Chapter XIX 

 THE RELATION OF SCIENCE TO INDUSTRY 



R. A. MiLLlKAN 



A WELL-KNOWN public speaker of fifty years ago 

 once remarked ruefully after disastrous consequences 

 had followed misplaced humor, "I rose by my gravity 

 and fell by my levity." 



I use this incident as an introduction to my chapter 

 for the sake of calhng attention to the fact that what is 

 absurd or ridiculous today was perfectly good science, or 

 at least good philosophy, not more than 350 years ago, 

 that the very existence of the "law of gravity" was discov- 

 ered as late as 1650 a.d. and that "levity" and "levitation" 

 have through all recorded history up to Newton been just as 

 acceptable scientific ideas as gravity and gravitation, so 

 recently have we begun to understand just a httle about the 

 nature of the world in which we live. 



Nor do I need to go back 300 years to make my point as to 

 the newness of our knowledge. It is within the memory of 

 every man of the age of sixty that in the great Empire State 

 of New York the question could be seriously debated, and 

 in the most intelligent of her communities too, as to whether 

 Archbishop Usher's chronology, computed by adding Adams 

 930 years to Enoch's 365 years to Methuselah's 969 years, 

 etc. gave the correct date of creation. Recent election 

 returns from Arkansas indicate that the same debate is at 

 this very moment going on there. 



But what has this to do with "Science and Industry?" 

 Everything! For mankind's fundamental behefs about the 

 nature of the world and his place in it are in the last analysis 

 the great moving forces behind ail his activities. Hence 

 the enormous practical importance of correct understandings. 

 It is his behefs about the nature of his world that determine 

 whether man in Africa spends his time in beating tomtoms to 

 drive away evil spirits, or in Phoenicia in building a great 

 "burning fiery furnace" to Moloch into which to throw his 



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