142 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1940 



design and construction, and many other fields. This trend was dis- 

 cussed at some length at the Conference on Industrial Physics ar- 

 ranged by the physics department of the University of Pittsburgh on 

 November 15, 1935 (2). I had the honor of appearing on that 

 program (3) and I remember well the discussions there, particularly 

 the paper by Dr. A. W. Hull of the General Electric Co. entitled 

 "Putting Physics to Work" (4). 



The physicist is doing his share to usher in the new world of taller 

 buildings, longer bridges, swifter trains, safer aircraft, and finer 

 homes, a new world of greater beauty, deeper comfort, and smoother 

 efficiency. He is helping to build this new world out of stronger 

 steels, tougher alloys, better aluminum products, more useful plastics, 

 harder abrasives, more powerful machine tools, and more ingenious 

 automatic controls. 



m 



A third great cultural value of ph5'sics is derived from the im- 

 portance of physics for the future. I like to talk about the future 

 for I believe that we should face tlie future with courage and confi- 

 dence. I believe that the world will move within the next century 

 into a period far more remarkable than the present, and I believe 

 that the leadership for this great progress will come from America. 



I have spoken of the taller buildings, the longer bridges, and the 

 faster trains and airplanes that are now evolving. But no bigger 

 mistake could be made than to think of the future as nothing more 

 than an exaggerated picture of the present. 



This is the mistake, as the British satirist and caricaturist, Max 

 Beerbohm, has pointed out, that every century has made. The six- 

 teenth century thought that the seventeenth century would be only 

 a magnified picture of itself. The seventeenth thought the same of 

 the eighteenth, and the eighteenth thought likewise of the nineteenth. 

 Yet each century had a personality and a development all its own. 



How smug the nineteenth century was in this regard can best be 

 described by borrowing a story from Dr. Millikan. He tells how, as 

 a student in Europe, he attended the annual session of the British 

 Association for the Advancement of Science in 1893. An eminent 

 British physicist rose to address that august assembly and spent his 

 time giving thanks that he had lived at the close of the nineteenth 

 century. For, he said, the nineteenth century had seen the completion 

 of the great edifice of physics. All the laws of nature had been discov- 

 ered and cataloged. Nothing remained for the physicists of the future 

 but to repeat the experiments of the past. Perhaps some twentieth- 

 century physicist might carry to four decimal places a determination 

 which the nineteenth-century physicist had left at thi'ee. 



And how quickly that smug view of nature was overturned ! Just 

 2 years later, in 1895, Roentgen showed the German Physical Society 



