CONQUEST OF NEW WORLDS.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20643, 15 February 1929, Page 12

CONQUEST OF NEW WORLDS.

THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE. Science is always giving man a new world (writes Professor J. Arthur Thomson in John- o’ Loudon’s Weekly). It was a new world long ago when men first learned from the great objectlesson of the seasons and from. the.movements of the heavenly .bodies that they lived amid great uniformities under an orderly sky. It was a new world when Isaac Newton linked the falling, apple to the distant moon, and showed the universality of the law o'f gravitation in reference to visible bodies. • , , . It was a new world when Lavoisier proved that no 1 matter can be destroyed, but merely changes from one form to another; and this fact was deepened when Liebig illustrated the idea of the circulation of • the elements. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen—the Big Four—and all the rest of them are whirling in an endless dance, in the course of which they continually change partners,, yet rarely cease. Sometimes, it may be, there is a sitting/out of the dance, and a long rest; but sopner or later the movement, begins afresh. For even the mountains flow down to the sea.

It was a new world when Joule and others added to the fact of the conservation of matter the law of the conservation of energy, showing that no power can be destroyed, but if it seem to disappear has merely - changed ' from one guise to another. The energy of the mountain torrent moves the wheels whicli generate electricity which captures free nitrogen from the air which'goes to make fertilisers which nourish the plants which feed the man. Thus in a very real way the turbulence of the torrent is changed into the beating of our heart. Few of us visualise enough to appreciate the newness of the world that the microscope began to- reveal to man in the "Second half of the seventeenth century. . It was not merely a'disclosure of intricacies by magnification, it was a. discovery of the secret .ways of things—a revelation of the invisible world which accounts for the visible.

■ Before the microscope the world of life was uncannily magical, for the germs of many animals are invisible without lenses; the microbes that cause rotting and disease and fermentation are microscopically minute. .Yet we. cannot make sense of life apart from these invisible germ-cells and' microbes. No one can 'see a nerve fibre ■noth the naked eye, nor the capillaries that join the ends of the arteries to the beginnings of the veins; yet : we’ cannot make sense of life if' we do not take account of nerve-fibres and capillaries! One likes to think of Darwin’s voyage in the Beagle as a Columbus voyage, discovering a new world—a world that has evolved. The whole outlook was changed, it became evolutionist! Everything living >vas seen as an antiquity, the long result of time; The animals and plants we know- around us arc the descendants of rather simpler and more generalised types that went before them, ■ and these in turn had' . their rather simpler ancestors.

• If he is dealing with a degenerate parasite, .the, evolutionist will, of course, find the ancestral; stock ; at a higher level than those now living, that is more differentiated and more integrated, for evolution may be retrogressive, though it- is on. the whole triumphantly progressive. Science always makes the world less magical, and no one now pictures the primitive lion pawing its way out of the earth as Milton supposed. But one must avoid the error suggested by the word “ transformism.” A lizard never turned into,a snake nor a reptile into a bird; but from an ancestral, stock variants arose on a new line of advance, from which others and again others, until eventually a very new’ creature. had emerged.

Even since the twentieth century began, the world has become so hew’ that many of us are hardly at home in it. There is a new r unity in the w’orld since it was shown that all the different elc- v meats (02 less 1 three or four still to bo found) are made up of electrons and protons in diverse numbers and arrangements and movements.' There 1 is a new unity in the world since it has been shown that all the radiant energies form a series of electro-magnetic radiations or “ ether-waves,” from those of a very Tong ware-length, used in broadcasting, to those of very short wave-length, used in radio-therapy. There is a long gamut of 02 octaves, if we reckon the light we sec as one octave!

Moreover, matter has been swallowed up by electricity; the conservation of matter and the conservation of energy hilve been' included in one conception; and all inertness has disappeared from the world. There is not. only a bravura of growing corn, but a bustle in the air we breathe.

. In the second half of the nineteenth century it was customary to refer most of the powers on earth to the radiant energies streaming forth from the sun, which was regarded,as a great fiery furnace becoming hotter and hotter as it contracted. Only in our own day has the chief origin and fountain of solar energy been discovered in the disintegration and transformation of atoms, and in the smash or splash which occurs when protons and electrons annihilate one another in headlong collision. The whole outlook of chemistry and physics has changed since Becquerel discovered radio-activity in 189fi. . We should like some day to refer to the new world of life that biology has revealed, but keeping just now to tins physical world, what have we? The world is one, fundamentally homogeneous amid its manifoldness, strangely simple in spite of its intricacy; it ia teeming with power—-again very homogeneous. The world is progressively intelligible, as long as we keep to scientific questions, even though our knowledge of the real laws of Nature is still young. We live in an orderly world, not aphaw tasmagoria but a cosmos.