THE FUTURE OF THE ATOM

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26226, 9 August 1946, Page 2

THE FUTURE OF THE ATOM

Sir—Notwithstanding the present strong claims of local politics upon our attention many laymen will appreciate the public expositions by our professional scientists of the advances in knowledge and application of sub-atomic energy. Dr Slater s Interesting article, with its intriguing illustrations. in your Saturday’s issue recalled to my mind a passage from Clerk Maxwell, a particularly acute and enlightened nineteenth century physicist who. paradoxically enough, may be justly regarded as the John the Baptist of the new mathematical dispensation in material science, in which dogmatism has given place to the recognition, voiced by Dr Slater, that scientific truth is not absolute, but always relative to current theory. Maxwell is recorded as saying:— " Natural causes, we know, are at work which tend to modify, if they do not at length destroy, all the arrangements and dimensions of the earth and the whole solar system. But though in the course of ages catastrophes have occurred and may yet occur in the iuavens, though ancient systems may be dissolved and new systems evolved out of their ruins, the molecules out of which these systems are built—the foundation stones of the material universe—remain unbroken and unworn.” How strangely this reads now! Dr Slater contemplates a time when the statistical method of physics may find a more positive auxiliary in the knowledge of individual units of the sub-atomic realm at present assessable only in bulk This hope for the restoration of individual causation is shared by at least two of the greatest modern physicists—Einstein and Planck—but Dr Slater will be aware that a strong current of scientific opinion has been running in the opposite direction. As in State opinion the commune hasbeen over-riding the individual, but an ultimate objective particle is a more elusive quarry than an individual man Even in man, however, scientific methods tends to probe beyond individuality in a downward direction, and so psychoanalysts people the mind with a whole hierarchy of demons and sub-demons to which process nobody can assign an end To conclude, may I make brief reference to the rather pathetic press message refarding Professor Compton's conscience? urely President Truman would recognise that a physicist, as such, has special competence to advise only on probable material results, and would not saddle him with ethical or political responsibility for the bomb.—l am. etc., John C. Begg. Dunedin. August 6.