WAY TO PEACE

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 11, Issue 59, 28 July 1947, Page 5

WAY TO PEACE

EDUCATION IN NATURAL SCIENCES ' OPINION OF NOBEL PRIZE Declaring that education in the natural sciences is education for peace, Dr. Arthur H. Compton, Chancellor of Washington University and Noble Prize physicist, asserted technical man can “perform a unique service in establishing useful and friendly contacts between nations” according to a report from Philadelphia, Addressing fellow members of the American Philosophical Society, organised in 174 J by Benjamin Franklin “for promoting useful knowledge,” Dr. Compton discussed “The place of Science in the Programme of Unesco.” He served as an American delegate to the Paris meeting.

“In bringing peace into being, natural science can play a distinctive part, he said, chiefly because the natural scientist is essentially a citizen of the world, concerned with matters which affect, not nations, but the entire human race. He uses ideas that have originated and have been developed in all parts of the world. His discoveries are not of distinctive interest to his own nation, or race or creed. “Peace,” he said, quoting the definition accepted an written into the organisation’s programme, “means something more than a mere absence of overt hostilities. It means a condition of solidarity, harmony of purpose, and co-ordination of activities in which free men and women can live secure and satisfactory lives, —a condition in which war is affirmatively prevented by the dynamic and purposeful creation of a decent and human relationship between the peoples of the world.

‘Men of research have become citizens of the world already,” he said, “because they are the first fruits of the social trend that is making all groups of people ' dependent upon other groups who live far away. They are those who understand best the thinking of their ‘opposite numbers’ in other nations. They are thus in a good position to interpret reliably to their compatriots the thinking and attitudes of those in other nations.”