VALUE OF SCIENCE

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20040, 12 September 1939, Page 2

VALUE OF SCIENCE

SOLVING WORLD TROUBLES ENLIGHTENING MANKIND STUDY OF COSMIC RAYS The value of science, and the study of the cosmic rays on which he is a world authority, were discussed by Dr. A. R. Millikan, the eminent American physicist and Nobel Prize winner, in a lecture at Victoria University College, Wellington. He expressed the opinion that such studies might do much to enlighten mankind in the method of dealing with the social and political difficulties confronting the world to-day.

“I wish to devote no small part of my lecture to attempting to answer the question which every cub reporter askis: What are cosmic rays good tor? The answer can best be made by calling on the experience of the past,” said Dr. Millikan.

“Suppose we try to see what answer history has given to a similar question: What is astronbmy good tor? Astronomy has never directly filled anybody’s stomach, or satisfied anybody’s material wants except the astronomer's, and his wife’s _ and children’s, and they got their spinach and their automobile _ only because you, society,' gave him “hem. Did the astronomer make any return to you? He idded something to your knowledge of the universe, and revealed to you-the method by which real knowledge is obtained. The Bread-and-Buttcr Value

“Has that real knowledge then, indirectly, done anything to fill your stomach or buy you an automobile. Not an automobile or power machine of any kind can be built to-day without applying directly the fundamental scientific principles discovered by Galileo and Newton some 300 years ago. Had they or others not made those discoveries, modern industrial -civilisation could not have developed. There you have the. indirect bread-and-butter value of the study of astronomy. , . , “But 1 have over-emphasised the material; that is after all a minor part of the social values that came from the study of astronomy. The change in man’s conception of the universe that came directly from the invention of the telescope and microscope in Holland about 1600 slowly revolutionised man’s thinking, his theology, his literature, and his politics. The mind of man began to become free to .study for itself, to speak out its convictions, and to act upon them. Authoritarianism lost its sacredness. Ideas of economic and political freedom began to stir. “Possibly the largest social value that can come from study Of the cosmic rays will consist in furnishing our generation, with another object lesson of how real progress, scientific or social, is to be obtained. The new scientific ideas that came into human thinking in the early seventeenth century undoubtedly had much to do with the shaking off of the shackles of religious and political authoritarianism. Law Of The Jungle

“What is happening now? Never since 1600 has the world seen such a reversion toward authoritarianism, superstition, and every unscientific and irrational brand of emotionalsm as at the present moment. And wherever emotionalism determines conduct, you have necessarily the law of the jungle. There is the correct definition of a reactionary—-the man who has turned his face back toward the method of the jungle, brute government instead of ballot government, authoritarianism instead of freedom.

“The reactionaries are those who support in varying degree violent world revolution, assassination and intimidation, suppression of freedom of speech, press, and action, indoctrination of the public in the interests of the ideas and individuals in power, dcpotism—in a word, reactibn. Not for 300 years have the forces for freedom and progress been so sorely pressed the world over. A wave of hysteria and reaction toward political depotism has swept in succession over Russia, Italy, Germany, and Other countries of Europe. “The supreme social value of science is in. the demonstration it furnishes of the difference between the right and wrong answer, in destroying the terrible superstition that any opinion based only on hunch or emotion or preconception has any right to be entertained at all, and in dissemination of the conviction that science has found a method by which truth can be discovered, error in time destroyed, the man attain in time to the ideal of Socrates, the living of a reasonable life.”