Editorial December 25, 1976 Issue

Observing Christmas

Geoffrey J. Barratt

"After 25 centuries of search for an underlying simplicity in nature, it may turn out, as one theorist put it ..., that natural phenomena, even at their most fundamental level, are as complex as a painting by Jackson Pollock....

"'Until we have seen as no longer strange [the] strange role of the observer in the definition of reality,' [an eminent scientist commented], 'we can well believe we have not understood the first thing about what physics is, not the first thing about who we are and what the world is.'"^{The New York Times, April 28, 1976;}

These and other views of where physics research is tending were presented earlier this year at meetings of the American Physical Society, the National Academy of Sciences, and related groups.

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