PHYSICS AND THE FUTURE

Abstract

FOR the majority of citizens science remains inaccessible. It has little or no place in their school life, their newspapers, their cinemas, their radio, or their literature. Although present–day civilization depends entirely on applied science, even the politicians and rulers, who guide our affairs, share this common unfamiliarity with science. Dramatic events like war, however, in which science is misapplied, forcibly direct attention to man's most powerful tool. If the War of 1914–18 was a chemists' war, the present affliction, with its extensive mechanization, radio propaganda and aeronautical developments is a physicists' war. Aerial bombardment alone might almost be called a nightmare of complex physical problems the solution of which would need the efforts of more than the whole of the country's physicists. In the circumstances, a scarcity of physicists is not surprising. The Board of Education is approaching the problem by offering a number of State bursaries chiefly in physics, engineering and chemistry (see p. 251).