Evening Star Newspaper, April 23, 1933, Page 67

- Fiction= Features' PART 7. ti , Magasine WASHINGTON, D. C, APRIL 23, 1933. Art Notes Book k S 16 PAGES. New Challenge to Science Will It Be Pomble to Lead Us Out of the Chaos of the Present Into a Planned and Managed World?- Can There Be a Science of Society? Dr. John C. Merriam, Head of the Carnegie Institution, Says Science Can Do Al This, and That It Alone Can Achieve That Goal. PERIOD of eco- nomic stress is a time of chal- lengee. When values that we accounted wealth on our ledger sheets suddenly evaporate, and luxuries and extravagances sink into their relative scales of unimportance, then _everything must pass “muster before the ap- praising eye of utility. .Questions become ruth- lessly realistic. Is the thing necessary? Does it perform an indispensable service? Is its contribu- tion . beneficial to man- kind? In the present war against drift and chaos, will it help to wage the war? Lately I have been put- ting such questions to the profession and practice of scientific research. It is a threadbare charge, of course—the idea that - science is’ responsible for the depression through its improvement of proc- esses, its increase of’ productivity, its wide- spread substitution of machines for men. __There have even been suggestions that science has gone far enough; that now it should halt in its exploration of physi- cal nature and allow hu- man nature to catch up. Some repeat the old fear which Willlam Blake sounded in his protest against Isaac Newton’s law. An American tech- nical journal resurrects ‘George QGissing’s state- ment: . “I hate and fear ‘sclence’ because of my conviction that for ‘a Jong time to come, if not !orever,itwmbethere- maorseless enemy of man- kind . . . destroying all simplicity and gentleness of life, all the beauty of the world.” I'l‘wuadlflemtkjndottmthat ! oppressed the brilllant young Harvard senior with whom I chanced to talk one day last Winter in Cambridge. The conversation had drifted to the subject of modern science. “The world is get- ting too vast,” volunteered this.under- graduate. “I read of Dr. Hubble’s dis- covery at Mount Wilson of star systems so remote that their light takes 140,- 000,000 years -to reach the earth, and his report that these stars are racing away at 15,000 miles a second, with the impli- - cation that we, too, are whirling away_at some incredible speed in the opposite di- rection—and I am terrified. Who can, feel thgt our dust mote of an earth has any cance in this stupendous whirlpool of fire and abyss of space?” The student’s reaction is a modern echo of Pascal’s cry: “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.” Perhaps, after all, the greatest challenge to science is not a question-as to what it has done for our delicately balanced “THE MARCH OF.,PROGRESS.” -r_mmmhmmumn.wmmma .By George W, Gray. system of, production and consumption, but rather what it has done to the more delicately balanced system of the human spirit. Has not science already probed deep enough into the atom and reached far enough into space amd tortured enough souls with the eternal silence of its infinite spaces? I only paraphrase what many are thinking. What does a scientist say to this chal- lenge? One may get different answers, depending upon the personality and ex- perience of the-man interrogated. What follows in this article is based on con- versations with Dr. John C. Merriam; and while science is bound by no official - spokesman, I think it is fair to say that ‘Dr. Merriam’s point of view is represent- ative. Dr. Merriam is a paleontologist,: which is to say, a student of fossils, an ob- server of the extinct life of prehistoric ages as its evidence is preserved in the rocks. Perhaps his acquaintance with dinosaurs and saber-toothed cats and other mighty ones that.strutted their little millennia and then passed to ob- livion . give him more than ordinary qualification to appraise the spacious sweep of science in its relation to our .third decade of the twentieth century of the Christian erd. In addition to the long view of the specialist in the past, Dr. Merriam has the broad view of the administrator charged with supervision of a wide pro- gram of sclentific exploration; he is president of the $32,000,000-endowed and superbly equipped Carnegie Institution of - Washington, with its far-flung empire of - Kennedy & Co. re research on which the sun never sets. Mount Wilson Astronomical Observ. atory in California, the outposts of plant biology strung across the conti- nent, the coastal laborae tory on the Pacific, the desert laboratory in Ari- zona, the alpine labora- tory in Colora0o,” th genetics laboratory ' on Long Island, the labora- tory of embryology in Baltimore and the nutris tion laboratory in Boston, the magnetic laboratory in Washington, with its observatories in Peru and Australia, the geo- physical laboratory in Washington, the depart- ment of Meridian Astron- omy in Albany, the ma= rine biological station on the Island of Tortuga in the Gulf of Mexico, the projects of Maya arche- ology in Yucatan and Guatemala, the co-oper= ative studies in England, Germany, Asia and other foreign parts—one needs only to list these Car- negie outposts to suggest the wide and diverse complexity of modern re= search. The challenge t0 science s a challenge to such as these. - Indeed, one may make the inquiry quite specific by centering attention on a single well known estab« lishment. The Mount Wwilson Observatory is now in its thirtieth year, Its equipment represents an investment of nearly $2,000,000. Its operation involves an annual ex= penditure of close to $250,000. Its staff includes 20 or more men of em cepflonal brain power. this background the afks: Is. the Mount Wilson Observaa tory necessary? Does it perform an in« dispensable seryice? Is the labor of these brilliant minds justined by the re. sults? “Assuredly the kind of work that Mount Wilson does is necessary to cive ilizsed life,” answered Dr. Merriam, “Science’s greatest contribution to hue man welfare is the development of the mind—and that indispensable service astronomical research does perform, Since Mount Wilson Observatory was established, and partly through discovs eries made there, our concept of the uni« verse has enormously expanded—and the human mind has expanded with it.” “But it is this vastness that terrorizes and depresses,” I objected, and quoted the Harvard student and others. 3 “With the perception of the vastnesf” there has come a glimpse of a larger unity,” answered the scientist, “and that vision is reassuring to the thoughtful mind. Hubble’s work with the great 100~ _inch telescope has opened to view a longer perspective in -space, a majestic Sweep in time and the evidence of unity