Man in Transit

by PHILIPPE LE CORBEILLER

1

SCIENTISTS, on one point at least, are remarkably modest. They all seem impressed with the boundless scope of their science and conscious of how small a part of it they know. Ask a physicist if he knows physics, and he will tell you that this science is immense and that he is a specialist of just one chapter of it — X-rays perhaps, or thermodynamics, or quantum theory.

“I see,” you may say. “It is all the specialists in the world, taken together, who know the whole of physics.”

“Far from it,” your physicist will reply. “There are today a number of questions in physics to which nobody knows the answer.”

If you insist, and say you hope that research physicists at least will soon find out all about physics, it is pretty certain that you will be told: “No, there will never be an end to research. The more we know, the more we realize how much more there is to know. Our knowledge is like an island surrounded by the dark ocean of the unknown. Scientific research progressively expands the island, but the larger it grows, the more points of contact it has with t he unknown along its shoreline, and the more questions we are led to ask, to which we don’t know the answers.”

Such is the opinion of experts in every domain of science, from physics to sociology. And this idea that the field of research is infinite is pleasing to scientists and non-scientists alike. The scientist is proud of the conquests of science in the past and present, and sees in the future ever expanding success. The religious man, on the other hand, likes to remind us that what the scientist has found out about nature is nothing compared to the immensity of what he does not know, even in his own field; whereas religion reveals to us the truth about God and man, a much larger domain than the restricted one of natural philosophy.

There is, however, a dark side to this pleasant unanimity. The evils of the modern world are obvious to all, and many people believe that they are a consequence of the rapid advance of science. In the wake of, or at times parallel to, science’s progress, industrial techniques advance at a constantly increasing rate, and it is clearly impossible for the whole of mankind to keep readjusting their lives and their points of view to a constantly changing environment.

If, then, the progress of science is the cause of the world’s present unbalance, and if, on the other hand, we believe that science will continue to advance without end in its boundless field of endeavor, does it not necessarily follow that our difficulties will also continue to increase without limit, and that mankind is running headlong towards the chasm of ultimate disaster?

This conclusion has occurred to a number of people, and the only solution that has been offered (besides the ostrich-like attitude that things will surely settle down somehow) is that of temporarily putting a stop to scientific research. This has been until now, and is bound to remain, a pious wish, since it is well established that scientific research pays certain and considerable dividends, both intellectual and financial; so that only a few people who are interested in neither will ever agree to kill the goose which lays the golden eggs.

I propose to submit here a completely different solution. It is based on the denial of the universal belief in the boundlessness of science. Contrary to general opinion, I submit here that the field of science is not infinite: but that it is finite. Consequently, after a while, man will have learned about nature all there is to know. Thereafter, society will no longer have to adjust to ever shifting scientific views and advancing techniques.

This view of science not only seems plausible; it implies an outlook on the future which dovetails with what archaeologists tell us of humanity’s past. It gives a constructive interpretation of our age, of its difficulties and its hopes, whereas the present appears as a riddle in the work of even its best commentators.

2

IT HAS been known for a few decades that there exist only a finite number of chemical elements, ranging from the simplest one (hydrogen) to structures so complicated that they become unstable (that is, radioactive). Their list constitutes the periodic table of elements inaugurated by Mendeleeff, completed by its modern companion, the table of isotopes.

In the periodic table, ninety-four chemical elements are ranged in rows and columns in applepie order, their atomic numbers increasing by unity at each step: Hydrogen 1, Helium 2, Lithium 3, and so forth, up to Uranium 92, Neptunium 93, Plutonium 94. In the table of isotopes, more than two hundred varieties of the same elements are arranged in a line, their mass numbers increasing by unity at each step (with a few empty places): Hydrogen (two varieties) 1 and 2, Helium 4, and so forth, up to the fissionable Plutonium 239, of atomic bomb fame.

The possibility remains of the existence of very unstable elements at the far end of each table. But all the evidence so far is against the possibility of fractional atomic or mass numbers: it appears that they have to be integers. The confidence of chemists in the adequateness of these tables is such that they have not hesitated to announce, as Mendeleeff did as far back as 1871, that the places unoccupied at a given date would eventually be filled up by some as yet undiscovered elements, the properties of which could even in some degree be predicted. The prediction has actually been fulfilled, the last missing elements in the periodic table having been found in the course of atomic research during the war. These successful predictions parallel the announcement and discovery of the planet Neptune, which finally vindicated Newton’s law of gravitation.

Chemists feel very certain, therefore, that they know all the possible types of chemical elements except the very unstable ones, and that every chemical atom consists of a central nucleus around which a specific number of electrons circulate. The composition and internal laws of the nucleus are the next unknown. The branch of science which investigates this problem is called nuclear physics, so tight is the present merger of physics and chemistry.

Now, whatever the outcome of the nuclear physicists’ research, we may in any ease say this: Either the particles in the nucleus will be found to contain smaller particles, these in turn smaller particles, and so on ad infinitum, — a view to which few present-day physicists would subscribe, — or else there must exist some final constituents of matter, which will be discovered some day.

In my opinion this day is not very far off. There are two reasons for thinking that the final constituents of matter belong to the level of the newly found elementary particles and not further down the scale. One is that these particles are defined by a very small number of properties (their mass, electric charge, and one or two others), so that they are very near ultimate simplicity.

The other is that we are beginning to suspect that concepts of space and distance, which we use in ordinary physics for describing objects on our scale, and which still work for objects the size of molecules, probably lose their meaning for dimensions much below one trillionth of an inch, such as would be needed to describe the inside of a nucleus. Therefore the ancient argument against atoms, that space is indefinitely divisible, would be invalid at the level of these particles, which is precisely what must happen if final particles actually exist.

For these two reasons I think that rock-bottom simplicity, which has been found to be represented in chemistry by the hydrogen atom, is not far from being discovered in physics also.

Let us now turn to the large end of the scale. Is there a limit to the combinations that can be built from the simpler elements? It is already known that electron cannot be piled upon electron without limit, to form new atoms: at a certain stage instability sets in. Can atom be piled upon atom to form larger and larger molecules? This is one of the most exciting questions on which physicists and chemists are working at present. New synthesized types of sugar, rubber, silk, have already resulted from this research which promises to provide mankind, within the next decades, with numerous variations of every one of the materials it has borrowed for millenaries from plants and animals. The eventual synthesis of protein will be of particular significance for biology.

But, little as we know today of larger molecules, it is extremely likely that a limit to the largest stable combinations will be found here also, as it was found in the case of the larger atoms. And when the significance of the spatial connections of atoms and molecules, already clear in the simpler cases, will be understood in the case of the larger edifices, a complete knowledge of the physical and chemical properties of all possible substances, from hydrogen to the most unstable organic molecules, will have been finally obtained.

Considerable simplification and unification have taken place more than once in the realm of physics. The Newtonian theory of gravitation, the wave theory of light and electricity, are examples of this. Professor Einstein has been working during the last thirty years on the unification of electric and gravitational fields, and Professor Erwin Schrödinger announced last January that he believed he had solved the problem. The unification of atomic physics and chemistry resulting from the discovery of electrons is still another example of how neighboring sciences, when sufficiently developed, merge to their common benefit.

I think that it is not at all sanguine to expect the whole field of inanimate matter — that is, the whole of physics and chemistry — to be essentially mapped out in the near future — let us say about the year 2000, to give an idea of what I mean. Some will remind me that physicists at the end of the nineteenth century believed that they knew the whole of physics, and had their faith rudely shaken by the discoveries of the years 1890-1910. But what I am saying here is something quite different. Present-day physicists are certain that there must be some very essential things which they still do not know — for instance, in the very small, in the very large, in the very cold. My own position is that the field to be explored is finite, and moreover, that the end of the exploration is relatively near.

One may object that it would always be possible at any time for an entirely unsuspected physical phenomenon to enter the picture suddenly, as the electron did in the nineties. But it is only so long as the field of physics is not correctly integrated that this possibility will remain open. At the time of Columbus, one might have expected the discovery of any number of continents. Since the end of the eighteenth century, although some corners of the earth are still imperfectly known, the knowledge we have of our globe completely precludes the discovery of a new continent. Similarly, no large discovery can now possibly be made in the field of human anatomy proper, once as exciting as the exploration of the Pacific.

It is a similarly rounded-out picture that physics and chemistry will present in a hundred years or so. Then they will offer a firm basis for the biological sciences.

3

A BIOLOGICAL phenomenon — for example, digestion — has a number of physical and chemical aspects. But it takes place inside an organism; and while any one of the specific chemical reactions involved could be duplicated in a heated test tube in the laboratory, actual digestion cannot be separated from the functioning of the circulatory and nervous systems of the animal. Thus, while one cannot expect biology to understand living organisms until the physics and chemistry of their tissues are known, there is more to biology than just physics and chemistry; and exploring the biological field will be the task of humanity after it understands physics and chemistry.

Similarly, psychological phenomena contain a great deal that is biological, plus a great deal more that is not. And sociology, the science of the behavior of man in groups and in societies, is the most comprehensive of all sciences, the only one which does not arbitrarily ignore some aspects of its own subject. Consequently, it will be the last science to develop, after biology and then psychology have reached the stage which I believe to be relatively near at hand in the case of physics and chemistry.

To envisage the completion of the science of sociology in a finite amount of time seems an incredibly large order. But then the progress of science since 1600 is no less incredible. Looking back at each one of the specific sciences, one wonders how so much progress as actually occurred during any period of fifty years could ever have been achieved. To give just one example, Galileo in 1638 published the first correct analysis of the fall of free bodies — the simplest problem of physics, and one incorrectly solved at the same time by as great a mind as Descartes’s — and in 1687 Newton published in his Principia the law of gravitation and derived from it the motion of the planets. The same explosive progress has taken place in other scientific fields.

Considering that physics and chemistry have advanced so far in 350 years, and that biology on several points is already reaching the status of a deductive science, it does not seem unreasonable to expect that in 500 to 1000 years from now biology, then psychology, and last sociology, will have reached the quantitative scientific stage and mapped out their respective fields.

This may be a period of continual unrest, like the present, or even worse. Worse because we may expect biological advances to be much more upsetting than physical or chemical discoveries. Think what a jolt Darwin’s theory has given to the traditional concept of the status of man. See what ardent antagonisms are raised by modern methods of birth control, now several decades old. Artificial insemination is just beginning to be applied to cattle; but for humans, after startling beginnings, notably in California, it is now prohibited by the laws of several states. Of course it is only for a limited time that the adoption of a new technical possibility can be delayed. Other imminent biological advances, already realized in the laboratories, will be more and more upsetting.

One may hope, it is true, that the progress of psychoanalysis will help mankind as a whole to face scientific discoveries in the field of life, otherwise loaded with huge emotional significance. Here again the advance in fifty years has been astounding. Anyone now writing for a popular magazine may take for granted the fundamental discoveries and the vocabulary of psychoanalysis, although he should preferably not mention Freud by name. In medical circles, the once outlawed discipline has gained official recognition, and has even been given entry into the field of general medicine — witness the amount of attention now given to psychosomatic cases, as well as some recently opened courses on Psychotherapy in General Practice.

It is probably impossible to imagine how much more rational people will have become after another fifty years of technical advance in that field and of infiltration into the minds of physicians, judges, ministers, educators, and just plain parents. Quite possibly the social difficulties which in perspective perturb some of our leading biologists will not be so serious after all. The younger ones among us will have the opportunity to check this optimistic suggestion.

However that may be, once sociology, last of the sciences, becomes truly scientific, a long period of stability will follow.

The reason for this is that once knowledge becomes scientific, discussion dies out. Workers do not discuss in a factory what is the best procedure for making sulfuric acid or for winding a dynamo. When sociology has become scientific, it will prescribe the correct procedures with the same authority which physics and chemistry wield at present.

There are now several theories of the ideal society, in conflict with one another, which in all probability are just as far from the future scientific approach as the theories of the Ionian philosophers are from present-day physics. We should reject the tempting idea that scientific sociology will be the vindication of our particular pet system. One thing only is sure about the society of the future; it will be something of which we do not have the faintest idea. It is enough to note that in the present stage of biology, it is possible by glandular treatment to turn a rooster into a hen, and the hen back again into a rooster. It is quite likely that in the near future, appropriate pills will change a lazy man into a demon for work, or a prize fighter into an artist. How can we then form any picture of the sociological conditions as they will be after several centuries of further biological progress? In the meantime, those most sensitive to social injustice will of course continue striving to improve the economic and political conditions of their day; but their work will remain, for quite a long time, more in the nature of a hit-and-miss procedure than of scientific research.

4

I THUS conclude that at the end of a period of unrest, a stable society will be ushered in. This does seem a fantastic notion, and yet it has already happened twice, according to what the archaeologists tell us of the past of mankind.

Man in the Stone Age had learned how to make stone knives and axes by chipping off a flint rock until it had the desired shape. More remarkable still, he knew how to make fire, as the earliest known human relics show. In spite of such extraordinarily clever beginnings, no technical skill was added to stone-carving and fire-making during one (perhaps even several) hundred thousand years. The further progress of mankind has occurred in three sudden outbursts, separated by long periods of stagnation; and the third outburst of progress is the one in which we are living today.

First, some time about 12,000 B.C., the essentials of an agricultural life were invented: edible cereals were planted, rush and straw woven into baskets and mats, clay was made into pottery, dogs and perhaps other animals domesticated. Then man’s inventive power again died out. Notice, however, what tremendous steps ahead had been made. We can imagine ourselves living, however roughly, under these simple conditions; to live the life of the caveman in the Stone Age is almost unthinkable.

The second outburst of human progress is much more surprising than the first, because of the enormous extent of its conquests. Between 6000 and 3000 B.C. — in a shorter time, even, in a given country — so many intricate techniques were invented as to make possible a complicated semi-agricultural, semi-urban civilization. Here are just a few of them: use of animals in plowing and driving; metallurgy of copper and bronze; the chariot wheel and the potter’s wheel; the construction of sailboats; a lunisolar calendar; specialization of workers; trade and money.

So rich were the other, lesser discoveries, that life under an Assyrian king or a Pharaoh was already essentially the same as in Europe on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. People ate the meat of fatted animals, with all the refinements of cooking; they wore garments made of woven cotton, wool, linen, or silk; they followed a specialized trade — farmer, smith, soldier, priest - buying the products of the other trades; ships sailed for distant countries, bringing back spices and jewels; the king had an army and a complicated bureaucracy served by a postal system. The practical inventions made from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century of our era, important as they are, are nothing in comparison with the treasure of techniques already at the disposal of men in the civilized countries about 3000 B.C., all of which had been discovered in a space of two or three thousand years.

Following this incredible outburst of invention, man’s creative spirit again reverted to idleness. The rise and fall of empires, about which classical history tells us so much, raised and lowered the standards of living in one country or another, but the collective treasure of humanity remained about the same for four to five thousand years.

Suddenly, in 1600, something extraordinary happened in Europe. Galileo discovered that the physics handed down from Aristotle was both untrue and ineffective, substituted for it the correct elementary principles, and gave physical science its real start. The growth of science was so rapid as to resemble an explosion; mankind suddenly awakened from a pleasant lounging of four or five thousand years and in eighty years reaped such fruits from scientific research that the attraction of further conquests was from then on irresistible.

It is hard to understand why the era of scientific research started in 1600, rather than two thousand years earlier with the Greeks. Those extraordinary Greeks, as gifted actually for mathematics as for philosophy and art, had, in a small explosion of their own, developed geometry from humble beginnings to quite an advanced stage in about 300 years. They then began to take an interest in physics, and Aristotle wrote several books on mechanical and astronomical questions. All credit to him for having first raised certain problems and given them a solution, however wrong. But how did it happen that during the following two thousand years, within three civilizations acclaimed by different groups as particularly brilliant — the Alexandrian, the Islamic, the Christian — no one had the intelligence to do the critical and constructive thinking which Galileo did? This phenomenon of mankind’s creative power being turned on and off for no apparent cause is one of the strangest in history, and one cannot help thinking in this connection of the random appearance of biological mutations.

Another comparison which may perhaps be relevant is with the way an individual acquires a skill demanding much coördination, like tennis, golf, or ballet dancing, learns to play the piano or to sing, or attains proficiency in certain intellectual subjects, such as mathematics or philosophy. It is well known that the conscientious student in these fields, whatever his standing, has to work for long periods of time at tedious and picayune exercises without apparent progress in over-all performance. Then quite suddenly a number of unconnected details form themselves into a pattern; they henceforth will appear as a group, when needed, without an individual roll call. In a short while the student seems to master several such groups, and at the next tournament, recital, or term examination he will qualify in a superior class. Psychologists are familiar with these long barren stretches, which they call plateaus, connected by short periods of sudden progress. It is rather remarkable that, whether for superficial reasons or for deeper causes, mankind should follow in its advance the same process of jumps and rests as does the individual.

Be this as it may, a conclusion is plain. We are now in the middle of just another great period of invention. It one believes that the field of science is finite, as I have tried to show, then he can foresee that this present period of invention will some time come to an end.

The Scientific Age, which will come in 500 or 1000 years, will be another long stable period, which does not mean a final Utopian stage. Probably, after several thousand years, another revolution will shake it up, springing from a reason as unintelligible to us as scientific research would have been to the Neanderthal man.

5

WE ARE thus living in an age of transition. This has been said many times, but not, I think, in the sense which I have just presented.

Matthew Arnold is often quoted as saying that we are wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born. Nothing could be truer than the first part of this sentence, or so untrue as the second part. We are indeed standing between two worlds, but these worlds are both alive, they live side by side in every country and in every one of us, and their conflict is precisely what makes life, national and personal, so difficult.

On the material side, the progress of science and industry has given rise to the miraculous inventions which we all know — the automobile, the airplane, the radio, and so forth. There is almost no place which has not been transformed by these inventions to some extent; but in the whole world, as well as inside any one particular country, not all regions have been affected by these technical changes in the same way. It is one of the major difficulties of international as well as of national politics, to balance the interests of nations or regions which are at a given moment at different stages of development.

There is the same contrast between the psychological attitude of people with regard to the future and the past. To some the attractiveness of the new is exhilarating. For certain commuters, the view of Manhattan from the Hoboken ferry is an ever renewed thrill. They will never tire of holding in their field of vision a density of technical achievements such as mankind never attained elsewhere or before. To others the comfort of the familiar, the old, and even the obsolete is equally satisfying. Those are the collectors of buggies or snuffboxes, the would-be revivers of vanished crafts. Americans go to France to enjoy the mellowness of the Old World; conservative Frenchmen go to Morocco to live for a month in the feudal age. (We don’t know where conservative Moroccans go for their holidays.)

The difference in point of view is radical and unbridgeable, even in a progressive country. Many people still think in Aristotelian ways. Copernicus and Darwin have not lived for them. Others are the contemporaries of Einstein and Freud. In the Atom City of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where uranium products are manufactured on an industrial scale, the laws of the state forbid the schools to teach biological evolution. The town of Oak Ridge is the symbol and epitome of our times.

It is idle to deplore this state of things. It is the necessary consequence of living in an age of transition, with Matthew Arnold’s two worlds existing belligerently side by side. Dictatorships have chosen a ruthless way of suppressing these difficulties, by suppressing the lives of many and the liberties of those remaining. A democratic state, on the contrary, is one in which citizens are determined to live at peace with other citizens whose beliefs are an absurdity or an abomination to them. The view which has been presented here, that mankind is engaged in a sort of mutation between two eras of totally different character, makes it possible for us to understand the difficulties of those emotionally attached to the past. It is all too true that every technical advance has for them an overwhelmingly painful consequence. To the traditional arguments for political toleration, the recognition of the transitional character of our age is bringing reinforcement of a decidedly novel type.

To those who realize the irresistible force with which advancing science is changing the world around them, it is an exciting challenge to try to keep up with the emerging new conditions. The scientist and the technician know all too well how difficult it is to keep abreast of recent theories and of the latest techniques; but the ordinary citizen does not as a rule realize that he is confronted with exactly the same task. To ensure that his business, his city, and his country shall ride the crest of the advancing wave requires the same continual adjustment, the same flexibility, which are a matter of course in a laboratory or in an ordnance factory.

Such flexibility is a modern characteristic. Millions of men and women are driving cars and trucks every day and effecting sudden changes of direction which the owners of the first automobiles, with their untrained reflexes, would have rightly been afraid of. Such is the responsibility but also the thrill of driving. Such are also the thrill and the responsibility of living in the present dynamic and significant period, one of those in which mankind, in an outburst of creative effort, passes from one stage to another in its biological progress.