Issues

A MEMORANDUM on the above topic (addressed to “The Record”) has been received from Prof. McLachlan of Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, Calif. The original document, dated January 24, 1961, was prefaced by the following explanatory remarks: “Although this subject has been of interest to us for a long time, the first clue as to how to pursue it came to the present author through a midnight argument in a barroom during the 1959 meeting of the Geological Society of America in Pittsburgh. The participants were Professor Garrels of the Geology Department of Harvard, Dr. Charles Christ of the Geological Survey, Washington, Professor Zwolinski of Carnegie Tech, and McLachlan of SRI. It all started when Professor Garrels said ‘I wish there was some way to make a science out of geology.’ The accompanying memorandum represents what I got when I tried to patch together the pieces of the fight which Garrels put up when the chemists and physicists present attempted to help him glue geology into a single package by means of quanta and a bunch of laws of diffusion, crystallization, thermodynamics, and kinetics. It turned out to be more complicated than I had planned.”