Chapel ceremony

Regarding the gay marriage in the Chapel and the resulting furor (Notebook, May 7, and Letters, July 2): In these tumultuous times, it's nice to know some things never change. Let PAW run an item suggesting gay people are not demons and, like cuckoo-clockwork, the sound of keyboards clattering can be heard across the land.
Elizabeth Green '84 condemns same-sex marriage by saying in effect that most people don't approve of it--as if right and wrong were determined by a show of hands. As a history major, I learned that, at various points in time, most people believed the earth was flat, Jesus was criminally insane, redheads were servants of the devil, slavery was the will of God, and women were unfit to attend Prince--ton. Fortunately, most people evolve with knowledge; if, as Green writes, Americans "overwhelmingly reject" gay marriage (debatable), it says less about the validity of same-sex relationships than about the populace's need to climb higher on the learning curve.
John Swan '37, one of several citing the Bible, coyly refers to a "circumstance"--presumably male-to-male sex--which the Bible "labels an abomination." It would be easier for a rich man to pass through the eye of a needle, than to convince some people that Biblical texts are rooted in historical context and all that bothersome stuff, so I won't try. Instead, I'd suggest reading a few chapters further, wherein the Bible proscribes, with equal vehemence, a whole laundry list of stuff, including tattoos, fiber blends, and touching the skin of a dead pig. Interestingly, the Bible says nothing at all about a "woman lying with a woman," so presumably that's okay. You go, girls.
As for Henry Whitehouse '54's charge that the sailors who died on the U.S.S. Princeton are somehow "betrayed" by the commitment ceremony in the Chapel: Is it really possible he believes there was not a goodly contingent of gay men among those valiant dead?
The past few years have increasingly shown that the most ardent gaybashers often act out of self-loathing, torn as they are between their own repressed homosexuality and their desperate desire to fit in to "straight" society. To those in the Princeton family in similar straits, a friendly word of advice: find a therapist, come on out, and for God's sake, get a life and stop obsessing about what goes on in other peoples' bedrooms! The whited sepulchers will spew their hatred at you; but the truly godly will extend an embrace and a welcome.
DAN BERKOWITZ '70
West Hollywood, Calif.

Jarring juxtaposition

I was moved by Marilyn Mar--tin '77's biographical essay "On Facing Death" (In Her Words, July 2). Its simple eloquence speaks volumes about the journey we all share toward that ultimate rendezvous. It was her references to her young daughter that particularly touched me: her mother's satin robes (worn when nursing the child) that "comfort her as she rubs them." My prayers--though hardly a consolation to their situation--go out to that child and her parents. It was something in the candid resignation behind Ms. Martin's whimperless prose that affected me most; then, turning the magazine's page, I was met with an article on the sports psychology of golf--a jarring juxtaposition that struck me numb. I don't deny that the one article is just as legitimate as the other in its own context. But I wonder if a little more judicious editorial effort might have been applied regarding the placement of the respective articles in order to afford Ms. Martin the dignity that her essay surely deserved.
ROCKY SEMMES '77
Alexandria, Va.

Living wills

Walter Hewitt '42's defense of so-called living wills only reinforces my concerns about them (PAW, July 2). As an attorney closely following--and sometimes participating in--litigation concerning issues of end-of-life medical treatment, I fear that living wills could more aptly be labeled death warrants. They are vague, general licenses to deny essential treatment to ill or disabled people.
Hewitt says that the threat of malpractice suits causes overtreatment. But he neglects to mention that living wills may cause undertreatment. Living wills, as legally binding documents, create the threat of lawsuits for physicians who do provide treatment they judge to be necessary or appropriate.
Hewitt clearly favors death over life for many people. (Exactly which people he does not say.) He calls it "very irresponsible" to allow oneself to be given life-sustaining treatment, and decries the "torture" to family members and the "cost" to society. Hewitt goes so far as to say that one should not "permit" this "ugliness" at the end of life. This is not a plea for freedom of choice--the usual public face of living-will proponents--but for pressure to die.
Hewitt says that a 77-year-old who has a serious heart attack or stroke should "just as well" die. Excuse me, but the world is a far better place for the presence of many 80-, 90-, and 100-year-old people, including those who have had strokes and heart attacks. In this age of budget consciousness, cost cutting, and health-care rationing, we should not be sending our elderly or disabled brothers and sisters the message that they should "just as well" die. Life is too "rich and meaningful," if I may borrow Hewitt's words, to tolerate the ugliness of devaluing the lives of medically dependent persons.
WALTER M. WEBER '81
American Center for Law and Justice
Washington, D.C.

Ethnomedicine

I was disturbed by the July 2 Class Act about a freshman seminar on ethno-medicine. It indicates that Princeton is not immune to the promotion of anti-scientific concepts. It is particularly unsettling to see this trend imparted to premed students who may one day influence and administer the standards of health care. Disregarding the issue of the effectiveness of traditional Chinese medicine, the seminar seemed to endorse postmodern assertions that science has no claim on objective reality and that truth is culturally dependent.
The success of the scientific method in explaining and predicting, and in mak-ing incredible advances in technology, is proof that scientists are steadily learning more and more about how the universe behaves. Within medicine, modern science--through double-blind, random-assignment, placebo-controlled tests--has made it possible to separate truly effective treatments from those that are only apparently effective.
I applaud efforts to increase multi-cultural understanding among Princeton students. But I hope the aim of anthropology seminars is to study the physical, social, and cultural development and behavior of man, not to teach students that scientific truths are merely cultural constructs or that medical treatments are valid solely because they are ancient. While I would welcome any treatment that could benefit patients, regardless of its origin, its efficacy and safety can only be demonstrated in properly controlled clinical trials.
HUNTER R. GORDON '84
Newtown, Penn.

David Duchovny '82

Is PAW striking out for increased circulation as a lowest-common-denominator movie tabloid in the racks of supermarket checkout aisles? Or is it just trying to be a veiled imitator of that glossy sheet for the bored housewife, People magazine? Your May 7 cover story on David Duchovny '82 is just plain dumb. He didn't want to be interviewed--to his credit--so you went ahead and slapped a publicity photo of him and his costar (who didn't go to Princeton) on the cover. If you want to help promote some worthy graduates struggling in the arts, why not find a few really talented stage actors or actresses working in off-Broadway or repertory theater and write about them?
LAURENCE C. DAY '55
St. Louis, Mo.

While it may be of interest to read vague recollections of David Duchovny, Prince-tonians were denied the full story behind the success of TV's X-Files. Howard Gordon '84 and Alex Ganza '84 were executive producers (and frequent writers) of this popular show and played a critical role in its success. It is unfortunate that your article dealt only with superficial celebrity.
JEFFREY S. OPPENHEIM '84
Suffern, N.Y.

Commencement & Reunions

Re your Commencement coverage in the July 2 issue: The prominent subjects of the nine photographs you published include 10 graduating seniors, of whom eight are women and two men. Not a single white male graduate is represented. Con-sidering the possibility that PAW's reporting lacks balance, is it safe to assume there were a few such graduates in the Class of 1997?
CLARK H. WOOLLEY '61
Telluride, Colo.

In your Commencement story I noted the photograph of a female graduate taking, as stated in the caption, "a puff on her celebratory stogie." Most young people believe that cigars are benign compared to cigarettes. But cigars can cause cancers of the oral cavity, larynx, esophagus, and lungs, and they contain high levels of nicotine, which we know to be addictive. I hope this cigar is just a crazy impulse at a wonderful event. It is hard to imagine such an attractive and presumably smart young woman adopting this macho habit.
HERMAN F. FROEB '46, M.D.
La Jolla, Calif.

The otherwise unidentified "tasseled graduate" appearing in your Commencement story is Laura Estes '97. Our thanks for including a photo of our beautiful daughter, although perhaps only family would recognize her from that angle.
GERALD M. ESTES '67
Chapel Hill, N.C.

With all the wonderful photographs you must have had, was it really necessary to begin your July 2 Reunions story with a double-page shot of beer-drinking undergraduates? I thought the emphasis of Reunions was more on collegiality and less on drunkenness.
KAREN PIESLAK POHLMANN '87
King of Prussia, Penn.

Palmer concrete

Charles W. McCutcheon '50 asks why Palmer Stadium survived only 88 years, while concrete structures built by the Romans are still standing (Letters, May 7). In a reply in the July 2 PAW, Rocky Semmes '79 blamed corrosion of the steel reinforcing bars (known as rebar) used in Palmer Stadium, but not in ancient structures. It is clear that attack on the rebar contributed significantly to the failure of the stadium, but the concrete was highly porous and contained excessive alkali, so it failed much sooner than it should have.
When Ed Vicenzi of the Princeton Materials Institute and I used an electron beam to examine pieces of concrete from the stadium, we found crystals of potassium chloride in the layers of rust surrounding the rebar. Chloride accelerates corrosion of rebar, and there was too much of it in the concrete in the stadium. We also found that white deposits on the surface of the stadium were pure calcium carbonate (from the reaction of atmospheric carbon dioxide with the lime in the cement). The invasion of carbon dioxide, which destabilized both the rebar and cement, was possible because the concrete was too porous. Modern concrete has a low alkali content, and its porosity and permeability are reduced by pozzolanic additives. That name is derived from the town of Pozzuoli, where the Romans obtained volcanic ash for their concrete; although volcanic material is still used where available, in the United States we usually use fly ash, a residue from the burning of coal.
The Romans designed their structures to have compressive stresses. This makes the buildings relatively ponderous, but prevents cracking even in very weak materials. Reinforced concrete offers enormous freedom in design (higher arches, longer spans, thinner walls), but some cracking of the concrete is expected. As long as the cracks are not allowed to get too deep, attack on the rebar is extremely slow. The most important lesson to be learned from the failure of Palmer Stadium, and the general deterioration of our civil infrastructure, is that modern reinforced concrete is not a maintenance-free material. Just as we routinely paint steel bridges without waiting for corrosion to threaten their stability, we should regularly inspect and repair the inevitable cracks in reinforced-concrete structures to prevent corrosion. With proper maintenance, modern concrete buildings and bridges--and stadiums--will last indefinitely.
GEORGE W. SCHERER
Professor of Civil Engineering
Princeton, N.J.

Relatively speaking

K. L. Campbell '46 asks why it was that one member of the physics department, Robert Dicke '39, could be praised for challenging Einstein's theory of relativity, while another, Joseph Taylor, could be praised for confirming it (Letters, July 2). Science proceeds by carrying out ever-more stringent tests on theories; if the theory does not pass its tests, it is disproven. But the process of testing is never over, and therefore no theory is ever proven absolutely.
Einstein published his general theory in 1915. It gained immediate acceptance because it naturally explained a hitherto mysterious phenomenon, the precession of Mercury's orbit, and made a further prediction, that the Sun should cause the position of nearby stars to shift slightly due to the gravitational bending of light, which was quickly confirmed. However, further tests of the theory's predictions were beyond the technological capabilities of the time, and little experimental work occurred over the next few decades. The late 1950s and early 1960s witnessed a resurgence of interest in tests of general relativity, led in large part by Professor Dicke. In 1961, he and his student Carl Brans *61 published an extension to general relativity consistent with the relatively meager experimental constraints of the time.
In the mid-1970s, Professor Taylor (then on the faculty of the University of Massachusetts) and his student Russell Hulse (currently a researcher at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory) used state-of-the-art instrumentation at the world's largest radio telescope, in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, to discover a pair of neutron stars, one of which emitted extremely regular signals (a pulsar), in close orbit around each other. By very accurately measuring the parameters of the orbit, Taylor and his colleagues were able to confirm to high accuracy some of the detailed predictions of the general theory of relativity. With this and subsequent work, they were able to constrain the Brans-Dicke theory to make it essentially indistinguishable from Einstein's original theory; general relativity passed this test, and in 1993 Taylor and Hulse won the Nobel Prize for this fundamental work.
This does not make Brans and Dicke's work useless. When they developed their theory, general relativity had been subject to only a handful of experimental tests. Their work showed that Einstein's theory was not unique, and more importantly, stimulated an entire generation of theorists and experimentalists to test the theory in all its aspects. This work continues. It is through such efforts that difficult-to-test theories are validated as much as they are discarded. Inspired by the early work of Dicke, and due to the precision tests of Taylor and his group, we have much experimental evidence, but no absolute proof, that Einstein was correct.
MICHAEL STRAUSS
Assistant Professor of Physics
Princeton, N.J.

Larry Doby

I was pleased and proud that Larry Doby was awarded an honorary degree at Commencement (PAW, July 2). In the heady baseball days of the late 1940s and early 1950s, when I was growing up in north-east Ohio, the Cleveland Indians were our heroes. We knew that Larry Doby was the first black American League player. But that did not mean nearly as much to us as the fact that he played for the Indians. In our little town of perhaps 15,000 persons, there was only one black family (whose elder son, John Roseborough, later entered the majors as a catcher with the Dodgers). It's astonishing to recall just how innocent we were of racial preconceptions--we had never been taught to think otherwise. We idolized Larry Doby the way we idolized Bob Feller, or Joe Gordon, or Bob Lemon. He was an Indian, and that was good enough for us. It seemed the most natural thing in the world that Larry Doby should be playing ball in Cleveland Stadium. But for him, it must have been much tougher than we 10- and 12-year-olds could ever have imagined.
STEPHEN C. BANDY *67
Princeton, N.J.

Bulletin board

I am seeking information about Kenneth B. Myers '43, our classmate from Australia, who was only with us freshman year. I can be reached at 525 Latona Avenue, Ewing, NJ 08618 (609-883-6679).
BILL SLOAN '43
Ewing, N.J.

I am seeking a print of a 45-minute documentary film, Princeton, which was made for the university in the fall of 1948. If I can obtain one, I plan to make a videotape copy to present to the University Archives. In the spring of 1949 the film circulated widely among Princeton clubs and alumni organizations. I can be reached at 45 Wayside Inn Rd., Framingham, MA 01701-3021 (508-877-5328).
RALPH WOODWARD '51
Framingham, Mass.

I would like to hear from alumni who in the fall of 1942 worked at the Army's Belle Mead, New Jersey, storage and shipping facility. The Army brass was said to be amazed at how fast Princeton work gangs could load a freight car. Please contact me at 300 E. 75th St., Apt. 22-J, New York, NY 10021 (212-535-8724).
DARBY PERRY '46
New York, N.Y.

The Princetoniana Committee of the Alumni Council is working on a booklet of beer-jacket logos. Anyone with information about the origin and meaning of these designs should contact Hugh Wynne '39, 100 Battle Road Circle, Princeton, NJ 08540 (609-921-1004).
HENRY R. MARTIN '48
Princeton, N.J.