Auckland Star WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, The Echo and The Sun. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 8, 1932. LIFE AND MACHINERY.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 239, 8 October 1932, Page 8

Auckland Star WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, The Echo and The Sun.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 8, 1932. LIFE AND MACHINERY.

For the cause that lacks assistance, For the wrong that needs resistance, For fhe future in the distant, And the good that «e« can do.

A changed spirit is evident to-day in the thinker's attitude towards "what is called mechanical progress. Admiration is being tempered by criticism; complacency is giving way to doubt; doubt is passing into alarm. This spirit is reflected in the presidential address of Sir Alfred Ewing at the annual meeting of the British Association at York. He reviewed the marvellous march of science during the last hundred years, its abundant and familiar gifts to mankind, and asked whether on balance it had made an addition to our safety and happiness. He thought man was ethically unprepared for so great a bounty; the command of Nature had been put into his hands before he knew how to command himself. Science may prove, in such case, to be like those Sabine soldiers who, when Tarpeia asked them for what they wore on their left arms, meaning their golden bracelets, overwhelmed her with shields.

Recent advances in abstract physical science have shown that Ave are groping in a half-light, tentatively grasping what are at best only half-truths. The scientist has dropped the toga of dogma, and shown how with every gain of knowledge we realise more clearly that we can never really know. Einstein lately said that to understand is to draw one incomprehensible out of another incomprehensible. The unread riddles cannot be interpreted in the language of ordinary experience. The place of the atom, as the ultimate indivisible unit' of matter, has been taken by the proton and the electron. In every atom, Sir Alfred Ewing pointed out, there is a permanent separation of positive and negative electricity, looking across an immensely great dielectric gulf which no laboratory operation has ever caused them to bridge. The energy is safely locked away, but Sir Alfred says that if the secret were discovered of letting loose the atomic store, we should invite dissolution at the hands of any fool or knave. A play has been written on this very theme. We have no knowledge of what electricity really is. All that we know is that it is something Avhich exists in units of two sorts, positive and negative, with a strong attraction for each other, and that in any atom Ave find them somehoAV held apart against that attraction, Avith a consequent storing of potential energy. We noAV regard electricity as the very essence of matter, not merely an attribute, but Avhat it is Ave cannot say. Science has deepened rather than explained the mystery of the universe.

Pioneers in engineering were sagacious men who put their faith in experience. They kneAV little of theory and cared less. They mainly profited by their OAvn mistakes. When Joule brought forward his first determination of the mechanical equivalent of heat, his paper was received in chilly silence. It Avas four years before he excited the interest of William Thomson, the future Lord Kelvin, and then the tAvo together applied the principles to every part of the physical domain. To the formulation of the principles which govern the Avhole art of producing power by the agency of heat we owe the steam turbine of Parsons, the gas engine of Otto, and the oil engine of Diesel, with all that they have done for travel by road and air. To the same foundation we OAve the process of refrigeration. Thus did scientific theory usher in a new era of engineering practice.

Whither does all this tremendous procession of discovery and invention tend? We are becoming acutely aware that the gifts of science may be grievously abused. If we have the motor car and the aeroplane, we have also poison gas and the submarine. Mass production made possible by the machine is glutting the world with competitive commodities, produced in a quantity too great to be absorbed. Man does not live by bread alone, and he needs spiritual as well as material betterment. The creative ingenuity of the engineer is a God-given faculty, and could make life fuller, wider and richer. But whether it does so depends on the ethical preparation of man for so great a bounty, and there is always a danger that we may gain the whole world and lose our own soul unless moral evolution keeps pace with physical and material.