J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER 



produced a world in which the explosion of the new knowledge 

 is reflected in material and practical terms by a rate of change 

 unprecedented in the world's history. I have no doubt that 

 other papers in this symposium will illustrate with vividness 

 and skill manv of the instances in which some finding, some 

 discovery that was made by a curious scholar enquiring of na- 

 ture to find the truth has been the basis of changes in the hu- 

 es 



man situation, in our habits, in our social order, in our converse 

 with one another, comparable to or greater than any brought 

 about by conquests and revolutions. 



In a sense, the connection between new knowledge and 

 new power is as old as history, as old as myth. It was understood 

 by Archimedes, as well as by his Tyrant. But in today's world 

 the inventor and the scientist, though sometimes the same man, 

 are more often distinct; yet they are far more dependent one 

 on the other than in the past. The steam engine and the cotton 

 gin rested on no newly acquired knowledge; they might have 

 been invented earlier, and were perhaps more responsive to a 

 new need and a new opportunity than to a new or better under- 

 standing of nature. The zipper may well be the twentieth cen- 

 tury's contribution to such invention. But increasingly the 

 practical developments of our time rest on things which were 

 not known to our fathers, and often on things which were not 

 known to us when we went to school. 



Manifestly not every finding leads straight to invention; 

 but it is hard to think of major discoveries about nature, major 

 advances in science, which have not had large and ramified 

 practical consequences. I should think that as of today, Ein- 

 stein's general theory of relativity had had few if any practical 

 consequences. This rests on the inaccessibility of very strong 

 gravitational fields, and our poor powers to create them at will. 

 It is therefore related with the widely held view that general 

 relativity, though very likely to be true, is not very firmly estab- 



6 



