The World We Live In [antikvár]

AN INTRODUCTION by VANNEVAR BUSH President of the Carnegie Institution of Washington Wartime Chief of the Office of Scientific Research and Development FOR as long as man has lived in the world he has been interested in knowing something about it. When he lived in a cave, his very existence depended on such knowledge; for if he mistook a saber-toothed tiger for a tapir or a woolly mammoth for a musk ox, he was likely not to get back to his cave. His world was a simple one, extending only a few miles in any direction. But he peopled it in his imagination with mystic beings that blew the winds and caused the eerie sounds he heard and waved their arms from the trees as the dreaded night approached. Today we are still interested in our world, though for different reasons. Self-protection against the forces of nature has not ceased to be of concern to us, but it has become less important as a motive for inquiry than our endless curiosity and inquisitive spirit. The race of man has become dominant on the earth primarily because of its urge to know and its phenomenal ability to learn. Some of us, to be sure, are interested chiefly in the works of man-in automobiles and gadgets, in the squalling of loudspeakers, or in the curve of a baseball. Some of us study nature romantically to escape from oppressive thoughts of what may result from our uncontrollable creations. We find a placid relief in contemplating the beauties of nature-the flight of birds and butterflies, the graceful motions of trout and deer, the trembling of an aspen leaf over a stream or the hopeful light of the east a moment before the sun rises-and such relief is indeed salutary in these troubled times. All of us ought, at least, to be interested in curbing our prodigal depletion of the power and material resources of our world and enlarging the niggard legacy we are likely otherwise to leave for future generations. Yet our interest in the world, even when it is narrow or specialized, stems mainly from a craving to know and understand, which has developed through ages of evolution as an essential part of our character. Understanding is not a simple matter in our time. Science has extended the world of our experience and shown it to be almost infinitely complex. Astronomers, with their giant telescopes on Mt. Wilson and Mt. Palomar and their recently perfected radio telescopes, have extended our view of the universe far beyond our solar system, beyond the Milky Way, out into space more than a billion light years away, disclosing events and situations so stupendously remote in both lime and space that we hesitate to concede to them full reality. It was but a few years ago that we saw through our light telescopes and confirmed through our radio telescopes the dramatic collision of two giant galaxies that occurred more than two hundred million years ago. In the light of such events we are tempted to echo Sir Thomas Brown's observation that "The created world is but a small parenthesis in eternity." While astronomers have looked farther and farther out into the limitless reaches of space, geologists and paleontologists have delved into the history of the earth and its creatures, tracing evolution through hundreds of millions of years. Chemists and physicists in their exploration of the very small have gone beyond the molecule and the atom to find that all we experience in a material way comes from the interaction of particles so tiny and elusive that billions of them go to make up the smallest particle we can actually see, even with the aid of the electron microscope. Geographers and explorers have brought us knowledge of hitherto forbidden places in the frozen areas about the poles. Oceanographers have plumbed by sonar sounding and charted the vast mountain ranges and abyssal valleys that lie hidden miles under the surface of the sea. Great stores of knowledge have been accumulated by specialists, but they remain largely in the minds and libraries of the specialists. In coping with this mighty plethora of fact what we most need for the guidance of multitudes of men and for the development of wisdom is synthesis and interpretation. We need to have brought together the knowledge that has been garnered in many fields of investigation. We need to have its complexities made intelligible and its significance for ordinary lives expounded. The conventional boundaries between sciences are neither fixed nor absolute. There has been an increasing tendency in every science to explore those areas that lie near the boundaries, and this has inevitably led to a good deal of crossing over the lines. We have physical chemists, chemical physicists, biochemists, astrophysicists- all concerned with problems involving two or more major disciplines. But most research scientists who work in a border province have to specialize in their province almost as narrowly as those who work within a single discipline. They concentrate on a particular problem, straddling the border, just as the research scientist within a more conventional field concentrates on a particular problem lying within that field. Few of them have the art or the inclination to write a broad interpretative work on a single whole discipline, let alone on two; and fewer still will essay to write a popular book, cutting across many disciplines, that will meet the need for information and understanding of a public that is curious about the world but is mainly occupied with other concerns than the study of science. Thus, those who summarize and interpret perform a great service for all of us. There are many scientists who write well and who contribute greatly to our progress by condensing the essential aspects of scientific fields for the guidance of their fellow scien lists. A few, a very few, can interpret for studious laymen. But only the true journalist of science can fully satisfy the public need. And competent science journalists are exceedingly rare. For they must not only have familiarized themselves with all the essential data supplied by every department of science; they must have mastered the most difficult art of communicating in brief space, by evocative words and illuminating pictures, the fundamental meaning of those data. It is their task to bridge the