X INTRODUCTION 



fields of activity and by providing to the scientists new devices which are 

 of incalculable value in the progress of scieiice. 



The electron tube technique developed during the first world war and 

 extended during the second, and now the methods and materials discovered 

 in connection with increased knowledge of nuclear energy, have speeded 

 up by many-fold the progress in several fields of pure science. Through 

 contact with war problems, scientists have been led to combining sciences 

 which would not normally have been brought together. 



For example, the active work in meteorology in which Dr. Vincent J. 

 Schaefer and I are now engaged leads us to the modification of clouds and 

 the control of weather by the production of rain and snow using seeding 

 techniques. This work started from war problems on the production of 

 screening smokes and on the prevention of icing of aircraft when fiying 

 through certain types of clouds. 



Chapter Seven deals largely with the incentives that may lead to 

 progress in the field of industrial research. Several of the other chapters in 

 this book also deal with the problem of incentives motivating scientific 

 work. 



Chapter One deals largely with the philosophy of science, but it leads to 

 a philosophy which should be of great importance for all human affairs. 

 It is pointed out in Chapter One that the whole form and content of 

 classical physics was largely determined by the incentives which led the 

 physicist in his work : "He chose as the subjects of his studies those fields 

 which promised great success" involving the discovery of "natural laws." 

 The common belief that science has shown that all things have their causes 

 is, I believe, a mistaken belief, and it rests largely upon the fact that the 

 scientists had an incentive to discover natural laws. They, therefore, went 

 out and did so. After the turn of the century, it became more fashionable 

 or there was a greater incentive in studying the behavior of single particles 

 and electrons. Then they gradually found that other laws governed these 

 phenomena — the quantum laws and the uncertainty principle. 



We, therefore, have to deal with "convergent phenomena" and "di- 

 vergent phenomena." In human affairs, we have to deal largely with di- 

 vergent phenomena which are not determined by definite relations of cause 

 and effect. 



Much of my work in connection with meteorological phenomena has 

 largely been stimulated by this belief that the essential detailed phenomena 

 of meteorology are not subject to definite relations of cause and effect. 

 They are determined rather by probabilities, and the neglect of such factors 

 has led to entirely false opinion as to the possibility of weather forecasting 

 for the future. 



Chapters Two and Three also deal largely with incentives. In both of 



