Preface xiii 



I hope that more young people may find some interest 

 in the ideas sketched in chapters 12 and 13 about art and 

 morals. I really do not have any special competence in these 

 matters, but I am anxious that young people engaged in the 

 reappraisal of value questions that has always characterized 

 their time of life should not fall into the facile fallacy that 

 science has nothing to do with the finer things or with eternal 

 verities. 



Finally, some of my colleagues have objected to Chap- 

 ter 11, "Day of a Scientist," on the ground that it deals with 

 a number of personal problems pecuHar to adult hfe which 

 are sure to seem unreal to people in their late teens or early 

 twenties. There are two sorts of answers to this. The first, 

 and most practical, is that the youngest of my colleagues, 

 who typed the manuscript, liked it and thought it helped her 

 to understand that scientists (and adults) are really people. 

 The second, and more theoretical, answer is that since one 

 is an adult for a much longer time than one is a teenager, it 

 is wise to get as much data as one can before deciding what 

 kind of adult one wants to be. 



A number of people have helped me in writing this book, 

 especially my brother Elting Morison, who looks at science 

 with the eyes of an historian and litterateur, my wife, who 

 thinks of scientists as people, and my friend Charles Frankel, 

 who very kindly went over the philosophical parts to keep 

 me from making too many naive mistakes. (I did not take 

 all his advice, so there are still some things that are probably 

 wrong or imperfectly interpreted; he must not be blamed 

 for them.) 



Several patient and extremely skillful people helped to 

 translate the manuscript into typescript from what my old 

 algebra teacher used to call the "turkey tracks" in which it 

 was originally set down. Miss Doris Neuer, Miss Barbara 

 Post, and Mrs. Thomas Flagg deserve especially honorable 



