THE RELATION OF SCIENCE TO INDUSTRY 463 



my opening remarks on Archbishop Usher's chronology 

 showed. But since then we have made some scientific 

 discoveries, discoveries that are not usually hsted as of 

 industrial importance at all, but which in my opinion 

 outweigh by far in practical value to the race, either the 

 invention of the airplane or of the radio, and that simply 

 because they change fundamentally our ideas about the 

 nature of the outside world, and hence change also the 

 nature of our acting in relation to it. 



We have learned within the past half dozen years through 

 studies in radioactivity that this world of ours has in all 

 probabihty been a going concern, in something hke its present 

 geological aspects as to crustal constituents, temperatures, 

 etc. for more than a bilHon years, and hence that the human 

 race can probably count on occupying it for a very long time 

 to come, say another billion years; and further, that mankind 

 has been doing business on it in something hke his present 

 shape for about 20,000 years, perhaps 50,000, but in any case 

 a time that is neghgibly small in comparison with the time 

 that is behind and also that is presumably ahead of him; 

 in other words, we have learned that mankind, speaking 

 of him as an individual human being, is now just an infant a 

 few months old at the most, an infant that up to about a 

 minute ago, for the 300 years since GaHIeo are but a minute 

 in the geological time-scale, had been lying in his crib spend- 

 ing his waking hours playing with his fingers, wigghng his 

 toes, shaking his rattle, in a word, in simply becoming 

 conscious of his own sensations and his functions, waking up, 

 as he did amazingly in Greece, to his own mental and 

 emotional insides. Just one minute ago he began for the first 

 time to peer out through the slats in his crib, to wonder and to 

 begin to try to find out what kind of an external world it is 

 that lies around him, what kind of a world it is in which he 

 has got to live for the next billion years. The answers to that 

 question, even though never completely given, are henceforth 

 his one supreme concern. In this minute of experience that 

 he has already had he has tumbled down in his crib, bumped 

 his head against the slats, and seen stars, real ones and unreal 

 ones, and he has not yet learned to distinguish with certainty 

 between those that actually exist and those that only seem to 



