THE PETERITE Vol. XLVII
MAY, 1955
No. 339
EDITORIAL SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE SCIENCE EXHIBITION Three and a half centuries ago Francis Bacon could boast that he took all knowledge for his province. Today, perhaps, he might be content to echo the words of a visitor to the Science Exhibition who, on being asked if he were the wiser for his tour of inspection, confessed that he had never been made to feel so conscious of his own ignorance. It is, of course, a commonplace to observe that the day of the polymath has long since gone and that the all-embracing studies of an Aristotle can never again be within the reach of a single human intelligence. The Science Exhibition itself—a triumph of organisation and meticulous effort, of which its ,sponsors have every reason to be proud—must have brought home to all of us not only the vast extension of the sum of human knowledge in Science as a whole, but the multiplicity of its sub-divisions, each in itself a field for specialist study and research. There may be some who are conscious, with a feeling of apprehension, that the time has come when Samuel Butler's prophecy in "Erewhon", that the machines would one day master the man, has been fulfilled. Certainly the alliance (holy or unholy, according to taste) of research worker, technologist, and technician has got a grip on our lives which it would be visionary to suppose can ever be relaxed. For good or ill—and with Penicillin we must accept the potential horrors of bacteriological warfare, with the Calder Hall power-station the nightmare of the hydrogen and cobalt bombs—we must live our lives in the Scientific Age; or, rather, in the age of the scientific research specialist—which is the more alarming, since no-one, certainly not the specialist himself, knows to what his researches may lead. In one's perambulations round the Science Exhibition, the models and photographs of the Interplanetary Society afforded the welcome relief of the rare lighter interlude in the remorseless inevitability of a Greek tragedy. Here, one felt, was something which, despite the optimism of the ten thousand Americans who are said already to have booked their passages to the moon, must remain a pipe-dream for a generation or two. The pipe-dream would certainly one day be translated into 1
