The Art of Science..

       As our modern civilization advances from year to year, almost from day to day, we are steadily becoming more aware that science is increasingly affecting & influencing our daily lives, the structure of our thought, & our understanding of the world around us. The speed of scientific progress has now grown rapidly & its application almost immediate; but the pace was once more leisurely.

      The change from ancient to modern in science began in the 16^th, & became evident in the 17^th century, in an altogether different social context, in which the professional scientist had not yet made his appearance; & the fruits of some three hundred years of experiment & research have in our own time come amazingly to harvest. British statesman & philosopher, Lord Balfour, once remarked of scientists: “They are the people who are changing the world & they don’t know it.” To say nothing of invention & discovery & to refer only to everyday matters – we see that in the preservation of health, in the fight against disease & epidemics, in diet & in problems of malnutrition, in the production & preservation of food, in the preparation of artificial materials & fabrics & synthetic drugs & agricultural fertilizers, in economizing old & tapping new sources of power – to name only a few: in all these science is now the guide of civilized mankind & the dominant factor in the preservation of military security of nation.

       Yet science is not the mere search for new inventions, not a matter of radio & television & motorcars & weapons & gadgets, but the pursuit of a knowledge of Nature for its own sake & for a better understanding of the world in which we live & of its mechanism & of ourselves as part of it. It is to the minds that were inspired with the vision of searching into every nook & cranny of Nature that we owe much of what we now enjoy &, by is misapplication, occasionally suffer.

       If we take a backward glance, we discover three great revolutions in science, each of them momentous in the history of civilization: the revolution in mechanics in the seventeenth century, completed by Newton & marked by the publication in 1687 of his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica or Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, the revolution in Chemistry in the eighteenth century, effected by Lavoisier & by the appearance of his Traite Elementaire de Chimie or Elements of Chemistry in 1789, & the revolution in biology in the nineteenth century, achieved by Darwin & introduced in his Origin of Species in 1859. The three books in which these fundamental advances were recorded have done more than all others to mould our modern world; in their time, they gave the shape of things to come.