and fellow teacher Robin Graves lead up to the project in a roundabout way. First, they have each student support a ruler several centimeters above a desk using a piece of paper. Then three rulers. "You get a kid who realizes he can hold four book1Sup with just a piece of paper, and it just blows him away," McIntosh says.

McIntosh, an exuberant, nonstop talker, is an expert at envisioning strange uses for familiar things. Where most people see junk, he sees exciting raw material for his class-perforated sheets of plastic, multicolored foam pads, heavy-duty cardboard t~bing. "We're making amazing stuff out of things people have already thrown away," he says. His inverted perspective is clearly rubbing off on his students: on a back wall is a collage depicting the actor Ricardo Montalban dancing with an oversize digital watch for a belt, two bare arms for legs and a sneaker for a cigar. Somehow the composition works perfectly.

McIntosh and Graves worry that by the high school years a

T

About the Author: Doug Stewart is a free-lance writer living in Ipswich, Massachusetts. He specializes in scientific subjects.

child's natural willingness to imagine and invent is fading, replaced by a desire to avoid mistakes and find the right answer.

"Younger kids have a lot more flexibility," McIntosh says.

"They don't know that something won't work, or that they can't draw, or that dogs can't fly."

To back up this last claim, McIntosh refers me to a book that Edward de Bono once published containing children's drawings of dog-exercising machines: remote-control airplanes carrying long leashes; treadmills with films of rabbits projected at one end; lllagnetic bones that are shot from catapults and return like boomerangs, the dog presumably racing back and forth underneath. De Bono wrote, "Children are not really searching for the best way of doing something .... It is enough if the ideas fit together."

Young children do indeed seem to have active visual imaginations, and with practice, children might be able to hang on to this ability to experience the world visually, instead of losing their visual skills as they develop verbal ones. That, at any rate, is what a 29-year-old Stanford graduate student and confirmed visual thinker named Scott Kim believes. Kim is the author of Inversions, a book filled with words that can be flipped or rotated and still say the same thing-or something significantly different. Its cover, for example, reads "Inversions" right side up and "Scott Kim" upside down.

"A lot of my biggest fans are 5 and 6 years old, just when they're learning to read," Kim tells me over breakfast one morning at a cafe near the Stanford campus. To children that age, Kim points out, a letter is still a shape, not a label, so even the familiar is probably a trifle strange. Kim has written an activity guide for schools called "Thinking Upside Down" that shows children how to try their own inversions, and he has put together a software tutorial for making inversions with a computer.

Like many other visual thinkers, Kim wouldn't leave home without a sketch pad. While we talk, he sketches, jotting down words surrounded by boxes, arrows and dotted lines.

"The way I understand something is to reinvent it," Kim says. "I put myself in the inventor's -shoes. The thing I want to understand now is computers." Kim's own PhD work focuses on how people might interact with computers using pictures instead of words. Kim is excited about computers like the Macintosh that let people choose pictorial commands and make freehand drawings using a hand-held electronic mouse. "Words are¡ dominant over pictures in academic and serious circles because they're easier to produce," he says, "but computers like the Mac are changing that. To me, computers are the answer to getting visual thinking recognized."

Perhaps creative people have always recognized it, and the rest of us are only now beginning to notice. I recall asking Stanford's Bob McKim how he went about dreaming up his own inventions, most of them highly technical medical devices. "I set myself up for having accidents," he told me. Everyone has accidents, he pointed out, but visual thinkers don't just run off and get a mop. They study the result. "An architect friend of mine was once making a cardboard model of a seaside home," McKim said. "By accident, he knocked the model over so it rested partIy on its roof." As a result, somewhere in the vicinity of Monterey, California, there is a homeowner who probably loves the way his beach house looks but who has no idea that it's (More pictures on page 8.) actually upside down. 0

Below: For an assignment to design shoes that play music as he walks, Jim Rymarcsuk uses an ankle whistle and an inner tube to blow the whistle. He manages to give a fair rendition

~

~,.,

of "Mary Had a Little Lamb." Below, right: A group doodle is used as a warm-up exercise at the start of a Stanford visual-thinking course; as many as 60 students participate.

Far left: Annabelle Kim makes Spinmobile to gather Ping-Pong balls in an MITcontest, and gives it a test (left). The machine is a product of "lateral" thinking, as she tried different designs before making her final choice.

John Updike confesses that success breeds disillusion; Cynthia Ozick tells of her long and painful ,apprenticeship to Henry James; Joyce Carol Oates asks why gender is so important when the writer happens to be a woman. A noted Indian novelist comments on the collection of essays in which these and other North American writers discuss their craft.

"Writers On Their Craft" is the subtitle of a new book compiled by Joyce Carol Oates, but the book, First Person Singular* is not strictly about the writer's craft.

It includes essays on romantic love as a poetic and literary mode, on the influence of poetry and the novel on each other, and on remembered poetry. Also, most memorable, is one called "When We Dead Awaken" after Ibsen's play, about "the use that the male artist and thinker-in the process of creating culture as we know it-has made of women in his life and in his work; and about a woman's slow struggling awakening to the use to which her life has been put."

There are contributions on keeping diaries. And a good bit of autobiography emerges in the pieces on craft. The selection of the 29 essays and conversations reveals no plan or pattern. *Published by Ontario Review Press. Princeton. New Jersey. 280 pp., 1983. Available ~t American Center Libraries in Bombay. Calcutta.

Madras

and

New

Delhi.

Why these particular writers and not others? There is no foreword that would provide a clue, no paragraph introducing each contributor, except the explanation that places Adrienne Rich's essay in its feminist context. A brief comment also precedes the "conversation" with Bernard Malamud, setting the domestic scene at his house in Vermont. This collection of North American writers (including a Canadian) is clearly meant for readers who are already familiar with their names and work. For readers who are not North American, it is a little like coming into a roomful of highly articulate people whose dialogue is meant for each other. And it takes careful listening to penetrate the veils of North American nuance. If this is a continent not usually associated with mystery and impenetrability, I don't know why it shouldn't be, when all that one does not understand (whether it belongs to remote antiquity or tomorrow's technology) is mysterious

to the one who does not understand it.

North America is well into tomorrow.

Why wouldn't it be a puzzle for a large part of the human race?

The North American continent is set apart by its unique national experience of prosperity and technology combined with formidable power, and a psychology that must be either the result of these or a reaction to them. North Americans laugh and weep like you and me, but about very different things. They have more highs and lows, seem lonelier, more restless and rootless than other people. They move uneasily through the fabulous plenty of their cities, and they tend to move more in herds and packs than anyone since tribal times, though they call themselves individualists. There are other prosperous societies, but they are connected with threads, however transparent, to shared pasts and common frames of reference. Eurasia and Africa cut across each other's barriers in this

way, united by a tangled mess of history.

It is well known in the world outside North America that it is ghosts who carry culture, and that life is an untidy bundle of contradictions. Is this why the Jewish and black writers of that continent speak a more universal' language, one that awakens echoes that fragments of other civilizations can relate to? The meltingpot tongue, in contrast, is firm, explicit and homogeneous. It is unlike life in much of the rest of the world, therefore mysterious.

An outsider would dearly love to know more about the gifted artists in this book than they themselves tell us in their selections. So, I think, would many North Americans themselves, who are part of a culture which Saul Howard Nemerev Bellow describes as inimical to literature.

"American writers are not neglected. They mingle occasionally with the great, they may even be asked to the White House, but no one there will talk literature to them. ... Secretary Kissinger and Danny Kaye fall into each other's arms.

Cary Grant is surrounded by senators' wives who find him E. L. Doctorow won d erfu IIy preserve d . ... People speak of their diets, of travel and holidays, of vitamins and the problems of aging .... It is easy to observe in bars, at dinner tables, everywhere, that from flop house to White House Americans are preoccupied by the same questions. Our own American life is our passion ... our cities, our crime, our housing, our automobiles, our sports, our weather, our technology, our politics, our problems of sex and race and diplomacy and international relations .... Is reading possible for a people with its mind in this state? .. Canan individual, the subject of a novel, compete in interest with corporate destinies?" What Bellow calls "crisis-chatter" rules the media, and the media rule the public mind. Is it possible then, that American literature is unex-

plored territory to many Americans?

Writers are in a tiny minority, John Updike tells us. "Not counting journalists and suppliers of scripts to the media, hardly a hundred American men and women earn their livings by writing, in a wealthy nation of two hundred million."

The book's title is a puzzle too. I? Is I what it is all about? It seems to me the writer's basic urge is to give birth, a process in which one is no longer confined to, and scarcely aware of one's self, a condition that produces degrees and varieties of altered consciousness. And inasmuch as this is a book about that process, wouldn't I be the smallest part of it? That, at least, is what the writers of these pages say.

"More and more a writer thinks of himself as an instrument, a means whereby a time and a place make their mark.

To become less and to transmit more .. .is the reason why I write" (John Updike).

"Most novelists ... really do attempt to refine themselves out of existence by way of an immersion, a systematic and disciplined immersion, in language .... Writing is bodiless, consisting solely of words" (Joyce Carol Oates).

"In my work, it begins to seem to me I am no longer the 'novelist' or 'short story writer' .... 1 am the thing being written at the time" (Hortense Calisher).

A section of the public must be interested in the process, in literary problems, if not in literature, or there would not be books about it. Is this another aspect of the fascination for "how to" books, those manuals that help develop individual, do-it-yourself skills and earning capacities? Is this love affair with technique a demystification rite suited to a no-nonsense mentality? If anyone can be President of the United States, why can't anyone be a writer? And is that why

there are wrItmg courses and workshops and books on craft? Then, technique and skips apart, there is the primitive in all Eudora Welty of us that responds to the magic of cities, lives, landscapes springing up on blank pages out of no effort greater, apparently, than staring out of the window. For the curious public there is something baffling and entirely nontechnical here that needs explaining, though not everyone is curious.

Attitudes to writers vary hugely, from awe of the magic-maker to killing the entertainer if he didn't tell a good enough story, as Scheherazade feared might happen to her on everyone of the thousand and one nights of her bedtime storytelling. And then there are the hazards of telling too good a story, as practitioners of the art have discovered to their cost in totalitarian societies. But probably the most crushing audience reaction of all is neither awe, nor the executioner waiting in the wings. It is plain, kind, human pity for the poor fellow who can't do anything more useful or lucrative than write. Anne Tyler tells us she was asked by another mother, as they waited in the schoolyard for their children to come out of class, "Have you found some work yet, or are you still just writing?"

The peculiar breed that spends its time "just writing" must have some characteristics in common. Can the process be reduced to a set of rules and regulations, some kind of shared experience? Certainly not through writing habits, we discover, which have in common only the fact that they have nothing in common. Every writer goes his solitary way. "I do not write every day .... I've got a notion you have to get depressed before something happens" (Howard Nemerov). "People need formulas. They ask, 'When do you work?' hoping to learn that composers put pen to paper each morning at seven and go on till tea. Now by the time they put pen to paper, the composing is done; this is the inscription of the act, not the act itself" (Ned Rorem). "You write by sitting down and writing. There's no particular time or place-you suit yourself, your nature ... everyone learns his or her own way. The real mystery to crack is you" (Bernard Malamud).

So much for getting down to the job.

But what happens when one actually does sit down at one's desk, pen in hand? Here the testimony is even vaguer.

Superstitions abound. Margaret Atwood puts it in a nutshell: "Blank pages inspire me with terror .... I suspect most writers are like this." And what about the page that is no longer blank?

Mark Strand, asked if he understands his own poems, gives what he thinks is a lucid answer: "I think if forced to talk about them, I can understand them pretty well, a lot of them. Some, I don't.; .. 1 believe that we understand so little about our world that it's unfair to put such pressure on a poem."

The artist, it is obvious, is not in the business of interpretation or analysis. He is engaged in producing a whole impact, putting things together, not taking them apart. If we are looking for light on this interior unconscious part of the process, most writers will offer us instead the mists and darkness of a cave or a womb or any other source of origins. Heavily significant as this sounds, are we to expect great earth-shaking "significance" to come out of these depths? Not at all. Mary Gordon tells us, "My subject as a writer has far more to do with family happiness than with music of the spheres. I don't know what-the nature of the universe is, but I have a good ear. What it hears best are the daily rhythms." And the grand lady of American letters, Eudora Welty, puts it this way: "Fiction is made to show forth human life in some chosen part or aspect .... When ChekhQv says there were so many stars out that one could not have put a finger between them, he gives us more than night, he gives us that night."

It is generally agreed that writing is a craft, which does not help us much in understanding it, since "craft" means a

lot of things and all of them apply to the writing of fiction. It is a trade, a skill, know-how, though these don't account for the feeling of vocation writers have, of being called to the task. Hardly ever does one choose to become a writer.

Writing chooses one. So it is more than a profession, it is a life. Crafts get linked with arts and are sharers in artistic traditions, but craft is also cunning and deceit, and means tricks of all sorts. Writers must be freaks of a kind, too, unable to function effectively except on the level of words. "I stopped writing poetry to work on a daily newspaper. ... All too soon, however, I grew restless with the newfound world of information. Realities lacked reality. In covering news I was unable to use words in any but prepared, formulaic ways. In time, I left my job as a reporter to try to summon the strength to step gingerly into the landscape of my imagination .... 1 knew then ... that language was all I had" (Grace Schulman).

"Whatever I have to offer only emerges or is realized through the act of writing" (E.L. Doctorow).

Adrienne Rich goes further, pointing out that women's writing in particular is the effort "to find language and images for a consciousness we are just coming into," for "the very act of naming has been till now a male prerogative," creating images of women that men can tolerate, romanticize or control. A woman writer uses language as a liberator, and sends it into battle to demolish myths and stereotypes. The act of writing becomes "re-vision," seeing an old text with fresh eyes and "entering it from a critical new direction." Writing becomes more than writing. It is "an act of survival." Not too extravagant a summary, considering the undreamed of fiction worlds that feminist literature has given us. Rich tells us today's women writers don't use Jane Austen or Virginia Woolf as models. They are more at home with anger than with detachment and charm. Virginia Woolf, addressing an audience of women, referred hesitantly to "the women who are not with us," while 50 years later the writing sisterhood is forcefully aware of those who never entered her scheme of things: "The women who are washing other people's dishes and caring for other people's children, not to mention women who went on the streets last night in order to feed their children." Rich says, "Our

struggles can have meaning and our privileges ... can be justified only if they can help to change the lives of women whose gifts-and whose very being-continue to be thwarted and silenced."

The beliefs that literature changes life, that the two interact and that a writer's commitment transcends the personal predicament, are not the vibrant monopoly of the women's movement. Much has been said and written for and Anne Tyler against the artist's commitment to social and political change. I like E.L. Doctorow's definition. He calls it "a poetics of engagement," and considers it an area where commitment and aesthetics meet and give each other beauty and power. It is certainly true that in any crisis or emergency the question of artistic responsibility has been reopened and redefined, for it seems that a living literature cannot claim immunity from the social and political consequences and influences around it. Fiction cannot be written as in the past. A story must have some implications for the collective fate, or be meaningless. And as for the question of whether art and other commitment can mix, has this not been answered by the creation of new forms to express new visions in music, paint and words? In emergencies above all, we realize that the individual soul and the collective fate are integrally part of each other. The success of the mix can ultimately be judged only by the final test of any work of art: its power, and the reverberations this produces long after it is seen, heard, or read, sometimes from generation to generation.

0 Nayantara

Sahgal's

recent novels are Rich Like Us, which was awarded Britain's Sinclair Prize for Fiction for 1985, and Plans for Departure, published in New York. She Writes a monthly column for the Sunday edition of the Indian Express.

A

Bill of

Rights

by A.G. NOORANI

"The American tradition holds that the Bill of Rights rests upon self-evident, inalienable, eternal and universal principles which no government, and no majority of people, may violate."

here can be no greater mistake in any appreciation of the Constitution of the United States of America than to regard the first ten amendments to the document as mere curbs on state power, like any other constitutional limitation. These amendments were not only a precondition to the ratification of the Constitution by the states of the new Union, but are its very soul.

No judge or jurist captured its spirit better or expressed it more eloquently than did the late American newspaper columnist Walter Lipmann in an article entitled "The Bill of Rights" in 1939: "Though in form these amendments are a part of the Constitution, and therefore in theory subject to repeal or amendment by the ordinary procedure, in fact the American tradition holds that the Bill of Rights rests upon self-evident, inalienable, eternal and universal principles which no government, and no majority of people, may violate.

"The rest of the Constitution is a framework of government designed to establish a federal union operated by representative democracy; it is also the outline of a policy for the ordering of affairs. This constitutional system comes from the people, that is to say, from majorities among the people, and in the course of history is subject to change by other majorities. But the Bill of Rights does not come from the people and is not subject to change by majorities. It comes from the nature of things. It declares the inalienable rights of man not only against all government but also against the people collectively."

Lipmann continued, "It establishes rights, which no majority may abrogate, and, as Jefferson put it in his first inaugural

[address], 'to violate would be oppression.' Those words are pregnant, for in the philosophy of the American Founders oppression was illegal even if it was done under the forms of law, and such men as Jefferson and Franklin were fond of saying that 'rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.'" In a very real sense, the Bill of Rights is a fulfillment of the pledges and affirmations jl1ade by the American Founding Fathers in their Declaration of Independence. It is no exaggeration to say that the impact of the Bill on the constitutional history of many a democracy has been as great as the influence of the Declaration on the aspirations of peoples struggling for freedom.

The Supreme Court of the United States, which has sat as sentinel over the enforcement of these rights for nearly two centuries, has regarded the Declaration of Independence as a guide to the understanding of the Constitution and not as a document of mere historical interest. Justice Field's observations in 1883 in Butchers' Union Co. v. Crescent City Co. are a veritable classic on the subject. " ... Certain inherent rights¡lie at the foundation of all governmental action and upon a recognition of them alone can free institutions be maintained. These inherent rights have never been more happily expressed than in the Declaration of Independence, that new evangel of liberty to the people: 'We hold these truths to be-self-evident,' that is, so plain that their truth is recognized upon their mere statement; 'that all men are endowed,' not by edicts of emperors or decrees of parliament or acts of congress, but 'by their Creator, with certain inalienable rights,' that is, rights which cannot be bartered away or given away except in punishment of crime; 'and that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of

¡h~

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happiness, and to secure these," not grant them but secure them, 'governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the "consent of the governed.'"

Both documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, greatly influenced Indian leaders, spearheading the country's struggle for freedom. They were mostly lawyers, like the Founding Fathers of the American Union, and like them were steeped in English constitutional history and imbued with the spirit of freedom.

extended by the courts to protect the rights which the Constitution gives; how reasonably on the ~hole the courts have interpreted the language of the ConstItution; and, not least, how consonant with justice and common sense the general result of the, decisions appears to be."

Ramaswamy, on his part, had no hesitation whatever in declaring: "It seems to me that, in the matter of protection of the basic rights of the citizen, we would do well to take' the United States, the Constitution of which contains safeguards for such rights, as our model, rather than England, where those dmund Burke's magnificent speech on c'on- rights ultimately rest upon the good sense of the people as there ciliation with rebellious America, in the Brit- are no external checks to control the legislative powers of the ish House of Commons on March 22, 1775, EnglishParli<iment. India, like the United States, has a large described the American leaders in terms number of minority groups. If these groups are to live in peace which were no less applicable to the leaders of and amity and contribute to the common good of the land, they India's freedom movement: "Permit me, sir, must be made to feel that their basic liberties are secure against to add another circumstance in our colonies, the whims of legislative majorities and that they can directly which constitutes no mean part toward the appeal to the courts when those liberties are invaded. Long growth and effect of this untractable spirit-I mean their reflection upon this subject has convinced me of the imperative education. In no country perhaps in the world is the law so necessity of incorpo!ating into the future constitution of India, a carefully chosen code 'of fundamental rights. And I think the general a study. The profession itself is numerous and powerful; and in most provinces it takes the lead. The greater number of experience of the United States in working a constitution containing safeguards for the maintenance of basic civil liberties the deputies sent to Congress were lawyers ....

"This study [of law] renders men acute, inquisitive, dexter- shows that those constitutional provisions have, on the whole, ous, prompt in attack, ready in defense, full of resources. In worked very well indeed" (Fundamental Rights; Indian Council other countries, the people, more simple and of a less mercurial of World Affairs; Oxford University Press; 1946; p. 45).

A few months after the publication of this work, the cast, judgy of an ill principle in government only by an actual grievance. Here they anticipate the evil, and judge of the Constituent Assembly of India was elected to draw up a presence of the grievance by the badness of the principle. They constitution for a free India. As Granville Austin, the Ameraugur misgovernment at a distance, and snuff the approach of ican author of the classic The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone tyranny in every tainted breeze." of a Nation, summed up pithily, "Indians believed that in their Not surprisingly, Indian leaders pressed fora Bill of Rights 'federation of minorities' a declaration of rigHts was as when a federal constitution was being drawn up 'during British necessary as it had been for the Americans when they rule in the Government of India Act, 1935. Its draftsmen noted established the first federal Constitution." the disappearance of such guarantees in many constitutions, In July 1955, Justice William O. Douglas delivered the "notably in those of the European states formed after the war," celebrated Tagore Law Lecture which was published under the and rejected the demand. A decade later the first Chief Justice title "From Marshall to Mukherjea: Studies in American and of the Federal Court of India, Sir Maurice Gwyer, lamented Indian Constitutional Law." The Chief Justice of India then was that "if they had paid greater attention to the American Justice B.K. Mukherjea and, in the author's opinion, "Marspall authorities, they might themselves have arrived at conclusions [the first U.S. Chief Justice] and Mukherjea are in the same different" from those which they embodied in the Act. tradition. " Sir Maurice Gwyer himself had in his remarkable inaugural The U.S. Constitution declares the Bill of Rights. The address to the Federal Court of India, on October 1, 1937, limitations on the rights in the interests of society have been referred to "that great tribunal, the Supreme Court of the evolved by the Supreme Court through doctrines like "police United States of America." In July 1946 he wrote a scintillating power" and "eminent domain." The Indian Constitution foreword to a pioneering work, Fundamental Rights, by a declares the rights and also specifies the "restrictions"; but lawyer of great erudition, M. Ramaswamy. Sir Maurice wrote: these must be "reasonable"--in the eyes of the courts. The "It is not the least valuable part of Mr. Ramaswamy's work that chairman of the Constituent Assembly of India's Drafting he has been able to show from the American reports that the Committee, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, claimed that "In support of fundamental rights conferred upon American citizens by the every exception to the Fundamental Rights set out in the draft Constitution of the United States are real andetfective, Constitution, one can refer to at least one judgment of the U.S. constantly enforced and readily enforceable. They are few in Supreme Court." The purpose of the provisions, Ambedkar number, but they protect all the vital in~erests of human continued, was to prevent endless litig'ttion and the Supreme personality; and there seems no practical reason why provisions Court having to rescue Parliament. The provisos permit the of similar lines should not be embodied, to the great advantage state "directly to impose limitations on the Fundamental not only of minorities, in an Indian Constitution.

Rights. There isreally no difference in the result," he claimed.

"It will, I think, be a matter of surprise to those unac- Controversy surrounds the claim, still. But the effort in quainted with the American cases to see how far the very broad emulation is obvious. and general language of the American Constitution has been It was, however, not a mindless but discriminating emula-

tion in the light of the Indian conditions. The process continues to this day, 36 years after the Constitution of India was enacted.

During this period, the Supreme Courts of both India and the United States have opened new avenues of redress of wrong and spelt out from their respect,ive Constitutions new nuances of the Bill of Rights-in India, the Fundamental Rightsundreamt of by their authors.

The law is constantly growing. On many an aspect, the U.S. Supreme Court, while ruling against a petitioner, made observations which suggest that the denial is not final. "Maybe some other time" is the hint. Also, at places in the judgments are whole ~uggets that can be unearthed for use with deadly effect to assert a new right 0t expand the scope of an existing one.

The first amendment's guarantee of freedom of the press has been repeatedly affirmed by the Supreme Court. Only in recent years, however, has it come to accept the press as a surrogate of the people and, therefore, entitled to rights that an ordinary individual citizen may.not be able to claim. In 1946 Justice Felix Frankfurter had no hesitation in saying, "The liberty of the press is no greater and no less than ... the liberty of every citizen of the United States" (Pennekamp v. Florida). That statement will not be quite accurate today.

Three journalists-Eve Pell, Betty Segal and Paul Jacobsand four California prison inmates sued Raymond K. Procunier, director of the California Department of Corrections, and others, challenging a regulation that barred press interviews with named and willing prison inmates. Five justices held that the regulation did not abridge the inmates' freedom of speech nor the news media representatives' freedom of press.

Three others held that such a blanket ban on press interviews violated both. Justice Powell ruled that the prisoners' rights were not violated. But he said tha~ the ban "impermissibly restrains the ability of the press to perform the constitutionally established function of informing the people on the conduct of their Government" (Pell v. Procunier).

In his dissent Justice Douglas twice cited an illustration to test the majority's argument and thus provides a good argument for the press: "A State might decide that criticism of its affairs could be reduced by prohibiting all its employees from discussing governmental operations in interviews with the media, leaving criticism of the State to those with the time, energy, ability, and intimation to communicate through the mails." He proceeded to ask, "Could the government deny the press access to all public institutions and prohibit interviews with all government employees? Could it find constitutional footing by expanding the ban to deny access to everyone?"

These are illustrations, of course. But they provide high persuasive authority should ever such bans be imposed. The Court deciqed on the same day, June 24, 1974, in Saxbe v.

Washington Post, in which a similar ban by the Federal Bureau of Prisons was attacked. It was upheld by t~e n rrowest I

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majority of five-to-four. Justice Powell's dissent contained this passage: "No individual can obtain for himself the information needed for the intelligent discharge of his political responsibilities. For most citizens the prospect of personal familiarity with newsworthy events is hopelessly unrealistic. In seeking out the views the press therefore acts as an agent of the public at large."

This was but a dissenting opinion. But the ground was being prepared.

Four years later, the Court was evenly split in Houchins v.

KQED Inc., where the issue was the right of a TV station to have access to prison. As I have noted in the article entitled "Right to Know" (SPAN, June 1985), the governing judgment of Justice Potter Stewart in an evenly divided Court upheld the right of limited access because the information is "to be passed on to others," the public. Finally in 1980, in the Richmond Newspapers case, all the justices bar one (Rhenquist) accepted "the media claim of functioning as surrogates for the public." Even when the press lost in the Houchins case, the majority of the Supreme Court accepted the media's claim of "acting as the 'eyes and ears' of the public." All of which is a far cry indeed from Justice Frankfurter's dictum in 1946, mentioned above. most ingenious point raised in Kleindienst v. Mandel is yet to be fully answered. The attorney general's refusal of a visa to a Belgian journalist and Marxist theoretician, Ernest Mandel, for participating in an academic conference in the United States was upheld by the Court. Several American scholars had joined Mandel in suing the attorney general: They claimed the right to listen, an aspect of the right to know. They lost because the government claimed that he had abused the country's hospitality on an earlier visit. Also, because under the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act, 1952, Mandel was not legally eligible for a visa unless the attorney general granted a waiver. Richard G. Kleindienst's refusal was accepted by the Court as a genuine exercise of his discretion.

Yet, two aspects are worth noting. As many as three justices-Douglas, Marshall and Brennan-dissented.

And the majority rejected the argument that Mandel's books were there for all to read: "This argument overlooks what may be particular qualities inherent in sustained face-to-face debate, discussion and questioning." It is certainly arguable now that a prospective visitor, who has not blotted his record, cannot be shut out; not because the foreigner has a right to enter the United States but because the citizen is entitled to listen to the views of the foreigner.

Academic freedom flows from the freedom of speech. A New York law empowering the Regents of the State University to bar teachers from public schools for "seditious" words or acts was held to be too vague and inconsistent with the first amendment.

Justice Brennan wrote for the Court: "Our experience under the Sedition Act of 1978 taught us that dangers fatal to First Amendment freedoms inhere in the word 'seditious.' And the word 'treasonable' if left undefined is no less dangerously un~y

HI!

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IIh,tt~"Q~mi~ fr~y\l~ .~@ ~FiÂĽi~l ~Vn~im ~flni fim

Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy on the classroom" (Keyishar v. Regents).

There is a constitutional doctrine evolved by the U.S. Supreme Court which is pregnant with enormous potentialities in India-the doctrine of "State Action." Both, the Bill of Rights in the United States and the Fundamental Rights in

India, are enforceable only against the State or State authorJustice Frankfurter's judgment on behalf of the Court in ities; public corporations, for instance. They cannot be enMinersville School District v. Gobitis is a classic warning. forced against private individuals. But the U.S. Supreme Court "Judicial review, itself a limitation on popular government, has regarded as "State Action" the acts of private bodies in is a fundamental part of our constitutional scheme," he noted. certain circumstances-State financial aid, discharge of public "But to the legislature no less than to courts is committed the service or function, etc.' In obliterating the distinction between' guardianship of deeply-cherished liberties .... Where all the the public and the private realms, the doctrine can bring about a effective means of inducing political changes are left 'free from veritable constitutional revolution. . interference, education in the abandonment of foolish legislaIn 1976 in the historic case of Runyon v. McCrary, the Court tion is itself a training in liberty. To fight out the wise use of ruled by a seven-to-two majority that "private, commercially legislative authority in the forum of public opinion and before operated, nonsectarian schools" may not deny "admission to legislative assemblies rather than to transfer such a contest to prospective students because they are Negroes." In some other the judicial arena, serves to vindicate the self-confidence of a cases where a statute like the Civil Rights Act of 1966 was not free people." involved, the Court invoked-even stretched-the doctrine to It is more common to find warnings in dissents and those strike down racial discrimination. caveats are not to be regarded as of lesser importance because As Archibald Cox asked in his book The Warren Court: they came from justices in the minority in a given case.

Constitutional Decision as an Instrument of Reform, "Is the Justice Harlan's admonition is often recalled: "The Conaction of Harvard University private action or state action for stitution is not a panacea for every blot upon the public welfare; nor should this Court, ordained as a judicial body, be thought the purposes of the fourteenth amendment [guarantee of equality]? A large percentage of its annual expenditures comes of as a general haven for reform movements" (Reynolds v. from government funds, both for research and education."

Sims). Earlier, Chief Justice Stone had mentioned another It does not require much imagination to appreciate the consideration: " ... While unconstitutional exercise of power by implications of this doctrine in India, if its Supreme Court were the executive and legislative branches of the government is to accept it. In a judgment" concurring with the majority ruling, subject to judicial restraint, the only check on our own exercise Justice K.K. Mathew of the Indian Supreme Court relied on of power is our sense of self-restraint." this doctrine to bring public corporations within the meaning of Critics like Professor Nathan Glazer readily concur with "the State." But his brother justices in the Supreme Court such caveats. The very titles of his able critiques "Towards an preferred to reach the same result without invoking the doctrine Imperial Judiciary?" and "Should Judges Administer Social Services?" proclaim the core of his thesis (The Public Interest (Sukhdev Singh v. Bhagatram).

The Supreme Court of India has drawn on the rulings of the Nos. 41-Fall 1975; and 50-Winter 1978) respectively.

U.S. Supreme Court liberally, yet selectively.

In Express The debate has been conducted with a passion matched only by the erudition and felicity of style not always to be found in Newspapers (Private) Limited v. Union of India the Supreme Court said: public controversies.

The prime reject of the Bill of Rights is "The fundamental right to the freedom of speech and simply stated: "We set up government, by the consent of the expression enshrined in ... our Constitution is based on [the governed, and the Bill of Rights denies those in power any legal provisions in] Amendment I of the Constitution of the United opportunity to coerce that consent. Authority here is to be States ... and it would be, therefore, legitimate and proper to controlled by public opinion, not public opinion by authority" refer to those decisions of the Supreme Court of the United (Justice Robert H. Jackson's moving opinion for the Court in States of America in order to appreciate the true nature, scope West Virginia State Board v. Barnette). and extent of this right in spite of the warning administered by The U.S. Supreme Court has, to be sure, gone beyond its this Court against use of American and other cases" earlier. mandate sometimes as it has on occasion failed to act. On every Fifteen years later, in 1973, the Supreme Court of India such occasion, whether of excess in action or in passivity, it has uttered a caveat in Santokh Singh v. Delhi Administration: "In aroused keen and open controversy within its own ranks. "A our opinion, it is hardly fruitful to refer to the American dissent in a Court of last resort," Charles Evans Hughes wrote decisions particularly when this Court has more than once in 1928, "is an appeal to the brooding spirit of the law, to the clearly enunciated the scope and effect of Article 19(1)(a) and intelligence of a future day." It is very much more than that. It is at once an appeal to the people of the country-immediate, 19(2).[guarantee of free speech] .... Our Constitution provides reasonably precise, general guidance in this matter. It would direct and pungent. thus be misleading to construe a free press."

If the Supreme Court of the United States is a success it is because it has handsomely won the confidence of the people.

That the rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court repay study needs no emphasis. The classics among them are also gems of . We conclude, as we began, not with the dictum of a jurist, but of a publicist, one of the greatest ever. Alexis de Tocqueville's literary excellence; the great dissents of Holmes and Brandeis, explanation of the power wielded by the justices of the U.S. for instance. But the Court has done a lot more than that. It has provided a continuing debate on the philosophy underlying the Supreme Court defies improvement-"but it is the power of Bill of Rights and the role of the Court as its sentinel. It has public opinion."

That power is also the ultimate sanction found itself attacked for being too activist at times and too behind the Bill of Rights.

0 passive at others. It has sought to educate the people not only about its own limitations but also about those of the Bill of About the Author: A.G. Noorani, a regular contributor to SPAN, is a Rights as well.

Bombay-based lawyer and constitutional expert.

George Washington

APainting Comes Home A rare portrait of George Washington, whose 254th birth anniversary falls this month, has come back to India.

The painting of the first American President, which hung for more than a century and a half in Calcutta and later found its way to the United States, was ceremoniously unveiled by U.S. Ambassador John Gunther Dean last month at his Roosevelt House residence in New Delhi, where it will now hang.

Drawn from life and completed several years before the President died, the huge painting, which measures nine feet by six feet (almost three meters by two meters), shows Washington in a heroic pose-his left hand resting on his sword-hilt, the right outstretched as if to make a public address.

The portrait is attributed to the celebrated American painter Gilbert Stuart; and is considered by art historians to be a significant work, not only because of the subject and its extraordinary history, but also because of its intrinsic aesthetic merit. It is still in its original gilt frame, and, though somewhat mellowed and darkened by age, is in excellent shape.

The portrait was originally a gift to the Calcutta merchant Ram Doolal Dey, the pioneer of Indo-American trade. In the late 18th and early 19th century Ram Doolal single-handedly helped American traders to find a foothold in the Indian market, much against the protestations of the British merchants in India.

When the first American ship arrived in Calcutta in 1787, British merchants and trading houses in the city refused to market her goods, as they wanted to keep the profitable India trade exclusively to themselves. Five years later, when President Washington sent Benjamin Joy to Calcutta as the first American Consul to India, the British authorities refused to recognize him, and the envoy left the city in frustration a year later.

Ram Doolal Dey however extended all assistance to the American traders.

Through his agents and brokers, he had their merchandise sold in Calcutta at exceptionally good prices. He also generously advanced them money to carry back the choicest Indian wares-spices, silks, fine cobweb muslins, gunny bags, perfumes, tea, sugar, carnelian necklaces and indigo-then in great demand in the New World. So great was the Americans' interest in India that the traders also carried home with them Sanskrit books on Indian philosophy and religion. Some of these texts found their way to Yale University and became the springboard to its Sanskrit studies program initiated

by Edward Elbridge Salisbury, an early Sanskrit scholar.

American cargoes consisted mainly of bullion or products such as rosin and Madeira wine, picked up by the American ships during the voyage. Interestingly, an unlikely U.S. export of the 1830s maritime trade was ice. In 1833, the good ship Tuscany brought 180 tons of ice, cut from New England lakes and ponds, to Calcutta. The ice was packed in fragrant pine sawdust, to keep it from melting during its 25,000-kilometer journey. The ship's holds were double-sheathed and cargo hatches were always kept tightly closed. Henry Thoreau's Walden has a passage in which he reflects on this fact.

"Thus it appears," wrote Thoreau, "that the sweltering inhabitants of ... Madras and Bombay and Calcutta drink at my well." He muses that, while he bathes his intellect "in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita, the pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges."

As a result of Ram Doolal's assistance, U.S. trade with India flourished, and American merchants, ship captains and even sailors prospered. The Americans, in turn, acknowledged their gratitude to their Indian benefactor in numerous ways. They passed most of their trade with India through him and one American merchant named his new ship Ram Doolal, which made three voyages to Calcutta.

It was in this spirit of respect and esteem that 35 merchants of Salem, Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Marblehead got together in 1795 and

contributed a handsome sum to commission a life-size portrait of their first President and national hero as a gIft to Ram Doolal. The painting was presented to him in 1801, a little more than a year after the death of America's Founding Father. The Indian merchant hung it prominently in his business house in Calcutta. After Ram Doolal's death in 1825, his sons, described by the London Times as the "Rothschilds of Bengal," were proud of this treasure. About the end of the 19th century, the painting passed into the hands of the Mullick family of Pataldanga who hung it in their Wellington Square house in Calcutta.

The Mullicks, it is believed, sold the painting sometime ago to an American who took it back to the United States, where it found its way into the collection, appropriately enough, of Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.

How the portrait was traced at Washington and Lee and brought back to India is another fascinating story. When John Gunther Dean was named U.S. Ambassador to India last summer, his daughter-inlaw, who worked for an art gallery and who knew about this painting, told him of the story. "I was excited to learn about this historic link between our two countries, and was keen on bringing it with me to India when I came here to assume my ambassadorial duties," says Ambassador Dean. "We metthe owner ofthe gallery; he had been involved in the purchase and placement of the painting at Washington and Lee. Fortunately, he also shared my excitement and got into the act right away so that this lHlique symbol of friendship between India and the United States could be brought back to this country. It took a tremendous effort on his part to neg?tiate loan ofthe painting. It's a rare piece of art, and a huge one at that. To move that size of a painting was a difficult job. We had to get it insured for $500,000 and special boxes were made for its shipping to India.

"I am indeed very happy that it's back here to show that we realize it has Indian roots. It may be here only for a few years, but it is something that belongs to our two countries."

0 About the Author: Thomas C. Dove is the Press Attache in the American Embassy, New Delhi.

One of the most important continuing tests facing a working democracy is the way it chooses to change its national leadership or to retain a particular administration in power. Since 1789, when George Washington assumed the office of President, Americans have maintained an orderly system through periods of peace and war, prosperity and hardship.

That stability is the subject of national pride. As he began his second term in January 1985, Ronald Reagan took note of the straight line dating back to Washington's first inaugural ceremony.

"So much has changed," the 40th President said, "and yet here again we stand, together as centuries ago .... Once again, an American President .freely chosen by a sovereign people has taken the oath prescribed by the Constitution that guides us still. This alone is cause for rejoicing. " Yet the mix of law and tradition from which the system evolved has dealt more loosely with the crucial question of the President's tenure. What should be the limits on a chief executive's incumbency?

How much of a President's time should be spent on the next election? Even if permitted to do so by law, is it always wise to run again?

When President Reagan and his wife, Nancy, talked alone during the autumn of 1983 about his political future, she had mixed feelings about whether he should seek a second term in office. Returning to private life, she thought, had its attractive

Retumofthe Two-Term

Presidency Ronald Reagan is only the 13th U.S. President to have been elected for a second term. The strongest argument for re-election, says the author, is that it imparts continuity to government. side. Months later she told me in an interview, "I dragged my heels a little bit" as President Reagan listed the reasons for running again. "I guess he was wooing me," she said with a smile.

In those intimate conversations between husband and wife and in public comments as well, the Reagans consistently mentioned the most important argument in favor of striving for reelection-continuity.

It would benefit the country, she said, to renew the tradition of two-term presidencies.

Though Mrs. Reagan is neither a historian nor a political scientist, she was touching an important element of the way Americans regard the presidency as an institution.

The Constitution of the United States, as originally enacted 200 years ago, was silent on this point. While setting the President's term at four years,

the national charter imposed no limit, directly or indirectly, on the number of times an incumbent could seek reelection. Theoretically, at least, a President under those rules could have attempted to remain in office for life by asking the electorate for a new mandate every four years.

This issue was controversial in the 1780s, and the debate flared anew many decades later before a legal resolution was achieved (an event that we shall examine shortly). The dispute was typical of the U.S. political sy~tem's constant search for balance among competing needs. In the case of the President's tenure, there has always been tension between the need for a chief executive with enough political power to function effectively and an equally strong need to prevent any individual or branch of government from amassing so much power as to threaten the people's liberties.

As the Constitution was being debated in a raw young country that had only recently . freed itself from monarchy, there were fears that a President might take on the attributes of a king. Thus there was a clear need to fix a limited term, after which the electorate would have the right to choose a new leader if it wished. In a series of essays that came to be called the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton (who was later to serve as secretary of the treasury under George Washington) argued that "a duration of four years will contribute to the firmness of the executive [without causing] any

GEORGE WASHINGTON

THOMAS JEFFERSON

ANDREW JACKSON

(1789-97)

(1801-09)

(1829-37)

alarm for the public liberty."

Hamilton was among those who bee lieved in a strong central government. In his next essay urging enactment of the proposed Constitution, he ¡took up the issue of re-election.

The possibility of additional terms was necessary, he contended in the ornate language of his day, "to give the officer himself the inclination and the resolution to act his part well, and to the community time and leisure to observe the tendency of his measures, and thence to form an experimental estimate of their merits. The last is necessary to enable the people, when they see reason to approve of his conduct, to continue him in his station."

According to Hamilton and some of his associates, there was great virtue in providing to the "government the advantage of permanency in a wise system of administration."

This view, however, failed to survive very long. As the first President under the new Constitution, Washington set many precedents.

He chose to leave office after his second term. Among the six leaders who followed him during the next four decades, four also served two terms each, while two held power for only one term each. It became the norm, then, to expect a President who was generally considered successful in his initial administration to seek re-election once-but no more than once.

Similarly, it became part of the country's political tradition to associate "strong" Presidents-those who attempted to marshal the powers of the office _vigorously-with the ability to win a second term. That was true among the early Presidents who had serious competition when they sought second terms.

For instance, Thomas Jefferson (1801-

JAMES MADISON (1809-17)

JAMES MONROE (1817-25)

1809), James Monroe (1817-1825) a~d Andrew Jackson (1829-1837) were regarded in that light as each served a full eight years.

Alter Jackson retired in 1837, however, this tradition became more of an ideal than a functional pattern. During the rest of the 19th century, only two other Presidents, Ulysses S. Grant (18691877) and Gro~er Cleveland (1885-1889, 1893-1897), managed to serve two full

terms. Other Presidents either died in office or suffered political defeat.

(Cleveland is unique in the history of American Presidents.

Though he was popular with the voters, he was defeated for re-election in 1888 because of the distribution of electoral votes. But the Democratic Party nominated him again four years later and he won his second term.)

In the early decad~es of this century, only Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921) fulfilled the two-term tradition.

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-1945), as he did in several other ways, broke precedent on presidential tenure. With war already engulfing much of the world, Roosevelt in 1940 ran for a third term and won. His decision to shatter the tradition was controversial even within his own Democratic Party. His Vice President, John Nance Gardner, refused to run with Roosevelt in 1940, and many others were similarly skeptical.

The war was still raging in 1944, which in Roosevelt's mind justified yet one more campaign.

His health was already frail when he won that historic contest and he died soon after his fourth inaugural ceremony.

Having served far longer than any of his predecessors and having led his country through two enormous crises-the Great Depression and World War 11Roosevelt set the dimensions of the modern American presidency.

Many Americans who came to maturity in that period, including Ronald Reagan, would measure future administrations against Roosevelt's.

The manner with which the American political system dealt with that legacy was- a remarkable reminder of the enduring struggle for checks and balances.

Roosevelt had become so popular dur-

ABRAHAM LINCOLN (1861-65)

ing his years in office that there were fears about some future President's gaining similar stature and using it to abuse the powers of his post. Soon after World War II, then, members of the U.S. Congress who shared this apprehension sponsored a constitutional change. The 22nd amendment, ultimately ratified by the states in 1951, codified the tradition set a century and half earlier; no President would serve more than two full terms.

Students of American government considered this a fascinating test of the country's fealty to first principles. There were times, as in World War II, when continued incumbency had great expedient advantages.

On the other hand, yielding to such temporary imperatives could undermine the more durable imperative concerning limiting the power of a single individual or faction. As historian Richard M. Pious later wrote of the 22nd amendment: "It restricts the choice of the party and of the electorate. And if the nation is in the midst of war or domestic crisis, it forces rotation in office just when people may wish for continuity. Yet it. .. demonstrates that the fundamental core of the constitutional processes for selection and retention in office emphasizes constitutionalism rather than the popular connection. " Ironically, the first President to whom the amendment's provisions applied was Dwight D. Eisenhower.¡ He was still widely respected and liked at the end of his second term, and probably could have remained in office under the old rules had he chosen to make the effort. The two decades after Eisenhower's departure in 1961 produced a much larger irony-a period of political stress during which it appeared that American Presidents had

ULYSSES S. GRANT (1869-77)

GROVER CLEVELAND (1885-89,

1893-97)

WOODROW WILSON (1913-21)

lost the ability to keep power for eight years.

John Kennedy's violent death was an aberration.

But the four leaders who followed him each failed, for different reasons, to act out the eight-year model.

Lyndon B. Johnson declined to seek re-election to a second full term. Richard M. Nixon was re-elected a second time, but resigned a year and a half into his second term: The next two Presidents,

FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT (1933-45)

Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, each failed to win election to a second term.

Some experts in the field began to doubt that any incumbent could manage to govern effectively and retain power for eight years. The prospect of being a "lame duck" from the moment one enters the White House itself is a great dilution in the ability to govern well. As Jimmy Carter headed toward his defeat in 1980, political commentator Robert Shogan published a pessimistic analysis of the previous 20 years. After Eisenhower, Shogan wrote, the "story Of the presidency is dominated by upheaval and distress, producing erratic swings in political fortunes. " When he defeated Carter six years ago, Ronald Reagan seemed to many Americans an implausible candidate to restore stability in the White House. There was the matter of his age. At 69, he was the oldest American ever to assume the presidency and some observers thought that he would never try for a second term no matter what happened in his first.

Further, Reagan sought several basic changes in domestic and foreign policy.

These were sure to be sufficiently controversial to give his opponents a rallying point from which to attack him if he did attempt re-election.

As the President's biographer, Lou Cannon, wrote recently, journalists and political rivals have chronically underestimated Reagan's resilience.

His health remained good despite his age and despite the attempt on his life by a deranged gunman. By late 1983, his political standing was also healthy; the electorate clearly approved of the way he was running the presidency. Thus, when it came time for "wooing" his wife concerning the rigors of a second national campaign,

Reagan could talk confidently about his strong desire to carry forward the programs he had begun. Both Nancy Reagan and the voters found his courtship persuasive.

Reagan was fortunate, as he began his second term in January, in that the political climate favored him. Public opinion polls showed his personal popularity was even higher than on election day the previous November. Inflationone of the worst problems for Carter in 1980-was well under control. General economic activity, as measured by the gross national product, was growing at a healthy rate.

Just as important, there appeared to be progress in dealing with his most serious foreign-policy concern- Washington's relationship with Moscow. The two capitals had already agreed to resume arms control negotiations after a lengthy hiatus. Reagan's first business meeting, the morning after he took the oath of office for the second time, was with Secretary of State George Shultz and the officials who would represent the United States in the new round of meetings. Just four days after that, the White House and the Kremlin announced jointly the time and place for the start of new talks.

For the time being, at least, Reagan was enjoying what American writers call a political honeymoon. Even the senior spokesman for the political opposition, speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Thomas P. (Tip) O'Neill, jovially told the President that the Democrats (who still control the lower house of the Congress) would not seek to obstruct his program with parliamentary tactics.

Reagan himself was in an ebullient mood, eager for the opportunity tp show that much could be done in his second term. In the first week of that term, he told a group of government officials, "It has been a tremendous four years, and I'm feeling absolutely [optimistic] about the next four. I was just thinking the other day that in our first administration we made history, and in the second, we can change history forever."

Just how does he wish to "change history"? In domestic affairs, Reagan hopes to continue to reduce the role of government in American society. His conservative credo dictates that the surest way to enduring prospenty is to enhance private enterprise and individual initiative. While he made some progress in

DWIGHT

D. EISENHOWER (1953-61)

that direction during his first term, he feels that there is much still to do in diminishing federal regulations and in drastically overhauling the country's income tax system. Concerning the latter, he sent to Congress in May 1985 a comprehensive bill to make the tax code fairer and simpler, and to reduce the levy on individuals while stimulating economic activity. Republicans and Democrats readily supported the bill in principle, but they acknowledged that it would take months of debate and negotiation on its specific provisions to achieve final agreement.

One important problem that Reagan had not solved during his first term was the federal deficit. The government still spends far more than it collects in taxes.

However, in mid-1985 Reagan and'members of Congress were showing a willingness to compromise on the federal budget and to make significant cuts in government spending to reduce the deficit.

RICHARD M. NIXON (1969-74)

While the Geneva Summit between President Reagan and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev last November was welcome news in both the Soviet Union and the United States, neither side imagined that the process of arms control would be quick or easy. Complex differences would have to be addressed, and the subject would be of continuing concern to Reagan. Other aspects of SovietAmerican relations would also require close attention-along with a variety of issues affecting the Middle East, Central America, Afghanistan and other regions of the globe.

Winning a second term gives a President an opportunity to see his programs through, but does not necessarily assure success. There can be disappointments after high expectations.

Franklin Roosevelt, for instance, was frustrated when he attempted to reorganize the Supreme Court in 1937. But after he lost that battle, Roosevelt did succeed in getting the Court's approval for key portions of his New Deal program.

Eisenhower had problems with an economic slowdown in his second term. On the other hand, he was able to advance the cause of racial integration in dramatic ways. He also presided over the admission of the Union of Alaska and Hawaii as the 49th and 50th states.

When reminded that a President's second term can witness a loss of momentum, an attrition of energy, Reagan shrugged off such commentary. He is a natural optimist. He is delighted to have led the United States back to the twoterm tradition. He said in a recent newspaper interview, "I have had a previous experience that makes this exciting." He said that when he was governor of California, "most of our great accomplishments came in the second term."

Asked then if he didn't feel as if "a little of the thrill of the chase is gone," the President responded cheerfully:' "Oh no, no. If you walked away now and someone else came in with a different view, all of this could be unraveled. The idea is to get it clenched and in place."

None of the country's Founding Fathers could have put the argument for a two-term presidency more vividly. 0 About the Author: Laurence I. Barrett, White House correspondent for Time magazine, is author of the book Gambling with History: Reagan

in the White

House,

nce in a lifetime, and the time is now, the most celebrated vagabond of the solar system, Halley's [rhymes with valleys] comet, streaks out of the dark void, dashes by Earth, takes a turn around the sun and emerges resplendent with an even brighter tail of gas and dust. Outbound, after passing Earth again with a flourish, it vanishes into the void whence it came, far beyond the outer planets. Comets, with their icy nuclei and luminous vapors, are astronomy's itinerant carnivals-here today and gone tomorrow; more glitter than substance. And Halley's is the flamboyant carny barker, enticing the rubes with visions of heavenly delight. This time, however, the rubes have learned a thing or two. We have figured. out clever ways to steal a peek inside Halley's tent.

This time, too, for most astronomers, Halley's visitation will be merely an exhilarating diversion from their more cosmic quests. Comets in our solar system only orbit the sun, and scientists' far-seeing eyes now look far beyond such modest distances. There is much to be learned by close observation of the comet, but scientists now are poised to see close to the edge of the universe; new observational devices are formidable.

The best instrument scientists had for studying Halley's in 1910, when it last appeared, was a 152-centimeter telescope on Mount Wilson in California. Now, many telescopes with curved mirrors twice or three times as large are tracking Halley's course and will be examining its shape, size and composition.

Then too, in 1910, astronomers could see only radiations visible to the human eye. The light was magnified by telescopes, to be sure, but limited to a tiny sampling of all the radiations-radio waves, for instance, or ultraviolet-that are given off by objects in the sky.

This time, astronomers can see through windows on space that used to be closed to them, windows on the invisible. They have telescopic sensors capable of detecting radiations beyond the power of human vision. Most such radiation does not pass freely through Earth's atmosphere, but never mind; with spacecraft, astronomers can now get above our distorting and absorbing atmosphere and, for the first time, view astronomical phenomena clearly through all the windows on the universe, tuning in on the full range of cosmic radiation.

Astronomy has entered a golden age. "And there's no way it could have happened except by getting above the Earth's atmosphere," says Robert C. Bless, a University of Wisconsin astronomer.

Excitement and anticipation run high in this golden era.

Armed with incredible new tools of discovery and a surer understanding of the physics of matter, astronomers and other scientists are emboldened in the belief that the great unknowns of the universe are now within the grasp of human comprehension. As soon as the Hubble Space Telescope, built by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), goes into orbit later this year, affording astronomers a view almost to the edge of the universe and the beginning of time, they fully expect a rush of astonishing revelations that could reshape our concepts of cosmic history and destiny-and of ourselves.

Instruments on the ground as well as in space may soon bring us, for the first time, confirmation of other planets orbiting around other stars, raising the odds that we are not the only intelligent beings in the universe. How we view ourselves philosophically, even how we practice religion, could be

affected because the instruments of astronomy are also likely to yield answers to the really big questions that for so long have seemed unanswerable: How did the universe begin and what is its ultimate fate? Is it destined, in time, to collapse? Or is the universe eternal?

Astronomy's new talents and technologies will be on magnificent display for the return of Halley's comet. Two Japanese spacecraft are to examine the comet's ultraviolet emissions, investigating the invisible cloud of atomic hydrogen that extends tens of thousands of kilometers out from the comet. Two Soviet craft, carrying instruments designed by European and American as well as Soviet scientists, are on course to pass within a few hundred kilometers of the comet's nucleus. They should transmit incredible close-up pictures, analyze the charged gases spewing out and snatch dust particles for identification on board. Giotto, the spacecraft launched by the II-nation European Space Agency, is being directed on a suicide run through the particles that surround the comet's nucleus for a photographic glimpse of its solid core.

Although, for budgetary reasons, the United States has no Halley-bound craft, a space shuttle will carry telescopes aloft in March for a look at the comet from Earth orbit.

Later this year, Halley's comet, some of its mystery stripped away, will begin its journey to the fringe of the solar system-not to return again until the year 2061. What astronomy's instruments can now see could not be imagined when Halley's comet appeared in 1910 and may in turn be modest compared with what will be learned by 2061.

In astronomy, as in other sciences, according to Simon White, an associate professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona, there are "architects" and "builders." The architects are the theorists who design abstract frameworks, cathedrals of thought. The builders are the observational astronomers who gather the brick and mortar of data and try to fit them within the framework, or show that it cannot be done. The builders have never been busier or more capable of' providing the architects with extraordinary material for their bold edifices.

And the architects are busy refining their theories, anticipating data that will make their buildings solid.

Among the architects, the predominant current theory is of a universe initially flung into space by a violent explosion called "the big bang," of a universe still rapidly expanding. Most of the builders' recent observations of the violent nature of the universe support that idea. Architects divide, however, on whether the universe will always continue to expand. This is the new astronomy's No. 1 question, and builders are gathering data that they hope will yield an answer.

The big bang theory is based on the work of the American astronomer Edwin Powell Hubble. In the 1920s, working with the then-new 254-centimeter Mount Wilson telescope, Hubble first recognized that the universe is organized into galaxies of many sizes and shapes, and that the more distant ones are receding faster than others. Light from the most distant objects, having taken so long to reach us, actually represents conditions in the early universe, back close to the beginning of time.

The years since Hubble's discovery, according to Leo Goldberg, a professor emeritus of astronomy at Harvard University, "have seen astronomy expand like the universe itself, driven by a sequence of technological and scientific advances and by a tenfold growth in the number of astronomers."

The serenity of the night sky, observers have learned, belies the universe's violent nature. Recent discoveries reveal galaxies cannibalizing smaller galaxies and perhaps consuming much of themselves into black holes, those theorized objects millions or billions of times as massive as the sun but so compressed that their powerful gravity allows the escape of neither matter nor light. Stars are observed in various stages of life and explosive death. Some massive stars may collapse in death to create black holes. Billions of light-years away, bodies called quasars shine with the brilliance of countless suns by sucking in, each probably powered by a ravenous black hole, enormous quantities of surrounding gas and dust. Some other, less massive, stars collapse into rapidly spinning dense objects called neutron stars, or pulsars, whose repetitive flashes blink at us like beacons on some celestial shoal. From the explosions of stars, we discover, come the material for new stars. And radiation from all this activity pervades the cosmos, some of it the residual energy from the violent fireball that was the big bang.

medwith incredible new tools of astronomy, Man may finally learn if. other planetary systems exist. Or are we alone in the universe?

fi\

"The universe is popping all over the place," says Riccardo Giacconi, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute at Johns Hopkins University. "Violent processes are now seen to be the norm rather than the exception."

For Kip S. Thorne, one of the architects of astronomy, all these developments are cause for optimism. Dr. Thorne, a theoretical astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), is a lanky, bearded man who has been composing and testing cosmic theory since 1960. Over coffee in the common room at Caltech's physics department, he ponders how the universe began. "Twenty-five years ago," he says, softly but fervently, "I did not believe that in my lifetime there would be any hope of understanding the initial conditions of the universe. The problem was virtually off-limits. Now, I believe we may well resolve that issue over the next decade or two. The fundamental laws of physics, as we now understand them, are so constraining that it only takes a small amount of observational data to drive you to an answer."

He speaks of gravitational waves, a phenomenon predicted

by Einstein's theory of general relativity. It may be that forces at the time of creation released waves of gravity we have not yet learned to detect. These could, Dr. Thorne hopes, bring us messages from the moment of creation.

Dr. Thorne concedes, however, that the universe has a way of confounding the theorists. "Things you thought you knew," he says, "you discover you don't really know. You wind up with new questions you never even dreamed of."

The new astronomy is amassing new tools to detect with greater clarity the information conveyed by all types of cosmic radiation. The charged subatomic particles in stars, galaxies and other cosmic objects create electric and magnetic vibrations that spread out into space like the ripples in a pond where a pebble has been tossed. We can see a few of the vibrations as

light; the rest are invisible. These radiations-radio, infrared and ultraviolet waves, X-rays and gamma rays-differ from one another only in their wavelengths.

Radio waves, the longest of the radiations, afforded ast10nomers their first clear window on the invisible, beginning especially after World War II. They, like visible light, can penetrate Earth's atmosphere, and our antennas detected a hissing "noise" emanating from the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way. The noise was the first evidence of violent forces there, and radio antennas picked up similar radiations from other galaxies. They were the first also to detect quasars and pulsars.

Radio astronomy's most astounding revelation, however, was the discovery in 1965 of the faint radiation coming from every direction in the heavens. It was the radiation left over from the explosive moment of the universe's creation, the most conclusive evidence to support the big bang theory. The discovery won Nobel Prizes for Arno A. Penzias and Robert W. Wilson of the Bell Laboratories.

To sharpen the definition of radio observations, astronomers have devised ingenious methods of enlarging their signalcollecting area by stretching an array of antennas over kilometers, even continents. The most sensitive such arrangement is the Very Large Array in western New Mexico. Seen from afar, the 27 white dish antennas look like a fleet of galleons in full sail. The operation of each antenna is coordinated with that of the others, carefully timed and processed by computer. The system is able to sort out such fine details as molecules in interstellar space and the halos of matter extending out from visible galaxies. Even more revealing observations are expected from the Very Long Baseline Array now planned as a linkage of radio antennas from Hawaii to Maine and from the Canadian border to Puerto Rico. These new systems are funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation.

Infrared waves vibrate more rapidly than radio waves, and although some observations in the infrared range are made from the ground by high-altitude telescopes, most radiations in this wavelength are absorbed by Earth's atmosphere.

Accordingly, this window was not opened wide until the launching, in 1983, of the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS). Surveying the entire sky, IRAS sensors located five new comets and a new asteroid (possibly a dead comet), observed galaxies 500 times brighter in the infrared than a "normal" galaxy like the Milky Way and probed interstellar clouds where scientists hope to learn how stars are born. A newer satellite, the Space Infrared Telescope Facility, planned for the 1990s, will be 1,000 times more sensitive than IRAS. When IRAS focused on the star Vega, it made out a ring of dusty particles that were apparently leftovers from the star's birth. This was the first clear intimation that, as theorists have long predicted, other stars may have planetary systems. The particles around Vega have not coalesced into planets, but subsequent ground-based observations have served up more tantalizing clues elsewhere. D.W. McCarthy, Jr., an astronomer at the University of Arizona, is encouraged. "By the end of the century," he has written, "we should learn of other planetary systems, or realize that the formation of such systems is a rare event. In either case, we will be closer to knowing if we are alone in the universe."

Looking through the window of another wavelength, the

ultraviolet, spacecraft like the Copernicus, launched in 1972, examined in fine detail the composition and structure of interstellar space. It is not as much of a void as once thought.

The Uhuru and Einstein satellites peered through the window of X-ray radiation in the 1970s. Particularly efficient in high-temperature observations, X-rays contributed a new perspective on the violent universe, including black holes, quasars, neutron stars and the remnants of exploded stars, called supernovae. Galaxies were seen to have hundreds of times the mass they were previously thought to have when observed by starlight alone, and the structure of gases between galaxies was revealed. Exosat, the European Space Agency's satellite, is mapping X-ray sources to help determine the temperature, density and chemical composition of stellar gases. The Advance X-ray Astrophysics Facility, proposed by NASA for the early

1990s, is expected to supply X-ray images 100 times as sensitive as those of previous X-ray satellite observatories.

Gamma rays, the most energetic of the radiations, have been examined in space by instruments developed by scientists for detecting nuclear explosions. From balloons and spacecraft, these detectors found gamma rays associated with the enigmatic quasars and pulsars. But mostly, it was noted, gamma rays seem to be coming from regions not visible in any other wavelengths, a mystery that will be addressed by the American-European Gamma Ray Observatory set for launching in 1988.

"Our view of the universe is undergoing a grand change," George B. Field and Eric J. Chaisson wrote in The Invisible Universe, published last year. "Within a single generation, by learning how to capture and analyze kinds of radiation other than light, we have discovered to our surprise that many of the

Our Galaxy: How It Looks Today. A 360-degree assemblage of pictures of the Milky Way. The view above may be "read" in I5-degree increments from left to right, panel by panel. The distant center of the galaxy is at page center. Areas closer to Earth appear in more detail at the sides.

Black streaks resulted when the satellite or camera failed to complete a scan. Color indicates temperature, with the coolest being red and the warmest, blue. Spectacular as these first infrared satellite images appear, they will soon be surpassed by observations from the U. S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Hubble Space Telescope, which is to go up later this year.

most interesting phenomena-and even most matter-in the universe do not emit light."

Of all the major new tools of the new astronomy, the one most imminent is NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, named in honor of the man who discovered the expanding universe. With regular maintenance by shuttle crews, the telescope should be able to see the previously unseeable from its orbit for a minimum of 15 years and probably for many decades. The telescope will look at the universe through the windows of visible light and ultraviolet radiations, and astronomy's architects and builders alike expect to make incredible journeys back in time. "We will see light far away, from objects as they were five, seven, ten thousand million years ago," predicts ] ames A. Westphal, a professor of planetary sciences at Caltech and the scientist in charge of the telescope's wide-field/

planetary camera. (Estimates of the age of the universe range from 10,000 million to 20,000 million years.) The telescope will probe seven times deeper into space and detect objects 50 times fainter than anything observed by groundbased telescopes. Its resolution of detail will be equivalent to reading an auto license plate at a distance of 160 kilometers.

According to Dr. Giacconi, whose Space Telescope Science Institute at Johns Hopkins will direct scientific operations of the space telescope, the instrument is the "first qualitative improvement in optical telescopes" since the completion, in 1948, of the 508-centimeter Hale telescope on Mount Palamar in California.

A key to the space telescope's vastly improved vision, aside from simply being above the atmosphere, is a set of eight wafer-thin silicon chips called charge-coupled devices, or CCDs. These are attached to a wide-field/planetary camera developed at Caltech and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Each ceo chip contains a field of 640,000 sensors called pixels.

Light gathered and magnified by the mirrors strikes the pixels and is converted to electrical signals, with each pixel registering and storing electrons in proportion to the intensity of light at that point in the image.

Photographic plates, which used to be standard equipment on astronomical cameras, preserve only about 7 out of every 1,000 light particles reflected by a telescope. The CCDs are sensitive to 700 out of every 1,000. From these images, scientists hope to chart the large-scale structures of the universe, explore the turbulent nuclei of galaxies, examine supernova remnants and search for planets around other stars.

"We're going to see so much deeper into space and see so many more objects than we could see before," says Dr. Westphal. "We're going to be able, after some years, to learn if the universe is going to slow down and collapse on itself or if it is going to expand indefinitely. That is within the reach of technology now, I think."

What is the fate of the universe? It is a mark of the new astronomy's hubris that the question is raised these days with a growing sense that the answer is within human grasp. The answer, however, may be harder to come by than some of the optimistic architects of astronomy now say. It may lie hidden in what astronomers still cannot detect, despite the sophistication of their new instruments. No tool of the new astronomy, not even the space telescope, can see back all the way to creation.

Despite the hopes of scientists like Kip Thorne at Caltech that gravitational waves may some day bring us early messages, some theorists maintain that no instrument or method will ever detect conditions that far back. The first 700,000 years of time, they say, will remain obscure.

And there are other roadblocks to understanding the fate of the universe. The architects of astronomy, basing their ideas on the laws of physics and what is known about the structure of galaxies, now theorize that there exists matter in the universe heretofore unseen and unimagined. They call it the missing mass. Galaxies and clusters of galaxies may be immense, but they and other objects observable across the electromagnetic spectrum constitute, the theorists say, only 1 percent of the matter in the universe. Some of the rest, 10 percent or less, may turn out to be gas, dust, black holes, dark stars known as brown dwarfs and/or a host Qf Jupiter-sized planets. The rest-90 percent or perhaps even 99 percent-is elusive dark matter.

A decade ago, Jeremiah Ostriker and P.J.E. Peebles of

Princeton University theorized that individual galaxies must be surrounded by extensive halos of dark matter which supply the gravitational force necessary to maintain g?Jactic stability.

X-ray satellites subsequently detected clouds of hot gas around some galaxies, perhaps part of these theoretical halos. Aside from that, however, no astronomical data have been produced that tend to shed light on the missing mass. The search is being carried out by the theorists on thei'r own.

They are not at all dismayed by the fact that they may never see the missing mass. They are confident that they will come to an understanding of what it is by using the tools of high-energy physics, especially particle accelerators. They hope that the ephemeral nature of subatomic matter will soon be sufficiently probed to give them an idea of how the missing mass will affect the destiny of the universe.

Their efforts are guided in part by a new model of the early universe, the "inflationary" model. An elaboration of the big bang theory, this model postulates that in the first fraction of a millisecond, the universe underwent a tremendously rapid expansion and then settled down to a slower growth rate. The model would not only help explain how the universe evolved to what we see now but would also serve as the basis for estimates of the universe's assumed density.

The inflationary model is linked to another edifice of the architects, the grand unified theory, or GUT. This is an attempt to show that the universe's basic forces-such as electromagnetism, gravity, the forces that bind atoms together and the forces that cause radioactive decay-are actually different manifestations of the same fundamental interactions. Experiments in particle accelerators have lent support to the case for a relationship between electromagnetism and the forces that cause radioactive decay. Applying GUT and other theories, physicists predict that an abundance of exotic dark elementary particles must have been created in the big bang. Theorists give them names like photinos, axions and gravitinos. Collectively, they are known as weakly interactive massive particles, or (of course) WIMPs. And it just may be that WIMPs rule the universe, though they are too tiny and diffuse to be detected by available instruments. This may be the stuff that, clumping together, supplied the original gravitational force that attracted material into galaxies and holds it there. In a recent computer analysis comparing these premises with what is known of the universe, Simon White of the University of Arizona and other scientists said they found "some measure of support" for WIMPs being the missing mass.

Theorists would dearly love to know what and how much mass is missing, because one of their most cherished ideas is that the universe has an ideal ratio of matter to volumeroughly three hydrogen atoms per cubic meter. They see this as a natural state for the universe and call it the critical density. If the actual density of the universe turns out to be greater than the assumed critical density, so the theory goes, we live in a closed universe-the gravity of the galaxies and all the dark matter will eventually arrest expansion and the universe will collapse on itself in a "big crunch." If the actual density is less, the universe is open and would presumably expand forever into a virtual nothingness, with gravity eventually becoming insignificant. If the density should be at precisely the critical value, the universe would continue to expand, but more slowly, and with gravity continuing to hold things together. This

universe would be, presumably, eternal.

In the new age of astronomy, the observers who still look through conventional optical telescopes based on mountaintops are not being put out of business. Astronomy needs all the windows on the universe at its command.

"No one working in one wavelength region can do it all," says Gerry X. Neugebauer, an astronomer working with infrared frequencies who is also director of Caltech's Palomar Observatory. "We in infrared have to go to the radio and X-ray and optical people to help us 'explain what we are seeing. The space telescope and other orbiting observatories are not going to close down Palomar We're going to have more demand at Palomar. Every new instrument puts more pressure on the others. " Put another way, when an astronomer looking through one window of the spectrum shouts out that he has seen something unusual, others rush to their own particular windows to catch a glimpse, if they can, and see if they can elucidate the new phenomenon. This spirit is at once competitive and collegial.

To meet the demand for more precise data and the competi-

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challenge today is to find the 90 percent or more of the universe that scientists think is missing.

tion from instruments in space, the big earth-bound optical telescopes are constantly being upgraded. Many are now equipped with the charge-coupled devices like those designed for the space telescope. Recent tests at the National Solar Observatory on Sacramento Peak in New Mexico demonstrated an effective electronic-optics technique for removing most of the atmospheric blurring from ground-based observations, providing images whose resolution for bright objects may match that of space-borne telescopes. The experimental instrument breaks the dancing image into 19 separate ones, senses and balances the displacement of each, and then recombines them at a common focus. These adaptive optics, as they are called, produce images of solar phenomena five times sharper than the uncorrected images obtained simultaneously.

Even so, astronomers believe the current instruments have been improved almost to their theoretical limits. They have thus laid plans to build much larger telescopes capitalizing on innovative mirror-fabrication technology.

Roger Angel, for example, an astronomer at the University of Arizona, has developed a technique for spinning molten glass in a mold to form the surface of a honeycomb mirror as much as eight meters in diameter, the largest ever. The wider a telescope's mirror, the greater its light-gathering capacity. Such a telescope for optical and infrared viewing, being planned by Arizona and Ohio State University, would have 2.5 times the collecting area of the Palomar instrument.

Even more ambitious is the project by Caltech and the University of California to build an optical-infrared telescope twice as large as and four times more powerful than Palomar.

To be completed in 1992, it is called the Keck Telescope and will feature a primary mirror that is a mosaic of 3? hexagonal

mirrors, each 183 centimeters wide and only 7.5 centimeters thick. These segmented mirrors, designed by Jerry Nelson at the University of California's Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, will be effectively combined into a single mirror by a computercontrolled aiming system.

The Keck Telescope will be placed on top of Mauna Kea, a 4,145-meter extinct volcano in Hawaii, far from city lights and above the most turbulent air that distorts optical images and much of the water vapor that attenuates infrared radiation.

Marvin L. Goldberger, the president of Caltech, says that the instrument, which has a light-gathering capacity approximately 17 times that of the space telescope, is most likely to be used "to look extremely carefully and in great scientific detail at objects that might have been spotted by the space telescope."

For the time being, though, Mount Palomar in southern California is still the Olympus of optical astronomy. A Soviet observatory in the Caucasus has a somewhat larger mirror, but, judging by results, the 508-centimeter Hale Telescope at Palomar, called the Big Eye by its users, is superior.

Looking through this instrument, enhanced with a CCD, astronomers in 1982 caught the first glimmer of reflected light from the returning Halley's comet. Being first to see something is a tradition at Palomar.

Wallace L. W. Sargent has been spending his allotted nights there recently peering into the centers of galaxies. A professor of astronomy at Caltech, Dr. Sargent is one of the builders who, as so many of them do, sometimes think the architects get a little too detached from reality. The theorists' minds may range to the end of time, and yet their hands seldom touch a telescope. "It's like being religious and never going to church," says Dr. Sargent.

Working with Alexei V. Filippenko, a former student of his who is now at Berkeley, Dr. Sargent is looking for evidence to support the theory-the builder seeking to complete an architect's structure-that a quasar is actually a black hole in the center of a galaxy with a disk of rotating gas around it. If that proves to be true, the characteristically brilliant radiant energy emitted by quasars might be explained. It could be generated by the enormous quantities of gas and dust spiraling into the black holes. Accordingly, quasars would tend to fade out over time, as each black hole gobbled up everything around. This would seem to account for the fact that the brightest quasars all lie at the distant reaches of the universe. In the proximate universe, quasars are rare and, being older when we see them, are seldom very luminous, but seem always to be embedded in the center of galaxies. This has led theorists to suspect that many of the nearby galaxies may contain "dead" quasars harboring black holes.

In an examination of 75 nearby galaxies, Dr. Sargent and Dr. Filippenko discovered that at least 19, and perhaps 28, of them exhibited at their centers faint but definite quasarlike emissions. They cannot see with visible light into the cloudy center of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, but radio astronomers see energies there that have the appearance of a black hole.

The two astronomers continued their galaxy survey one recent summer's night. The control room near the base of the Big Eye is cozy and filled with classical music. Very rarely do astronomers sit in the "cage" high in the dome at the telescope's focal point. A television camera replaces the eyepiece they used

Above: With the help of a new sensor, a charge-coupled device, a galaxy is shown emitting electrons from its center.

Right: Halley's comet (circled) in 1985, surrounded by stars in Orion.

Right, above: Man has not yet been able to

confirm the existence of a single planet outside the solar system. But the chargecoupled device shows the star Beta Pictoris surrounded by a disk possibly composed of the same basic materials from which our own solar system evolved.

to squint through. Computers drive the telescope's movements and process the incoming data. Attached to the Big Eye this night is a double spectrograph, a kind of grating that separates the magnified light into its different visible colors from red to violet. The separated light is directed onto two CCDs. Dr. Filippenko turns from a spiral galaxy on the TV monitor, a galaxy much like our own, and examines the zigzag pattern on the spectrograph on another screen. From the center of the galaxy comes a flicker of quasarlike light, prompting Dr. Filippenko to remark, "This would never have been detected in the past without the CCD." Not all tools of the new astronomy are man-made instruments. "Astronomers are opportunists," remarks Dr. Sargent, and they sometimes seize on cosmic phenomena as a tool of discovery. He and other astronomers, for example, are using the bright light of distant quasars to search for galaxies so far away and faint that they are beyond the direct vision of instruments. Like the headlights of an approaching car that reveal the intervening fog and mist, quasar light, if examined more thoroughly, might highlight the structure and composition of otherwise invisible galaxies. The light, having traveled so far, might show the original state of the first galaxies formed after the big bang, and thus provide clues to how, why and when matter began to cluster and clump into such island universes.

A few hours before dawn, Dr. Sargent put on his Los Angeles Dodgers baseball cap-no more avid baseball fan ever came out of Lincolnshire-and left the control room to stretch and to see and feel the night. He led his visitor in the dark past the base of the Big Eye, up steep steps and out a double door to the narrow walkway that rims the upper dome. The Moon had set and so many stars filled the vault of night from horizon to horizon that it seemed inconceivable they represented but an insignificant fraction of 1 percent of the universe. The human eye could not yet catch the light even of Halley's comet, now in our own solar system.

But the Big Eye, looming just behind, could not be forgotten. The technology of the new astronomy, on the ground and in orbit and across the electromagnetic spectrum, has left us more in awe than ever of what we see in the heavens, because it has suggested what is there that we can't see. And it has held out the hope that some day before too long we may know what millennia of stargazers could not know: What was the beginning of it all and will it ever end?

0 About the Author: John Noble Wilford, a Pulitzer Prize winner, reports on science and space for The New York Times. He is author of We Reach The Moon and The Mapmakers and coauthor of The New York Times Guide to the Return of Halley's Comet.

Halley's Hello! comets' original materials have not been burned away. Ever since their formation, comets have been in what Roald Sagdeev, director of the Soviet Union's Space Research Institute, calls "cosmic refrigerators" on the fringes of the solar system. "A comet may be a kind of fossil from the time the planets formed," says astronomer Roger Knacke of the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Although comets spend most of their lives in their Oort Cloud home, occasionally the gravitational pull from a passing star or collision among themselves randomly knocks a comet out of its orbit-usually forever-and may send it into an orbit that brings the comet close to the sun. When the nucleus is about 450 million kilometers from the sun, solar heat begins to vaporize the water ices of the nucleus, releasing some of the solid particles as dust. The process enlarges a spherical zone of dust and gas around the nucleus-the "coma" or head-which may extend tens of thousands of kilometers in diameter around the nucleus.

As the comet continues its approach to the sun, solar wind-atomic particles flowing from the sun's surface-pushes the ionized atoms and molecules in the coma away from the sun to form the ion tail that distinguishes many comets. The tail itself may be an astronomical unit in length and usually reaches its maximum brightness and length when the comet is near its perihelion, the closest point to the sun ..

Each comet behaves uniquely. It may make

Halley's, the most celebrated of comets, is back, marking for millions of earthbound watchers its first celestial appearance siQce 1910. This is Halley's 30th visit since its first recorded sighting in 240 B. C. A comet is a "dirty snowball," according to Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory astronomer Dr. Fred L. Whipple. The heart of a comet, its "nucleus," is a compact, solid, spinning ball of water ices, granular rocky material and some simple chemical compounds such as ammonia and methane. Comet nuclei range in size from just about one kilometer to perhaps 500 kilometers in diameter; Halley's is believed to have a diameter of about five kilometers.

Then why all the fuss over a chunk of ice and dust? .

Whipple, developer of the most widely accepted model of comet composition and discoverer of six comets, has an answer: "Comets are the most primitive bodies left over from the making of the sun and planets.

They are most nearly like the gas clouds from which the solar system was formed some 5,000 million years ago. Since we can't go out and pick up this interstellar matter directly, studying comets is the next best thing. They can help us solve some of the puzzles about the origin of the solar system."

According to the most widely accepted theories, the comets' home is the Oort Cloud, named after the Dutch astronomer Jan Oort, who theorized its presence in 1950. The Oort Cloud is a huge swarm of 100,000- to 200,000million comets circling the solar system at a vast distance estimated to be 50,000 to 150,000 astronomical units from the Earth and sun (1 astronomical unit, the mean distance from Earth to the sun, is about 149 million kilometers). Because of the Oort Cloud's great distance from the sun, the ~ ~

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To see Halley's comet, select the appropriate panel (right) for your latitude and time. Face the direction marked for each panel and look for the comet above the horizon at the angle given at Left in this chart.

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a trip around the sun in as little as 3.3 years, as does Comet Encke, or it may take thousands, even millions, of years. Eighty percent of the some 1,000 known comets are very longdistance travelers, with periods greater than 200 years.

Halley's is the most sought after because its route and the time of its appearance are fairly well known-thanks to· the 17th-century British astronomer and mathematician Sir Edmund Halley whose name it bears. It is a short-period comet, whose return time is 75-76 years-close to the human life span. Ordinarily, it can be seen only once in an average lifetime.

This is the year of Halley's. Having taken a lifetime to return, it is ta~talizing astronomers, curious to have a close look at the elusive snowball to know what stuff this peripatetic visitor is made of and perhaps what conditions existed in the early solar system.

While Halley's comet will be studied by spacecraft and from observatories on Earth, it is likely to disappoint the average viewer on Earth. Unlike in 1910, this time it will not come very close to Earth, and will not appear as big or bright as in the past. At its brightest in March and April, it will be best seen in the Southern Hemisphere, particularly in parts of New Zealand, Australia, South America and Africa.

The best time for a date with this celestial vagabond is a dark night away from city lights.

Even moonlight will hamper viewing. Binocu0 lars will certainly help.

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Making New Connections In a recent interview with SPAN editors, the U.S. Ambassador to India, John Gunther Dean, spoke of the increasing transfer of American high technology to India and the bilateral cooperation in science.

SPAN: Mr. Ambassador, you held a press conference in New

Delhi recently in which you described scientific cooperation between the United States and India as "unique." Would you elaborate on that; what makes it unique?

AMBASSADOR DEAN: It is unique first of all because of its magnitude. Our bilateral research effort encompasses a vast territory in the pure and applied sciences. India today has the world's third largest scientific and technical community, with only those of the United States and the Soviet Union being larger. The number of government-to-government projects between our two countries presently runs to 259 with U.S. contributions amounting to more than $100 million. There is no other nation, I think, with which America has scientific collaboration of the magnitude of this number of projects and the scope of the disciplines covered-agriculture, health and biological sciences, physical sciences, environment and ecology and technological innovations. ,under these broad categories, scientists of our two countries are engaged in research in such areas as genetic engineering, materials science, cancer, reproductive biology, biomass, space, tropical diseases and the study of monsoons-all aimed at improving the quality of life. And not only in our two countries but all over the world!

This is one aspect that makes our scientific partnership unique. The second aspect is reflected in the 400,000 Indians living in the United States, many of whom are scientists, engineers and physicians. I think they play an absolutely vital role in our society and we are fortunate to have them. They are major contributors to research in our academic institutions (two of them have won Nobel Prizes) as well as in certain kinds of advanced technological enterprises. They know exactly what's happening in our two nations-who is doing what in India and what is going on in America. They are a perfect bridge between the American and Indian scientific and technological establishments. These individuals can and do play a valuable role in bringing our two countries together in science and technology as they do in other fields, such as business and culture. American technical missions that come here to discuss bilateral cooperation in the sciences very often include scientists of Indian origin. I am enthusiastic about what they are doing.

Another important aspect, of course, is the number of Indians studying in the United States, more than 13,000 of them currently, most in advanced areas of science and technology. I am told that between 1961 and 1981 some 10,000 Indians, the largest number from any single foreign country, received doctoral degrees from American universities in such disciplines as engineering, math, physics and computer sciences.

At that same press conference you also released the report on "Indo-U.S. Cooperation in Science and Technology." What is the purpose of this publication?

India is a very large country and our cooperative science and technology projects are spread over the entire length and breadth of it. But many people are not aware of this. For example, during a recent visit to Madras, I discovered that many scientists engaged in collaborative research there were not fully aware that similar research in an allied field was being carried out by their colleagues in other parts of the country.

Similarly, Bombay scientists may not know what's happening of interest in their fields in Tamil Nadu. In a situation like this, there is a danger of duplication of effort. More important, lack of such information keeps researchers from interacting with their counterparts, and thereby benefiting from and exchanging results of their experiments. This is very crucial in science and we hope the report will help to remove that lacuna.

In addition to this geographic problem, there was a functional reason for preparing the report. The agriculture people may know what's going on between our two countries in the area of agricultural research, but they may have no idea about what's happening of interest to them in the field of, say, physical sciences or the environmental sciences.

These were the main considerations that prompted us to pull together in one publication a report on the cooperative research under way between India and the United States. The publication is not a history, but only a "snapshot" of the situation as it stands right now.

Let me add here that this research effort is not the be-all and end-all of our bilateral relations. It is just one facet of our broad, close relationship. For example, in the field of education and culture, there has been very active interaction. Under the aegis of the Indo-U.S. Subcommission on Education and Culture, a constant exchange of scholars, students; artists, media people, exhibitions and films is taking place between our two countries. The magnificent Festival of India in America is one result. Similarly, the U.S. Agency for International Development and many American voluntary organizations are involved in assisting with India's development-in health, family planning; social forestry and housing, for example.

Equally important, if not more so, has been the cooperation over the years between the American and Indian private sectors.

In the last few years especially, U.S. business has emerged as the largest foreign investor in India. But this report makes no mention of that. Why?

I have been here less than six months, not enough time to This particular report is devoted exclusively to feel I know India by any means. But what I have seen in these government -to-government few months has impressed me tremendously. For example, cooperation specifically in Bangalore, which I visited recently, struck me as a model of science and technology. We India's efforts to be a very modern nation, moving into the 21st do, however, plan to pub- century. The city has a large number of world-class research lish soon a similar-report on institutions and facilities, manned, I understand, by some of joint private business ven- India's ablest scientists and engineers. There are scores of them tures. in different disciplines-the Raman Research Institute, the The fact that American Indian Institute of Science, the Indian Space Research Orgabusiness has emerged in nisation, the University of Agricultural Sciences, and others. recent years as the largest foreign partner of Indian business is a Then you have large, modern manufacturing facilities, both in very significant development. Some of these ventures are equity the public and private sectors, such as the Indian Telephone investments, some involve joint manufacturing,. some are Industries and Hindustan Aeronautics. So, in one city you have licensing agreements. But what is most exciting is that, in the all the basics of progress-both researchers and practitioners, last few years, there has been a large increase in the number of those who develop the knowledge and those who apply the joint business ventures involving technology transfer-where results in industry.

American firms will provide the know-how, the technology. In many ventures, in fact, there is both technolo¡gy transfer and You spoke earlier about Indians who reside in the United equity investment.

States being a perfect bridge between our two countries. Many of In my travels around the country, I have seen many these non-resident Indians, as they are often called here, have examples of this. In Madras, for example, Hindustan Motors is begun actively participating in India's economic development by<, manufact!-uing state-of-the-art heavy earth-moving machinery, investing here. Prime Minister Rajiv Ga.ndhi recently called them such as a 50-ton dumper truck, with technology provided by the an asset of the nation. What is your view?

Oh, they certainly are an asset. There's no doubt about that.

Caterpillar Tractor Company of the United States. The Modis are making sophisticated photocopying machines near Delhi in Many, I understand, are starting highcollaboration with the Xerox Corporation, a world leader in the tech businesses here in India, which field. This kind of joint venture is taking place all over India. should be of great benefit to the country.

So yes, the private sector is a very important area of I am told that some Indians are coming technology transfer. In America it is the genius of the private back to stay. As the opportunities insector that has produced the greatest wonders of high technolo- crease here, many more will hear the call gy, and I hope these innovations will continue to help India to return and find it very satisfying to do in-as Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi has said-its "march so, I am sure. toward the 21st century."

If young people leave India to earn advanced degrees, and then hone their Following up on this subject of technology transfer, the U.S. skills and gain experience before returnGovernment recently granted a large number of licenses to India ing, it's not a brain drain, but a gathering for some of the most advanced, sophisticated high-tech systems . of additional capabilities which are brought back to be put to available. To what do you credit this successful conclusion? good use. That is the' point the Prime Minister made so This was the result of a lot of hard work on the part of eloquently at the silver jubilee celebration of the Indian officials of both governments. After long discussions and Institute of Technology in New Delhi. negotiations, an atmosphere was created and assurances given that led to the granting of the licenses. Now that we know what A final question. You have held a number of ambassadorial the equipment is being used for, there has been a release of assignments. How would you compare them with your present nearly all of the pending items. job in India?

I love this assignment. It is fascinating, though very What kinds of high-tech equipment will India receive und~r demanding. I've had many assignments that were important at this agreement? The impression one gathers is that mostly the time I held them-Ambassador to Lebanon, to Cambodia, computers are involved. IS that so? to Thailand.

It is true that a large number of the requests are for certain But I believe that what I do here in India will matter not kinds of very special, sophisticated computers. But that's not only for the present, but will have an impact in the years to all. One of the items is a highly sQphisticated radar landing come. The reason is that India, in my opinion, will be an even system for use by civil aviation at various airports of this mbre important force on the world scene. Therefore, the kind country. Another request is for a naval weapons system; both of of relationship we forge now will have a significant impact on these have been cleared. I am told that our Department of the future. That's a very awesome and challenging thought and Commerce' is now taking less than 40 days to process these responsibility. I sometimes feel that 24 hours are not enough in requests. We want to be responsive to India's needs. the day to do my job. But knowing that I am involved in something that really matters, and that I really care for, is satisfying indeed.'

0

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE

HI want to see Halley's comet, all right. â&#x20AC;˘ But I could skip the hype."

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As Harriet turned the page, a scream escaped her lips: There was Donald-his strange disappearance no longer a mystery.

Stalking Intelligence Robert Sternberg (left), a major figure in intelligence theory, believes both that intelligence is the same from culture to culture and that it is shaped by one's environment. And you can learn to be smarter.

When Bob Sternberg stands at the head of a seminar table, looking down at his notes, he seems grown-up and serious enough to be a tenured professor at Yale University.

You can believe the gray flecks in his otherwise black hair. Then he sits down, scrunches up in his chair and smiles, and suddenly he looks like Woody Allen-or your cousin from New Jersey. The one who's always smiling a little apologetically, to show off the carefully orthodontured, precisely regimented remains of a serious overbite.

Sternberg is talking about Diet Chocolate Fudge Soda.

"I was grossed out when I found out it was a best-seller," he is saying. "I mean, somehow, it can't be the true stuff if it doesn't have the calories, you know?"

Is this any way for a full professor of psychology to talk? The students who have coine to his class to participate in an "experiment" aren't sure. We are sitting in a room with leaded-glass windows and oak paneling, on the third floor of the clean-lined, 1920s-Gothic tower that houses part of Yale's psychology department. The student volunteers don't know it, but Sternberg is teaching them to increase their intelligence.

He segues smoothly from diet soda to a hypothetical chain of weight watchers' restaur.arits that failed. "I guess what they did is misrecognize the problem," he says.

"They viewed it as, 'People are on diets so they'll run to this restaurant'; they didn't look at it from the standpoint of who goes to restaurants. You go because you want to have a nice evening and get served good food, not to have the same junky stuff you eat when you get home."

Sternberg is demonstrating the second component in the internal part of his triarchiG theory of intelligence: recognizing the nature of the problem. It's no accident that the demonstration is in the context of a more or less

real-life situation. Sternberg thinks that real life is where intelligence operates. What's more, he believes that since intelligence is essentially mental activity, a process and not simply some sort of built-in, inherited thing you either have or don't, it can be trained. You can learn to be smarter.

Robert Sternberg is a major figure in intelligence theory. He aims at nothing less than a kind of grand synthesis of ideas that for others are mutually contradictory. His three-part theory accommodates both the traditional view that intelligence is general, the same from one culture to another, and the countertraditionalist view that environment-whether classroom or inner-city streets-shapes intelligence to different but equally valid ends. And, like the physicist who is comfortable with the knowledge that light is both a particle and a wave, Sternberg can look at intelligence as a set of components, "a wide array of cognitive and other skills," which are at the same time strongly unified by what he calls executive processes.

In the hot field of cognitive science, people in half a dozen different disciplines-psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, anthropology, linguistics and the neurosciences-are all trying to figure out what goes on in our heads when we bring our intelligence to bear on our behavior. Or, to define the problem cognitively, we want to know how we process information. Models of the mind in action are essential if computer scientists working on artificial intelligence are to develop the so-called fifth generation of smarter computers.

Neuroscientists have been analyzing the actual activity of the brain on the basic level of neuron and synapse and are preparing to test theories about the brain's operations in terms of larger processing units or circuits of neurons.

Cognitive psychologists are looking at behavior-how people actually solve problems-and analyzing the mental steps involved. But as Sternberg points out, the problems on which most psychological information-processing theories are based have largely been of the verbalanalogy ,sequence-completion and spatial-orientation type familiar to anyone who has come up through American schools.

In everyday life, though, as Sternberg writes in his recent book, Beyond IQ: A Triarchic Theory of Human Intelligence, "people no more go around solving testlike

Tacit knowledge includes knowing how to set priorities, allocate time and other resources, manage people and convince your boss of the value of your work. This is contextual intelligence. analogies ... than they go around pressing buttons in response to lights or sounds."

IQ, or intelligence quotient, is a figure constructed statistically by converting a percentile score on a series of tests to a number. Percentile scores are arrived at by "norming" a test-giving it to a representative sample of people and finding out what score represents the 50th percentile; this is median and, quite arbitrarily, represents an IQ of 100.

The tradition of intelligence testing belongs to the psychometric branch of psychology, which originated 80 years ago in France when the government commissioned psychologist Alfred Binet to develop a way to identify children who might need special help. According to evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould in The Mismeasure of Man, Binet regarded the number he arrived at as a "rough empirical guide constructed for a limited, practical purpose." But American psychometricians enthusiastically applied the measurement to nearly two million soldiers in World War I and subsequently to millions of schoolchildren. IQ came to be seen as a measure of something real-something fixed, innate and inheritable-that was, in fact, intelligence. This interpretation continues to be held by such psychologists as Arthur Jensen, whose 1969 article questioning the value of compensatory schooling for black children set off a dispute that has influenced a generation of cognitive psychologists.

In addition to questions that demand the kind of school-oriented cognitive processes needed to solve analogies, many IQ tests include those that require specific knowledge, such as "Who wrote the Iliad?" As Sternberg and others have pointed out, IQ tests really measure intelligence as a child's achievement in school. In both psychometrics and information processing, the domain of intelligence has been what Ulric Neisser of Emory University, who in 1967 wrote Cognitive Psychology-the book that defined the field-and who is now highly critical of the discipline, calls "academic."

Properly used, Sternberg writes, IQ is "moderately correlated"-from 0.4 to 0.7, where a perfect correlation would be 1.0-with school achievement. But doing well in school isn't necessarily the same thing as doing well in life.

"Typical correlations between IQ test scores and measures of actual occupational performance generally fall at about the 0.2 level," writes Sternberg. "Employment tests typically do no better," since they are often constructed of the same kinds of questions.

"I started off as an information-processing psychologist," Sternberg says, "and then I realized, well it's not that this stuff is wrong, it's only answering a subset of interesting questions. It doesn't deal with how business executives function in their jobs. It doesn't say anything about why my best student is the one with the relatively low Graduate Record Exam scores, while people with high 700s, even 800s, sometimes come to Yale and flop."

In response to such questions, Sternberg's triarchic theory of intelligence evolved. A triarchy is a government

by three-a triumvirate. Sternberg sees three areas in which intelligence is exercised: the external (or contextual), the experiential and the internal. (Intelligence is always mental activity, but each part of the theory considers it in relation to a different domain.)

The context is, simply, the external environment in which intelligence functions, whether classroom, office or squash court. The same person may use his intelligence in each environment in a different way. Experience is the domain in which people face new situations, and in which intuition, insight and creativity-nonrational processes that simply don't come into the usual informationprocessing picture-operate.

Mental mechanisms, by which intelligence relates to the internal world of the individual, are brought to bear on intelligence through experience.

In short, Sternberg's triarchic theory is intended to get at the kind of intelligence that counts in real life-what Neisser calls general and Sternberg calls practical. Along with a number of other psychologists, many of whom disagree with him on almost everything else, Sternberg aims to change the way we think about intelligence.

Ultimately, he hopes to revise intelligence testing to take practical intelligence into account.

One thing that makes some of his less academically successful students more successful in graduate school, Sternberg decided, is their ability to become aware of, to learn and to apply tacit knowledge- "the things you need to know to succeed on the job that you're never explicitly taught and that often aren't even verbalized. You have to pick this stuff up on your own, and it matters: Whether you get promoted, or get raises, or can move to another company or another school is going to depend in part on how well you pick it up."

Tacit knowledge includes things like knowing how to prioritize tasks and allocate your time and other resources; how to manage the people who work for you; and how to establish and enhance a reputation in your career, by convincing your boss of the value of your work, for instance. All this has to do with contextual intelligence, "mental activity directed toward purposive adaptation to, and selection and shaping of, real-world environments relevant to one's life." .

Sternberg is an excellent example of his own definition of intelligence. He has adapted himself perfectly to the requirements for success in the world of academic psychology: He publishes, widely and well, the results of research that is at once innovative and respectful of the traditions in his field. One colleague calls his rate of output frightening; in 1984 Sternberg published 25 papers as sale or senior author, two as junior author and two anthologies. He is in demand at conferences and colloquiums. At 36, he is director of graduate studies in the department of psychology at Yale, from which he graduated, summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, in 1972.

The real-world environment of cognitive psychology is extremely relevant to his life. "I think I have a real edge

over a lot of people in the intelligence field," he says.

"When I was a little kid, I was utterly test-anxious, and I was a real bomb on IQ tests. So I've been there. 1 was this overachiever, but when 1 was in sixth grade 1 was sent back to take the fifth-grade IQ test. The absurdity of that situation helped me get over the test anxiety; 1 said, 'I can handle this.'"

As a result, Sternberg got very interested in IQ tests.

"When 1was in junior high school 1 ordered a lot of them, and 1 made my own test, the STOMA, or Sternberg Test of Mental Ability. Then 1 gave a lot of kids the Stanford-Binet, and 1really got into trouble with the school¡ psychologist, who threatened that if! ever brought the book into school again, he'd burn it. And that doesn't work with me," Sternberg laughs, "When 1 won that APA award [in 1981 he was awarded the American Psychological Association's Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career" Contribution to Psychology], 1was very tempted to send this jerk a copy of it. To some extent 1think it's better if you have personal motivation."

Sternberg has also selected another academic field, love, in which to experiment and originate theory. He has even selected a second environment that seems to suit him as well as academia: the popular media. His article "The Measure of Love" appeared in the April 1985 issue of Science Digest; later last year, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich published his Understanding and Increasing Your Intelligence, a "how to" version of his theory for a general audience. Love landed him a Valentine's Day spot on the Today Show [a popular morning TV program], and in December 1984 he appeared in Science Digest as one of America's Top 100 Young Scientists.

To learn something about the role of tacit knowledge, Sternberg and a colleague, Richard K. Wagner, studied the differences between the performances of experts and novices in business. Psychologists have examined such differences in fields ranging frQm physics and chess to horserace handicapping. In chess, for example, William Chase and Herbert Simon of Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh found in 197~ that experts had a much better memory than novices for game positions they had glimpsed only briefly. They "chunked" more game pieces together in familiar configurations-recognizable as single units-and so were able to remember where most of the pieces were. The experts' advantage disappeared when the chess pieces were randomly set on the board. Their edge, then, lay in knowledge of the game, not in any innate superiority of memory.

Sternberg and Wagner asked successful, experienced business managers to describe typical on-the-job situations and how they had reacted to them. Once the researchers had assembled sets of work-related situations with possible responses and had identified key responses statistically, they used these to compare .the reactions of novices and experts. The experts were a group of 54 business managers, 19 of whom came from companies in the top 20 of the Fortune 500 list and the rest from non-Fortune 500 companies. The novices were a group of 51 graduate students from five different business schools and a separate group of 22 Yale undergraduates.

Contextual Intelligence The smart person learns to adapt himself to his environment. If that is not satisfactory, he can change it to suit his own needs.

Failing that he can select a different environment altogether.

Experiential Intelligence Experience continually confronts the smart person with novel situations. He has to puzzle them out.

When he has mastered a problem the knowledge becomes automatic, and he can use it to go out and confront more new situations.

Internal Intelligence The smart person plans an approach to a problem before he goes ahead and actually tries to solve it.

He keeps track of his progress, and he is alert to feedback that tells him whether he needs to change his approach.

If an American and an with the same problems, completely different, but same mentai mechanisms

A work-related situation might be something like this: "It is your second year as a mid-level manager. ... Your goal is rapid promotion to the top of the company." The object was for the test taker to rate the importance of each item in a list of possible actions that might help distinguish him from the other mid-level managers: "Get rid of the 'deadwood' among your assistants"; "Find ways to make your superiors aware of your accomplishments"; "Become involved in a public-service organization"; and so forth.

Not surprisingly, the managers scored higher in tacit knowledge than the business graduate students, who scored higher than the undergraduates. More interesting, for the managers tacit knowledge turned out to be related to "indicators of success," including, Sternberg writes, "whether or not the company was from among the top companies on the Fortune 500 list," salary and years of schooling beyond high school. It was not related to "years of management experience, level of title or number of employees supervised."

In another study, Sternberg asked philosophers, business people, artists and physicists how they perceived intelligence, wisdom and creativity. "Business was the only field in which creativity and wisdom were seen as negatively correlated," Sternberg says. "I've seen the squeeze put on the creative people, because they don't tend to fit in. One of the reasons I think IBM has succeeded is that it's run by people who you hope are wise, but just when you think the company is getting so staid that it will never survive, it will have this group of creative people go off to Florida and come up with the PC [personal computer]."

Intuition, insight and creativity are nonrationaI elements that it is often assumed can't really be measured. But Sternberg believes these operations can be analyzed to some extent. Through them, intelligence relates to experience, especially when there is something new to be dealt with. They are important in applying tacit knowledge: "A lot of getting ahead is knowing when to come up with the right theory or when to get into a certain area," Sternberg says. "You know, there are areas that are hot at a certain time and then two years later are as cold as ice. Knowing when to get into them is definitely not luck." (See box on page 37 for Sternberg's analysis of insight processes.)

The mental mechanisms through which intelligence relates to the internal world of the individual operate in the real world through his responses to experience.

Executive processes are crucial. They involve recognizing the existence of a problem, deciding what it is and how to deal with it. They also include the "how am I doing?" processes, used to monitor progress and respond to feedback. Executive processes make it possible to apply tacit knowledge and change strategies when something doesn't work.

"To me, part of intelligence is recognizing your blind spots," says Sternberg. "When I give talks, I get feedback;

African are presented their solutions may be they may use the in arriving at a solution.

someone may say, 'Your theory doesn't deal with this' or 'It doesn't seem quite right.' That makes me more aware of my blihd spots."

The big problem with teaching tacit knowledge, he finds, is that "people can be surprisingly resistant to acting on it. You need to recognize things for yourself."

Sternberg thinks the mental mechanisms are a domain of intelligence that holds good from one context or culture to another. The problems confronting an urban American and a bush-dwelling African may be totally different, but both have to recognize problems and figure out how to resolve them. If the American and the African are presented with the same problems, their solutions may also be completely different, in keeping with their different cultures, but they may use the same mental mechanisms in arriving at a solution. The same could be said of a lawyer and a farmer.

The contextual view of intelligence is one of the legacies of the heredity-versus-environment battles of the 1970s, when Sternberg was still in college. Opposing those who said that the low IQ scores of minority children were the result of an inherited deficiency in intelligence were those who said that intelligence is a response to a cultural context and that, in a nonschool setting, it may not show up on IQ scores. Among those who hold the latter view are many information-processing theorists. Today, most cognitive p~ychologists agree that heredity will inevitably account for some degree of intelligence; the natureversus-nurture debate is no longer interesting. "The hot question of the 1980s," Sternberg says, "is, 'What is the whole domain [of intelligence] here, and what isn't?' " One of Sternberg's chief critics locates the domain of intelligence"in several places. In his 1983 book, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, psychologist Howard Gardner of Harvard University theorizes in favor of the existence of several different, "relatively autonomous human intellectual competences," or intelligences, a number of which are not "intellectual" in the sense that Sternberg's intelligence is. Gardner thinks that the Western tradition of focusing on the mind, and particularly on rationalism, is limiting. In his argument for a "bodily-kinesthetic intelligence," for instance, he points out that "skilled use of one's body has been important in the history of the species for thousands, if not millions, of years." He also asserts that each of the intelligences (in addition to the bodily-kinesthetic, his list includes and spatial linguistic, musical, logical-mathematical intelligences) can be isolated or absent in particular populations and highly developed in particular people or cultures.

Gardner also thinks that the intelligences are characterized by "the existence of one o~ more basic information-processing operations or mechanisms ....

One might go so far as to define a human intelligence as a neural mechanism or computational system." As an

associate professor of neurology at the Boston University School of Medicine, Gardner has had many opportunities to observe the effects of damage to the brain on specific areas of ability. He is critical of Sternberg's model because it is not rooted in the physical brain: It is, he says, "a computational model."

To this, Sternberg replies, "Some biologically based models use biology metaphorically rather than being truly based on the biology of the brain." He also thinks that "there are different levels at which you can theorize, and no one has really succeeded in being good at all of them. I think your best bet is to try to find out what you're good at and then to make the most of that." He chuckles, and adds, "That relates to my theory of intelligence."

Sternberg thinks some of Gardner's multiple intelligences aren't, properly speaking, intelligences at all. "Would you really want to say that someone who is tone-deaf, lacking in an important aspect of musical intelligence, is mentally retarded?" he asks. "I don't think so."

Eventually, information processing will probably be understood both as observable behavior and as brain activity. In the meantime, the argument over whether there is a central "intelligence" or many different intelligences-and where the one or the many operatecontinues to occupy theorists.

Sternberg thinks that if we get rid of the word

intelligence we will promptly some people

do better

reinvent it. People notice that than others. "Gardner's theory

appeals," he says, "because we want everyone to be gifted, and it's true that everyone has some talent. When you look at IQ, it constrains your vision of the world. And everyone thinks he or she is above average. We did a study in which we asked people to rate their own intelligence ona scale of one to nine. Everyone was a six or seven. Gardner allows you to think, 'Well, if I don't win on IQ, I've got six other intelligences left to try.'"

Above all, Sternberg's is a pragmatic theory. He sees intelligence as a source of individual differences, but he also believes that most people, including himself, don't work anywhere near their potential. His is a theory for our time, when more people believe they can succeed than ever before. Sternberg will soon be training businesspeople to be smarter: telling them about those essential processes, guiding them through examples, as he did the Yale undergraduates in his seminar room, and putting them through cases so they can put their executive processes to work on their newly acquired tacit knowledge.

"Let's take these processes and see if they can help us lead better lives, or at least not make the same mistakes over and over again," he says. "That's the ultimate test, isn't it-whether doesn't,

it makes any difference

who the hell

cares?"

to your life? If it 0

About the Author: Signe Hammer is a senior editor with Science Digest. She has written three books on family relationships.

Based on his theories about insight, Robert Sternberg, along with research associate Janet Davidson, devised some problems to test a person's insight skills. He thinks intuition and insight are important in the relationship of intelligence to experience, when new situations demand creative solutions.

Insight, he and Davidson say, can be analyzed into three separate processes.

Selective encoding, in which relevant information is extracted from a mass of undifferentiated material, selective combination, in which apparently isolated or random bits of information are integrated into a whole; and selective comparison, in which newly acquired information is related to 'that already acquired.

Combining these three insight skills, read the following problems and compare your solutions with the ones below.

A scientist is doing a study for the U.S. Department of Energy to see whether some clothes keep people warmer than others do. This is his description of the experiment: Two women are walking along a road. The sun is shining brightly, throwing shadows behind the women. The women are the same height and weight. One wears a white dress and the other wears a black dress. The dresses are

identical except for color: They are both cotton and are the same style and. length. The woman in the black dress is comfortable, and the woman in the white dress is cold. The scientist concluded, based on these facts, that dark-colored clothes help a pErson to keep body heat, whereas lightcolored clothes let the body heat disappear. The Department of Energy fired the scientist. What did he do wrong?

ANSWER: The scientist did not take into account the effect of solar radiation. Sunshine made the woman in dark clothes warm because dark colors tend to absorb solar radiation. The woman in white was cooler because light colors tend to reflect sunlight.

Dr. Smith was reading an article called "Plants Have Feelings, Too." It reported that a scientist had conducted an experiment to see whether plants expressed feelings, not by smiles or frowns but by electromagnetic waves. To test this theo.ry, he connected the plants to machines that measured the waves, and had different people approach the plants and talk to them. The scientist was pleased to discover that Person A, who spoke kindly to the plants, registered one way on the machine, whereas Person B, who abused the plants, registered in a different way. He concluded that plants re-

sponded to human actions in different ways.

Dr. Smith wanted to test this theory. He repeated the experiment, but this time he attached the machine to plants and to empty plastic cups. He was surprised. Sure enough, the plants responded to different people in different ways.

But so did the cups!

Dr. Smith was mystified; but slowly, an incredible idea began to form in his mind. "I can't believe this discovery," he said. "I've .... I've learned that plastic cups have feelings!"

Unfortunately, he had drawn the wrong conclusion. What conclusion would you draw?

ANSWER: When Dr. Smith's cups registered on the machine, he should have known that something other than the. plants was causing vibrations. Instead, he misinterpreted the evidence offered by the "control" condition. The machine registered for irrelevant reasons.

The Garden Fantasy

In recent years there have been predictions about the super-pure pharmaceuticals and flawless alloys that will eventually be made aboard factories in space. That has been done experimentally.

The product manufactured was millions of perfectly spherical clear-plastic balls made aboard the ill-fated U.S. space shuttle Challenger during an earlier flight The polystyrene spheres are ten microns (roughly a thousandth of a centimeter) in diameter. They can be seen only under a microscope.

"This material is the first of what we expect will be a long line of products to carry a made-in-space label," says James M. Beggs of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration. "Pure pharmaceuticals to fight age-old diseases; perfect crystals, larger than any made on Earth, for use in electronic components; thin films for industrial use; new alloys-all are among the promising and potentially profitmaking products that could become realities soon."

Early this month Nek Chand was honored with a "superior craftsmanship" award by the Washington Building Con¡¡ gress (WBC) for designing a sculpture garden at the Capital Children's Museum in Washington, D.C. Since its institution 30 years ago, this is the first time that the WBC has given the prestigious award to a non-American.

Moreover, the park has been named "The Nek Chand Fantasy Garden." Modeled after his world-famous Rock Garden in Chandigarh, the park has become a new landmark.

Another award winner was Roy Mason, the architect for the Fantasy Garden. "It was an honor to work with a genius like Nek Chand. Every time he took a piece of junk-a broken tile, glass, what have you-I wondered what he could do with it, and then right before your eyes he transformed it as through magic into a work of beauty." He added, "The children as well as older people visiting the museum find it a visual experi-

On January 17, deans of eight Indian agricultural universities, led by Dr. Maharaj Singh of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, left for the United States. The visit, sponsored by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), will give Indian deans an opportunity to re-establish ties with the six U.S. land grant colleges that assisted in the establishment of eight Indian agricultural universities in the 1960s. It is also expected to result in further increase of bilateral collaboration in agriculture. The team will also tour research facilities of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and private agriculture research laboratories.

The deans are Dr. P. Pushpama (Andhra Pradesh Agricultural University at Hyderabad); Dr. T.S. Khuspe (Mahatma Phule Krishi Vishva Vidyalaya at Rahuri, Maharashtra); Dr. H.N. Mehrotra (Mohan Lal Sukhadia University at Udaipur, Rajasthan); Dr. A. Misra (Orissa University of Agriculture and Technology at Bhubaneshwar); Dr. S.R. Verma (Punjab Agri-

cultural University at Ludhiana); Dr. H.P.C. Shetty (University of Agricultural Sciences at Bangalore, Karnataka); Dr. R.P. Choudhary (G.B. Pant University of Agriculture and Technologyat Pantnagar, Uttar Pradesh); and Dr. B.S. Malik (Jawaharlal Nehru Krishi Vishva Vidyalaya at Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh).

These photographs show enlargements of ten-micron polystyrene spheres manufactured on Earth (left) and in space (right).

ence unlike anything they have seen before."

Joel Irish, vice-president of Sigal Construction Corporation which was instrumental in bringing the project to fruition, said, "We nominated Nek Chand for the award not only because he created somec thing that is unique out of what is ordinarily considered junk.

The more important thing is that he showed us how a society's waste can become a source of creativity." That is, in fact, Nek Chand's credo: "I want everyone allover the world to see what nice things you can make with waste."

Although Nek Chand designed a temporary exhibit of sculptures in Paris in 1980, the Washington Fantasy Garden is his first permanent creation outside India. It opened last October as part of the Festival of India in America.

The Smithsonian Institution's first-ever medal for outstanding services to zoological sciences and conservation was awarded posthumously to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi at a ceremony held in New Delhi on January 7. Prime Min,ister Rajiv Gandhi received the award on behalf of his late mother from Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, Secretary Emeritus of the Smithsonian.

Dr. Ripley, who is the chairperson of the American Committee of the Festival of India in America, also received a signal honor from India later that month. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan, the country's third highest civilian award, in this year's Republic Day awards.

Among those present at the Smithsonian function was Dr. Michael H. Robinson, director of the U.S. National Zoological Park. which is a bureau of the Smithsonian Institution.

Speaking on the occasion, Dr. Robinson cited Mrs. Gandhi's concern and the active role she played in establishing reserves and ecological programs In India. "Mrs. Gandhi's concern for environmental conservation was tremendous," he noted. "The award is in recognition of her efforts in' the area."

The medal was instituted by the Regents of the Smithsonian Institution last year to be awarded to individuals for" outstanding services to zoological sciences and conservation." The eight-by-ten-centimeter silver medal has the logo of the NationalZoological Park on the face and the sunburst symbol of the Smithsonian on the obverse.

A high-powered American trade and investment mission, led by James R. Phillips, U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Capital Goods and International Construction, visited India last month to explore trade and investment prospects in the field of oil and gas extraction equipment and services. The delegation included top executives of six wellknown American companies.

At the end of the visit, Phillips expressed satisfaction on the delegation's talks with the government officials and Indian businesspeople. "There's a much better business atmosphere in India now and prospects for investment are very bright," he

Recently Sharon Lowen. a young American exponent of the Odissi dance form, received a rare tribute from the Indian Council for Cultural Relations when it sponsored her tour of seven American states to give a series of Odissi recitals. She is the first nonIndian to receive this honor.

Lowen's tour culminated in New York where she performed at the prestigious Metropolltan Museum of Art. Lowen began her basic studies in Indian dance as a

f"'-..

student at the University of Michigan. She was awarded a nine-month Fulbright schofarship for study in India in 1973, and ended up staying in the country for nearly nine years. She studied under the tutelage of Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra. one of the greatest architects of the contemporary Odissi repertoire.

Lowen describes the, Indian classical dance forms as being "much weightier" than those of many other cultures. "They come out of spiritual consciousness, and the dances are beautiful without being saccharin."

The dancer considers herself very fortunate in being able to call two countries her

home. "I love India; it helped me grow. The Indian dance experience has made a tremendous spiritual impact on me." Lowen plans to return to India in the near future for a year or two to perform, study, research and teach. She loves her native America as much.

"It's so nice to be back home and see there is much more I awareness of India here as a result of the Festival of India. i Besides my recent tour of American states, I pian to give I Odissi oerformances in some 80 sch~ols allover the United States for the benefit of Amer- I ican children. It's a very satis- i fying thought that in my own small way I'm contributing to this bilateral understanding."

'''-, ;.,,'

I;f' " ,

said. Thanks to the memorandum of understanding on technology transfer reached last May between the Indian and the United States governments, America can offer almost all of the sophisticated U.S. technology that India needs in its bid to attain self-sufficiency in oil production.

The delegation's visit was the first of many technology trade missions being planned for this year by the U.S. Department of Commerce. An American telecommunications mission, for example, is scheduled to visit this country in March. "American businesspeople are very keen to collaborate with their Indian counterparts," Phillips said.

I I

I

I

HerHonor O'Connor In 1981 Sandra Day O'Connor, described by President Reagan as "a person for all seasons,"made history when she was sworn in as the first woman justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, arrives atthe Supreme Court bright and early every morning, along with several other Court employees, to take an aerobics class from a local YWCA instructor.

Sporting a leotard, the justice throws herself totus corpus into various stretches, extensions, twists, head rolls and leg lifts.

"I think physical fitness is enormously important to your capacity to do mental fitness work; to do the work that I do here at the Court," says Justice O'Connor. "I'm more productive with my work when I feel good physically, so when I came to the Court [in 1981] I decided that I wanted to continue the practice I had started in Arizona, an exercise class every morning early. And we set up a little class here at the Court. The class is open to all the women employees, and it's something that I manage to do just about every morning."

As the first woman on the Supreme Court, she feels an enormous responsibility to do her job well so that people will recognize that women properly belong in this and similar jobs. "It's been touching

to see how women of all ages have responded to my appointment, with an outpouring of appreciation that it happened and a feeling of encouragement that it gave them," she says.

Sitting back in her office chair, the vivacious 56-year-old justice (six years younger than the next youngest of the eight "brethren" on the Court) reflects on her childhood and the encouragement she received from her family. Growing up on a sprawling ranch in harsh, sun-baked southeastern Arizona made her life more of a challenge. Because her sister and her brother were much younger, she grew up as a virtual single child. Her early childhood companions consisted of her parents, cowboys and a large assortment of animals, including a large bobcat ("when he purred you could hear him all over the house") and a few javelina hogs.

For entertainment, the young Sandra Day would ride horses and read. She also learned to drive a car on the ranch at age 7 and could handle a truck and a tractor at 10. As she explains it, no other entertainment was really available besides working on the ranch. "My mother said that before I cOl1ld walk, one of the

cowboys, of whom I was particularly fond, would take me riding with him sitting on the saddle. I always loved horses; that was an important part of my childhood. The other thing, I guess, was reading, because there weren't that many people of my age around; none, in fact, unless I brought them to visit. I would read a lot because my parents had many books, many more than most people in that area."

Living on the ranch, however, had its drawbacks. When it came time for Sandra to go to school, the choices were limited. Because there were no schools in the area, "my parents had to make a decision," she remembers. "My mother's mother was living in EI Paso, Texas, and so my family chose to send me to live with Above: Sandra Day O'Connor, who grew up on a ranch in Arizona, was an avid horse rider as a child. Facing page, above: Chief Justice Warren Burger administers the oath of office to Sandra O'Connor, the l02ndJustice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Her husband, John, holds the family Bibles. Right: After the ceremony, the eight "brethren" of the Supreme Court flank the new judge and President Reagan.

"I decided to stop working for a time after the arrival of my second son."

her. I lived with grandmother from kindergarten through high school, except for one year. She was a wonderful person-very supportive of me. She would always tell me that 1 could do anything 1 wanted to do. She was convinced of that, and it was very encouraging. 1 was as close to my grandmother as to my mother. I was lucky having two such loving, affectionate mothers."

When she was 16, Sandra Day graduated from high school and headed west to enroll in Stanford University, where she majored in economics.¡ At that time, she had no thought of becoming a lawyer.

She wanted to own and manage a ranch of her own. But then, in her senior year, she took a law course-and the die was cast. She entered Stanford Law School as a full-time student. In six years (instead of the usual seven) she graduated from both college and law school (third in her class in the latter) and met her future husband, John Jay O'Connor.

By 1952, Sandra Day, 22 years old, was looking forward to getting married and practicing law in California.

Only one problem stood in her way: She couldn't find a job. It was not for lack of qualifications, poise or ambition; no law firms were interested in hiring a woman.

(Ironically, one firm that turned her down, Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher, subsequently had a partner by the name of William French Smith who, 29 years later, as attorney general of the United States, contacted Sandra Day O'Connor about a possible opening in the Supreme Court of the United States!)

Not disheartened, she succeeded in getting work as a deputy county attorney in San Mateo, California-her first opportunity to work in the public sector.

"It was a wonderful job," she remembers. "1 think that in public employment one often gets more responsibility earlier than one does in the private sector. It influenced the balance of my life because it demonstrated to me early in life

how much I did enjoy public service."

The job, however, was a short-term affair. Soon after her husband graduated from law school, he was drafted to serve as an army lawyer in Frankfurt, Germany. Sandra Day O'Connor gave up her position and followed her husband to Frankfurt, where she again entered public service as a civilian lawyer for the Quartermaster's Corps.

Not until 1957, when the couple moved back to the United States and settled in Phoenix, Arizona, did the young lawyer try private practice. Again unable to find an opening in a law firm, she started her own firm with a partner.

Of her private practice, the justice says, "We did whatever business we could get to come our way. We had a diverse, small-town type of practice. We took landlord-tenant, domestic, smallbusiness and even criminal appointments on occasion to help pay the rent. It was very challenging because I lacked the experience in those days to handle a broad range of problems."

At the same time, John and Sandra O'Connor were starting their family. In six years they had three sons, Scott, Brian and Jay, each two years apart. "Although I managed to continue working in my law practice after my first son was born," the justice says, "I decided to stop working for a time after the arrival of my second son. During those years, I did

John and Sandra O'Connor with their sons, from left, Jay, Brian and Scali. continue to do some volunteer work, however," she adds.

When eventually she went back to work, it was to a job with flexible hours that allowed her to be with her family when necessary. Asked how she managed to rear her three boys and maintain a busy career, the justice replies, "It wasn't easy. 1 think what it does is force you to be very efficient both at home and at work. You have to give up a lot of social activities that you might otherwise engage in, and you don't have time for much else except keeping your household going and doing your job.

"I think our children grew up expecting me to be working," she says, explaining how the boys coped. "Because I wasn't always available to them, they had to learn to manage some things on tlieir own and to be a bit more independent than they might otherwise have been. I think in the long run that's an advantage.

"For example, one day while I was at work, our much-loved dog apparently wandered away from home and was struck by an automobile. The dog somehow dragged his poor, horribly injured body back to the house. When our children found him, they had to solve the problem immediately. Because I was not available they had to be resourceful. So

they found an old door, took it off the hinges and made a stretcher for the dog and carried him to the veterinarian for treatment.

"On another occasion I was again unavailable when the children discovered a swarm of bees in our house. I guess a queen bee found a little way in through the siding, and the whole bee colony followed. When the children discovered what had happened, they got the phone book and called and called until they found a beekeeper who wanted the bees.

He came and had some way of getting the queen and attracting the other bees and taking them off. I was told that if they hadn't acted in that fashion, we could have had a major catastrophe."

When the working mother had to be away from the house, she tried to make sure the children were well-occupied. She often employed outstanding students to take her sons to events after school, on weekends or during the summer. The students also taught her sons sports, helped with homework and became cherished companions.

Brian O'Connor, age 25, remembering how it was to grow up in the O'Connor household, says that no one really had time to dwell on the long hours his mother worked, mainly because she had them involved in so many activities. "You name it, we were signed up," he says, listing Spanish, golf, football and dancing lessons as just a few of the many activities she scheduled for them. Often, he recalls, his mother got home earlier than they did. "If my mother is not busy organizing something or giving directions, she's not happy," quips Brian.

As the children grew older, Sandra O'Connor grew busier. After her fiveyear sabbatical and total indulgence in motherhood, she decided to join the work force again as an assistant attorney general in Arizona. Immediately given many new responsibilities, she familiarized herself with the Arizona state government. Not long after, there was an opening in O'Connor's Arizona statesenate district. She was appointed to the seat and ran successfully for two more terms. She also served as the majority leader of the senate, which added pressure to her work.

By 1975, ready for a change, Sandra Day O'Connor decided to run for the then elected position of superior-court judge in Maricopa County, northwest of

Phoenix. She won the election and served there as a judge until 1979, when she was appointed to the Arizona Court of Appeals.

The rest is history. In 1981, to replace the retiring Justice Potter Stewart, President Reagan chose 51-year-old Sandra Day O'Connor, "a person," he declared, "for all seasons." Luckily, the year before, the justices had decided to drop the "Mr." in front of "Justice," which until that time had been used in published opinions and official records for 190 years. Thus "Justice O'Connor" was a natural way to address her.

Justice O'Connor joins her colleagues in hearing oral arguments between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays for approximately two weeks of each month. Visitors are invited, up to a limit of 218, on a first-come, first-served basis. Astonishment at the judicial ambience is not unknown. One man said he had expected the justices to "talk in Latin or something."

A highschool girl was shocked that a blackrobed justice could rock comfortably in his high-back chair and actually laugh out loud. (Justices are privileged to choose a chair for their individual comfort.)

To reach the Supreme Court, cases must turn on principles of law or constitutional issues of far-reaching importance.

From more than 5,000 petitions a year, the Court hears arguments on perhaps 250. "We are very quiet here," Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes lI841-1935] once remarked, "but it is the quiet of a storm center."

Sandra Day O'Connor, regarded by most as a judicial conservative except when it comes to sex discrimination, already knows that storm center well. She has always shown particular interest in equality for women. She states: "I worked hard to try to eliminate what I saw o.r judged as legal impediments in the way of letting women progress and meet their career goals. I think that after women got the right to vote, they pretty much sat down for a long period of time and packed their banners and stayed quiet. It wasn't until the 1960s that women began to bring to the forefront the continuing concerns that they had about equal opportunity.

I am sure that but for that effort, I would not be serving in this job, because people obtained a greater consciousness of the need for women in these positions.

"There were not as many women working, at least in the professions, in the days when I was starting out in the legal profession," says Justice O'Connor.

"In fact, there were only a handful of women lawyers in Arizona, and we used to meet

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about once a month-and initially we could sit around a very small table indeed. Through the years it grew."

As for role models, th~ justice says: "A woman judge in Arizona named Norma Lockwood became the first woman chief justice of the state supreme court. Her father had been a lawyer and a judge, and she became a legislator and a judge. She was very helpful to the women lawyers in those days and would meet with us. We thought that was wonderful encouragement."

Have the confines of Washington and its turmoil made a severe change in the lifestyle of Justice O'Connor after a

childhood spent in the wide-open spaces and an early career in ozonic Arizona?

Her answer 'is not surprising: "When we lived in Arizona I was an active worker in a variety of civic projects and a volunteer in a good many different agencies. Today, I don't have the time to do much in terms of caring for my household or anything else except doing work that's demanded by this job. So it's a complete change."

Her sons are now "all very responsible young adults; all have performed well indeed," she says. "I see them already taking on jobs as volunteers in some of the things I was interested in long ago.

And that's just wonderful to me. I think it's important that young people get involved, and I'm extremely proud that our sons are becoming a part of community activities."

Anothec shared O'Connor trait is a love for sports. Says Justice O'Connor, "Through the years we planned our vacations so we could take them skiingwinter skiing in Utah and California, water-skiing in summer. We also like to play tennis and golf. The children learned to play both sports. We also managed to take backpacking trips and camping trips together.

"Years ago we had family gatherings

An Indian Lawyer Meets Her Honor On a busy day last year, Justice Sandra O'Connor met a young lawyer from India-Sunil Gupta of Allahabad. The hour-long interview (excerpts below) was conducted in the justice's chambers at the U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C. SUNIL GUPTA: It is fascinating for a person like me from the Indian legal world to be with the first woman judge of the U.S. Supreme Court. We do not have a woman judge on our Supreme Court bench as yet. Could you relate some of the most exciting moments in your career?

JUSTICE SANDRA O'CONNOR: Your country is noted the world over for its eminent women. You had a woman Prime Minister. I am sure that very soon you will have a woman judge in your Supreme Court., The most exciting and thrilling moment in my career, I guess, was when President Reagan decided to appoint me a judge of the U.S. Supreme Court. I, also had an extraordinary experience appearing before the U.S. Senate for confirmation of the President's decision.

How have you reconciled your family commitments with your professional commitments?

For me my family always came first. I did not want to pursue my career at the cost of my home. When my children were growing up, I wanted to take care of

them. So I decided to go slow on my occupation for a while and work on the children. I stayed home for a few years when they were small and when they were older I resumed work. My sons are now employed and settled. You know, these are the advantages of being blessed with a long life expectancy. You have plenty of years to pursue your career.

Do you think that there are special difficulties and pressures that a woman

attorney has to face in the American legal profession?

There was a time when it was difficult for women to find a place in the American legal profession. When I graduated from law college in 1952, there were hardly any opportunities for women. The solicitor firms-would not take us in. They probably lacked faith in women's capac7 ity and competence. But we have come a long way and things have changed dramatically. Now, almost half the stu-

for our friends in Phoenix where we would stage things like 'Family Olympics Day.' We'd set up a whole range of sports activities and encourage each family to construct their own flag, march in the grand parade and enter all the events as families."

The older the boys got, the more their father enjoyed being with them, she says, adding, "I think they are as close as a father and sons could possibly be. John has such a great sense of humor, and all three of our boys are very witty. They have a wonderful time entertaining one another."

John O'Connor's sense of humor, a

tonic for Sandra as well, has been a great antidote to the somber issues she must contend with on the Supreme Court. "It just bubbles out of him on an impromptu basis," she says. "Sometimes the first statement of the day will be some funny little comment that will have us both laughing. He has kept me laughing for 30 years. " John O'Connor is a senior partner of a Phoenix law firm. As his wife told the Senate during the hearings for her confirmation, he has always been "enthusiastically supportive" of her work.

At the same hearings when she was asked how she wanted to be remem-

dents in U.S. law colleges are women; and, I am certain, they would not have any of the difficulties that my generation experienced.

least dangerous. Perhaps this is because it really has no power of enforcement.

It cannot impose its decrees. It has only the power of thought and of the pen. But even so, I agree that (as you put it, in a more civilized social order) the judiciary does wield a substantial influence on the life of the community. The people tend to repose, quite naturally, greater faith and confidence in the judges. All the same, I strongly believe that the judges should not get carried away beyond the scope of duties legitimately assigned to them.

Under our system, the role of the judiciary as defined by the Constitution is to shape a uniform body of federal law.

That is all.

Does a woman judge face any additional handicaps or strains?

I don't think so. Speaking from my personal experience, I would say that the fact that women judges are in a minority gets us a lot of popularity and media attention. W.e are always treated as someone more special. For instance, whenever an organization has to invite someone for attending. a gathering or delivering a speech, they prefer to get a woman judge. So we probably have to make more speeches and public appearances than our male counterparts do.

How do you find your relationship with the other judges of the Supreme Court?

Very cordial. They are all so helpful.

They don't let me feel any different.

It is said that the judiciary is the weakest of the three organs of state-with the executive wielding the power of the sword and the legislature enjoying the power of the purse. But 1 believe that in a civilized society, where the common man is blessed with a high degree of civic consciousness, the judiciary is the most powerful organ of state by virtue of its power of conscience.

Do you agree?

Each one of the organs of state has its own kind of power and there is and has to be a balance of power among them. Some people do say that, of the three, the judiciary is the most innocuous and the

What dangers or challenges, if any, are being faced by the American judiciary today from the other two organs of state?

Throughout history, at different times, concerns have been voiced in this regard.

Political interference with courts is well known. But presently, I don't see any particular cause for concern. There is no danger right now, direct or indirect, from any quarter of interference with the judiciary. The other two organs of state are more occupied with serious and pressing issues such as global economy and world peace.

Do you agree that appointment of judges should be strictly apolitical?

Truly speaking, there is never a need to get alarmed or concerned about such a thing in the United States because there are enough safeguards to check the entry of undeserving persons in the judiciary.

The biggest check is the U.S. Senate,

bered, Sandra O'Connor replied, "Ah, the tombstone question. I hope it says, 'Here lies a good judge.' I hope I am remembered as the first woman who served on the Supreme' Court."

Both wishes are destined to be fulfilled.

As President Reagan said when nominating her, "She possesses those unique fairness, intelqualities of temperament, lectual capacity and devotion to the public good which have characterized the 101 'brethren' who have preceded her." 0 About the Author: Joan S. Marie is-much like her role model Justice O'Connorlawyer, writer, editor, wife and mother.

which takes a very serious view of its duty of confirmation of the President's nominees. The 100 Senators from all over the United States perform this responsibility with utmost conscientiousness.

In the Senate the quality of the individual going to be appointed is tested with unsparing thoroughness: That test is the real test. History affords examples of occasions when individuals were rejected and confirmation of their appointments denied by the Senate. Another insuperable check is the media and public opinion as expressed through them. [Justice O'Connor's confirmation wasunanimous.]

What, in your opinion, are some of the most important current legal or constitutional issues engaging the attention of the Supreme Court of the United States?

We decide about 250 cases a year.

They touch on all aspects of our law and legal system-civil, criminal, taxation, regulatory laws and so on. The Court's agenda is noteworthy, among other things, for its diversity. It is really hard to single out some cases at the expense of others. However, so far as constitutional rights are concerned, this year [1985] we have had on our agenda quite a few cases, involving the first amendment rights, * particularly, the rightto religion.

0

* "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the government for redress of grievances."

The paintings and sculptures shown here are part of the priceless collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Its curator is Pratapaditya Pal who has spread an awareness of Indian art in America.

Facing page: Infant Krishna with Butterballs, Tamil Nadu, 16th century; ivory with polychroll1Y; height 19 ClIl.

Above, right: Lovers Embracing, Imperial Mughal style, circa 1615; opaque watercolors on paper; 33 cm x 22 cm.

Above, left: Uma-Mahesvara, Uttar Pradesh, 10th century; cream-colored sandstone; height 86 em.

Right: Shiva and Parvati in the Himalayas, Rajput style, Sirmur school; opaque watercolors on paper; 35 em x 25 em.

iving a course in art history without slides in the United States is {} like teaching without chalk and a blackboard. Pratapaditya Pal (at right) teaches without slides, and he's proud of it-because, instead of slides, he shows the students authentic works of art, each one a classical museum piece.

Pal, 50, is adjunct professor of Indian and Southeast Asian Art at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, offering two art history courses each semester. Students attending his lectures and seminars are taught only at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art-where Pal is senior curator of Indian and Southeast Asian Art. The museum has an impressive collection from this region (some examples are shown on these pages).

Guiding them to become true connoisseurs of art, Pal teaches students to recognize the quality of valuable pieces of art, relating the works to geography, history, aesthetics and iconography.

For Pratapaditya Pal, imparting this appreciation of Asian art is almost a way of life. His curriculum vitae is 14 pages long and lists 16 exhibitions that he has put together in America since 1967 and includes 25 books and prestigious catalogs authored by him. "Dr. Pal is one of the major forces for the study and exhibiting of South Asian art in the West," says Andrew Pekarik, director of Asia House galleries in New York City. "He is a great scholar and a brilliant mind." Pekarik is himself a specialist in Japanese art.

Pal has been living in the United States for the past two decades with his Calcutta-born wife and their two daughters, aged 10 and 16. But it was India that gave him his life's vocation. Born in Sylhet, now in Bangladesh, on September 1, 1935, he was taken by his parents to Calcutta in 1939. He studied in Darjeeling, where he gained a lifelong affinity for Tibetan and Nepali art and crafts and an interest in the myths, legends and history of the people living in the Himalayas. (He also began developing his linguistic skills here-he can read, speak and write Nepali, Newari, Bengali, English and Hindi, and can read and write French and Sanskrit.)

Armed with first-class grades, Pal then moved to- Delhi, graduating from St. Stephen's College with honors in History in 1956. He returned to Calcutta to do a master's degree in Ancient Indian History and Culture at the University of Calcutta, where he won a first-class first. Continuing his postgraduate studies, Pal earned his first doctorate in 1962 from Calcutta University, and a second, three years later, at Cambridge University in England.

While still at Cambridge, Pal received a John Rockefeller III fellowship, enabling him to travel in the United States. After returning to India he "sat twiddling my thumbs." But not for long-the fellowship had brought Pal in contact with Porter McCray, who worked for the Rockefeller Foundation and knew a lot about Asian art. He recognized Pal's genius and persuaded the Center for Art of the American Institute for Indian Studies in, Varanasi to take Pal on as a senior research associate. After he had been at the Center for two

years, McCray helped him make a second visit to the United States. It was on this trip that his American career was launched, beginning as keeper of the Indian collection at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts. He organized an exhibition of Ragmala paintings in 1967 and another on Lamaist art in 1969. He also taught at Harvard and contributed to numerous scholarly journals.

Pal also made his mark at Asia House in New York, mounting three exhibitions-"The Art of Tibet" in 1969, "Nepal-Where the Gods Are Young" in 1975 and "The Ideal Image" in 1978.

But the year that Pal considers a landmark for himself was 1970. Nasli and Alice Heeramaneck had just sold their stupendous collection of Indian, Southeast Asian, Tibetan, Nepali and Islamic art to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. (Bombay-born Nasli Heeramaneck was one of the biggest dealers of Indian art in the United States for more- than two decades; in 1966 he bequeathed his magnificent 350-piece collection of pre-Columbian Art to India's National Museum in New Delhi.)

Pal moved to the West Coast to become curator of the Heeramaneck collection at the Los Angeles museum. From then on he and the museum have grown together to new heights of respect and popularity in American art circles.

Connoisseurs, collectors, curators and cognoscenti of Asian art in America have long recognized the contributions of Pratapaditya Pal. But what makes him so special?

First, there is his unique talent in consistently selecting the most exceptional works for display. Second is his facility for clear writing, stating facts succinctly and explaining intelligently even the most subtle elements of Buddhist, Hindu and Islamic art. Third, he is a prolific scholar. While many art historians specializing in South and Southeast Asian art obfuscate the issues, Pal is known for his ability to enlighten viewers, listeners and readers. ' And, chuckles McCray, "Pal is a very colorful character, most entertaining, very vivacious. His recent lectures at Columbia University were marvelously titillati 19." McCray, who has been happily following the career of the man he helped bring to America, declares that the Indian scholar has "had a profound impression on Americans. All art is natural to him.

He is a wonderful lecturer. Young American students love coming to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to hear him talk on Indian art."

Within just two decades of his arrival in the United States, Pal has established himself as a respected figure among art historians and stimulated an appreciation among Americans for the arts of South and Southeast Asia. His festival of India started a long time ago!

0 About the Author: Shehbaz H. Safrani, originally from Hyderabad, is now a New York-based free-lance writer and a painter. He has also taught art history at the City University of New Y:Jrk, lectured extensively on Asian art in American museums and has organized an exhibition of Indian art at Queens Museum in New York.

Costumes of Royal India "Lavish, gorgeous, magical, fabulous, ravishing .... " New York went ecstatic viewing 150 dresses from 16 princely families at a Festival of India exhibition that celebrates "an ongoing traditionof craft, of coloration."

... is worth a hundred million words in the field of fiber optics. The new technology of transmitting information with beams of light through glass fibers promises to revolutionize telecommunications. A single fiber could theoretically carry the entire telephone traffic of the United States.

Design Excellence The U.S. Federal Government is America's largest single builder, printer and user of design services, commissioning works ranging from dams to postage stamps and public housing to artificial limbs.

In a bid to encourage good design that also makes economic sense, President Reagan has established quadrennial presidential awards for design excellence. SPAN presents a sampling of the winners.

The Four Faces of Sylvia Plath Dying Is an art, like everything else.

I do it exceptionally well.

All through her life, Sylvia Plath was obsessed with death. Indian scholar Darshan Singh Maini discusses the woman who gave American poetics a new dimension and an unusual rendering.

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Sculptures in Glass These creations in glass are by Harvey Littleton, widely acknowledged as the father of the studio glass movement in the United States. In 1962, Littleton, a potter at the time, developed a glass-blowing technique that allowed artists to work with molten material in their own studios. Till then fine glass work was a highly technical process executed in factories.

Littleton's glass sculptures-produced in his studio in North Carolina-are currently being shown all over the United States in a traveling retrospective exhibition.

"Classic Symbol," 1969.

"Glass Spectrum," 1974.