SCIENCE AND TRUTH

Greymouth Evening Star, 13 June 1927, Page 9

SCIENCE AND TRUTH

WORLD OF BEAUTY. “I shall never forget the moment in which I learnt that the atom is a model of the solar system—the infinitely great of the same pattern as the infinitesimally small —or when I heard Profesor Bragg describe how all these remote and unimagined universes are built out of ninety two elements, arranged on an arithmetical scale, one atom with one electron, one with two, one with three, one with four, and so on, up to the number ninety-two. All the universe built out of these ninety-two elements'. I remember Professor Braggs saying under his breath, ‘The mind never ceases to marvel at such a universe.’ Such unimagined diversity and beauty made out of simple elements, in- such order and beauty!” “Beauty is everywhere! There is perhaps nothing in the whole of natture that is not beautiful. The artist shows us beauty and says, ‘This is love.’ The scientist shows us that beauty is everywhere. Things that no eye can ever see are beautiful, the remotest star, the minutest organism at the bottom of the sea alike are so. ‘The hidden down feathers of the eagle’s breast are as perfect as the outspread peacock’s tail!,” said Miss Maude Royden, in an address reported in the “Guildhouse Monthly.” “How many thousands of eagles are there in the world, and who will ever see the hidden down feathers of their breasts? Why then are they beautiful? Shall not the theologian at last acknowledge his debt to science and say, ‘What I have been teaching for the nineteen hundred years—that God is love—is now proved almost to demonstration, since everything he made, whether we see it or not, is beautiful’? “How curious that people belonging to a nation which produces a Roger Bacon, a Francis Bacon, and a Newton and a Darwin should still imagine that the scientist is arrogant and insolent in his attitude towards God. There is no humility greater than that of the ireally great in science. Think of a man like Newton, with perhaps one of the greatest intellects humanity has produced, saying at the end of his life that he was like ‘a child picking up pebbles on the seashore and diverting himself, with the notion that one was a prettier shape or colour than the other, while the whole ocean of truth lay unexplored before him.’

“Think of the attitude of the modern men of science whose whole conception of the universe was built up on the Newtonian system, confronted by an icononclast like Einstein, who comes to tell them ■ that the one thing they thought proved to demonstration is no longer wholly true; That they must modify ,and. radically modify, their whole conception of the universe. With what almost touching humility does the world of science come to sit at Einstein’s feet! Truth is the scientist’s God. Has he not ‘walked humbly with his God’? “In every realty great scientist is a sense of awe at the wonder of the universe. What does it matter whether he calls this ‘God’ or not? Science has its martyrs, with minds stunted and perverted by the stupidity of the world in which they were born. “Who knows what, such men suffer when they see wrecked on ‘one inconvenient fact’ the cherished hypothesis to which they have devoted the work of a lifetime? Surety we may claim for the scientist that he has said of the Truth, ‘lf it slay me yet will I trust it,’ and surety the Christian will admit that Truth is another name for God.”