Человек науки

Of Men of Science_


The story of man is the story--endlessly repeated--of a struggle:
between light and darkness, between knowledge and ignorance, between
good and evil, between men who would build and men who would destroy. It
is no more complicated than this.

That light, knowledge, good, and constructive men have had a small edge
in this struggle is attested to by our slow rise over the long millennia
of time. In taking stock of our successes, however, it is easy to assume
the victory has been won. Nothing could be further from the truth. This
is a contest that is never ended, nor can it be, as long as men are upon
the Earth.

While man has free choice, the elements of darkness, ignorance, evil and
destruction are available for him to choose, and there are times when
these seem the best alternatives.

At the end of the 18th century one of the greatest minds of all time was
destroyed by one stroke of a guillotine blade. The judge who presided at
the trial of the great French chemist Lavoisier is reported to have
said, "The Republic has no need of men of science."

Choices like this have often been made by the society of man. A turnoff
to darkness has been deliberately taken, superstition has been embraced
while knowledge has been destroyed.

When times are placid we assume such choices could result only from some
great insanity; that the men who made them had themselves known more
pleasant days. The truth is that there are extremes of circumstance
which could force almost any man to abandon that which he has always
held to be right and good, and only the very giants could stand up and
prove themselves unmoved.

Such giants may seem, in ordinary life, rather obscure. Illustrating
this are the people in this story: a somewhat pompous little mayor; a
professor of chemistry in a small-town college in the mountain west; a
minister of the gospel, who would be lost with a big-city congregation;
a sheriff who doesn't care what happens to him personally as long as he
sticks to the kind of rightness that has always worked; and a
high-school boy who learns what it means to do a man's work.

Such people are important, the most important people alive today. They
are the ones whose hands hold all that our culture has achieved when
catastrophe overtakes us.

The illusion of security is a vicious one. With physical comforts around
us, the abyss that is just beyond our walls is forgotten: the abyss of
outer space, beyond the paper-thin atmosphere shielding us; of the fires
in the earth beneath; of the hurricane winds beyond the horizon; of the
evil and insanity in the minds of many men.

The caveman dared not forget these abysses, nor the frontiersman, nor
the scientist who fought the witch hunters to bring forth a new truth of
Nature. But when we believe we are secure we do forget them.

In catastrophe, the most recent achievements of the race are the first
to go. When war comes, or mobs attack, or hurricanes strike, our science
and our arts are abandoned first. Necessity of survival seems to insist
that we cannot fool with things of the mind and of the soul when
destruction threatens the body. And so, "The Republic has no need of men
of science."

Emergency can take any form. Here is a story in which the mechanical
foundation of our culture is threatened. Whether the means of this
threat, as I have pictured it, could possibly occur, I do not know. I
know of no reason why it could not, if circumstances were right.

But more important, this is what happens to a small, college town caught
up in such disaster. How quickly do its people dispense with their men
of science and turn to superstition and mob rule for hope of survival?

It is perhaps not so apparent to those of us who have grown up with it,
but we have witnessed in our own time, under threat of calamity, the
decline of science before a blight of crash-priority engineering
technology. Today, we hear it faintly whispered, "The Republic has no
need of men of science."

Insofar as he represents the achievements of our race over the great
reaches of time, the scientist will always be needed if we are to retain
the foothold we have gained over Nature. The witch doctors and the
fortunetellers clamor for his niche and will gladly extend their
services if we wish to change our allegiance.

The story of THE YEAR WHEN STARDUST FELL is not a story of the distant
future or of the remote past. It is not a story of a never-never land
where fantastic happenings take place daily. It is a story of my town
and yours, of people like you and me and the mayor in townhall, his
sheriff on the corner, and the professor in the university--a story that
happens no later than tomorrow.