VALUE OF SCIENCE.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LIV, Issue 291, 6 November 1934, Page 7

VALUE OF SCIENCE.

SIR JAMES JEANS’S ADDRESS,

Three thousand million pounds were added to the world’s wealth by the inventions of Thomas A. Edison. That estimate was used by Sir Janies Jeans, in his presidential address to 30uu members of the British Association, states the London Daily Express. He gave an impassioned denial to the charge that science does more harm than good. Although some new inventions had thrown people out of work, he said, scientific discoveries had provided work for millions.

“There are many who attribute most of our present national woes—including unemployment in industry and the danger of war—to the recent rapid advance in scientific knowledge,” Sir James went on. “It is obvious that the country which called a halt to scientific progress would soon fall behind in every other respect as well. ‘‘Those who sigh for an Arcadia in which all the machinery would be scrapped and all invention proclaimed a crime, as it was in Erewhon, forget that the Erewhonians had neither to compete with highly organised scientific competitors for the trade of tlie world, nor to protect themselves against possible bomb-dropping, blockade, or invasion.

“Scientific research has two products of industrial importance—the laboursaving inventions which displace labour and the more fundamental discoveries which may ultimately lead to new trades, and new popular demands providing employment for vast armies of labour.

“Our great..need at the moment is for industry-making discoveries. The investigator in pure science does not know whether his researches will result in a mere labour-saving device or a new industry. He only knows that if all science were throttled down neither would result.

‘The community would become crystallised in its present state, with nothing to do but watch its population increase, and shiver it waited for the famine, pestilence, or war, which must inevitably come, to restore the balance between food and mouths, land and population.”