Science Will Save Mankind.

Waikato Times, Volume 107, Issue 17964, 8 March 1930, Page 1 (Supplement)

Science Will Save Mankind.

A PREDICTION that science will save the world from war and its future inhabitants from starvation, was made by Dr. Robert A. Millikan, world-famed physicist, who is a former Nobel Prize winner, in his presidential address before the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Speaking on the alleged sins of science, .Dr. Millikan took up one by one the outstanding accusations against scientific research, and to each of them, on behalf of science, pleaded not guilty - . He denied that science Is materialistic. , To the charge that science has multiplied the tools or destruction, that she has made war more deadly, more horrible and less heroic than it used to be, Dr. Millikan replied that every scientific advance “finds ten times as many new, peaceful- and constructive uses as it finds destructive ones." “Explosives and fertilisers are basically the same, and even explosives find a dozen peaceful uses to one warlike one, he said.” Public thinking is misled by the fact that a horror makes better news than a wheat crop. One man Blown Painlessly to Atoms gets more news space than a thousand men dying by inches from disease. “Steel does indeed make bayonets, but it also makes plowshares and railroads and automobiles and sewing machines and threshers and a thousand other things whose uses constitute the strongest existing diverter of human energies from the destructive to the peaceful arts. “In my judgment, war is now in process of being abolished, chiefly by this relentless advance of science, its most powerful enemy. It has existed in spite of religion, and in spite of philosophy, and in spite of social ethics, and in spite of the Golden Rule, since the days of the cave man because in accordance with the evolutionary philosophy of modern science and simply because it has had survival value. It will Disappear Like the Dinosaur when, and only when, the conditions which have given it survival value have disappeared, and those conditions are disappearing now, primarily because of changes in the world situation being brought about by the growth of modern science. "To the charge against science that ‘she has deadened and routinised labour and taken away the joy of craftsmanship,’ Dr. Millikan replied: “A superficial glance at Mr Ford’s factory might seem to justify it, but to the man who can see beyond his nose it is a different picture that unfolds itself. “As I read history, the machine age has actually freed, educated and inspired mankind, not enslaved it. Routine labour plays a part in all our lives, and an attractive part, too, if it is not overdone and if there is leisure for something else. l4 Even the few routine men who feed the machines In Mr Ford’s factory are less routinised and have shorter hours by far than the Dumb Agricultural Drudge who hoed potatoes for twelve hours a day, through all the history of the world before the machine age appeared. “Looked at in the large, I do not think there can be the slightest question that the only hope this world has of maintaining in the future a suitable balance between population and food supply is found in science. “That, in the last analysis, is mankind's greatest problem. Its solution alone, and there are the best reasons

FROM WAR AND STARVATION.

for believing that in the long run it can be solved, Is sufficient to warrant the fullest stimulation of both the biological and the physical sciences that can in any way be brought about.” The charge that science is “giving children matches to play with” by preparing to tap enormous stores of subatomic energy which weak, ignorant, confused, sometimes vicious man has not the moral qualities to control and direct to useful ends, a charge, as he admitted made by scientists themselves, was declared by Dr. Millikan to he without foundation. “Science regards it as her chief function to deter men from over-hasty conclusion, though she does not always succeed even with her devotees; her influence, nevertheless, is always to constrain men to replace panicky, emotional acting by reflective, informed, rational acting. The Great World Explosions, including the World War, have been mental, not physical. She would ask you then to withhold your judgment until all the available evidence is in. “Now the new evidence born of new scientific students is to the effect that it is highly improbable that there is any appreciable amount of available sub-atomic energy for man to tap anyway; in other words, that henceforth men who are living in fear lest some bad boy among the scientists may some day touch off the fuse and blow this comfortable earth of ours to star-dust, may go home and henceforth sleep in peace with the consciousness that the Creator has put some fool-proof elements into His handiwork, and that man is powerless to do it any titanio physical damage anyway. Dr. Millikan admitted that there is, however, one regrettable tendency in modern life for which science is probably, to some extent at least, responsible. “I refer to the craze for the new regardless of the true, to the demand for change for the sake of change, regardless of consequences, to the present-day widespread worship of the bizarre, to the cheap extravagance and sensationalism that surround us on every side, as evidenced by our newspapers, our magazines, our novels, our drama, our art in many of its forms, our advertising and even our education.” Regarding these as “transient accompaniments of the stupendous rate of change that modern science and its applications have forced on modern life,” and believing that what he termed the present spirit of revolt “is in part An Inevitable Reflex of the rapid changes taking place In our times because of the rapid growth of science,” Dr. Millikan said he was not greatly disturbed by this. “The actual method by which science makes its changes is becoming better understood, he said. "The demand for the saner popular books upon it is continually increasing. The remedy is, in part at least, in understanding it better. “‘•As soon as (he public learns, as it is slowly learning, that science, universally recognised as the basis of our •civilisation, knows no such thing as change for the sake of change; as soon as the public learns that the method of science is not to discard the past, but always to build upon it; as soon as it discovers that in science Truth Once Discovered Always Remains Truth; in a word, that evolution, growth, not revolution, is its method, it will, I hope, begin to banish its craze for the sensational, for the new regardless of the true, and thereby atone for one of the sins into which the very rapid growth of science may have tempted it.”