APPLIED SCIENCE

Evening Post, Volume CXXVII, Issue 98, 28 April 1939, Page 17

APPLIED SCIENCE

PLACE IN INDUSTRY

BRIDGES A DEEP GULF

How ■ what is termed in a general way "applied science" can help in bridging the gulf between the modern scientist and the ordinary man in the street, was the subject of the presidential address given by Mr. C. M. Smith to Wednesday evening's meeting of the Wellington Philosophical Society, now the ;Royal Society of New Zealand (Wellington branch). That this gulf was both deep' and broad, pointed out the speaker, was borne out by a serious indictment recently published in the report of the Consulting Committee.on Secondary Education (Great Britain): "The committee considers that the teaching of science has lost touch with life itself, and for this reason has often failed to give the knowledge required or to stimulate the pupils' interest." Such a charge coming from such a source, said Mr. Smith, cannot be set aside as groundless; and if the applied scientist can assist his elder brethren in remedying such a state of affairs, then surely he has a very useful and essential function to perform as a part of the complex modern social machine. After tracing the history of the long nartnership between craftsmanship and business, when science was a thing apart and a mere hobby of the learned or eccentric, the speaker proceeded to show how science was gradually admitted to this partnership, but ai first only as a very junior partner. "The conception of applied science which I set before you." continued Mr. Smith, "is that of a chain which is used by any large industry to link it? techniaue and its economic effici-j ency to all the sciences which have a bearing on its processes: and the applied scientist is the smith who attends to that chain, ever striving to strengthen it and to shorten it; but, alas.-still doomed to spend most of his time, as yet. in patching up weak lilnks and in mending broken ones. Continued and correlated, though diversified, reading supplementing continuous observation, and the testing of both against the touchstone of actual experience. I put forward as the training and principal life activity of the applied scientist, with the entailed duty of interpreting it all to meet the needs and requirements of the layman toiler —be he labour artisan or capitalistic financier: and with, in addition, the perhaps more difficult task of conveying back to the more generalised pure scientist, the messages of the further needs, requirements, and problems of the same man in the street."