2 SCIENTIST 



is. In the first place we have very much more scientific 

 knowledge than any people has ever had before. It has been 

 more or less reliably estimated that scientific knowledge has 

 been doubling every ten years since about the middle of 

 the eighteenth century. Unless one is used to dealing with 

 geometric progression of this sort, it is hard to visualize 

 exactly what this means. To illustrate how very nearly over- 

 whelming it is, we may say that children growing up today 

 have access to eight times as much knowledge as their 

 fathers, 64 times as much as their grandfathers, and over 

 1,000 times as much as their great-grandfathers had. 



The increase in the number of scientists and, as a corol- 

 lary, the increase in the number of career opportunities have 

 been even more abrupt and astonishing. Here the staggering 

 statistic is that 90 percent of the scientists who have ever 

 lived are alive today. 



Furthermore, science is involved in almost every aspect 

 of our hves. It is obvious to everyone that the telephone, 

 radio, television, the automobile, the airplane, and the 

 rocket are the direct results of modern science. It may take 

 a moment longer to reahze that the food we eat and the 

 clothes we wear could not possibly be provided in the neces- 

 sary amounts, nor could our people five closely together 

 in cities, without the constant application of science. The 

 contribution of science to health and survival is perhaps 

 no better seen than in the following figures. In nonscientific 

 societies a quarter to a half of all babies born are dead 

 before one year has gone by. In a highly scientific society 

 the figure is only 1 % percent. 



Finally, modern science has greatly altered the way that 

 man thinks about himself and the nature of his hopes and 

 fears. Before the scientific era, man Uved in constant fear 

 of hunger, pain, and death. His food supply depended on 

 the capricious acts of nature which were attributed to hos- 



