ENGINEERING AND PURE SCIENCE — SWANN 203 



you do not understand. But the old violinist is sad about this matter 

 and goes away a little comforted by the fact that although he may 

 not know what he is doing, he knows how to do it. 



THE SCIENTIFIC APPROACH 



And so it is characteristic of the ways of the scientific attack to take 

 a simplified problem and, by studying that thoroughly, hope that one 

 may proceed to understand and control the complex problem. In the 

 field where the man of science has had the matter in hand from the 

 beginning, this procedure has been very successful. Thus, he started 

 with pure academic interest to inquire why electricity was emitted 

 from hot wires in a vacuum. These experiments led to others and 

 ultimately to the thermionic vacuum tube and to the whole science of 

 electronics. In this development, the physicist had everything under 

 control from the beginning. There were other matters starting in the 

 realm of pure academic interest which became welded with the matters 

 pertaining to the discharge of electricity from hot wires. All these 

 infants, born more or less in isolation and with no great individual 

 prospects, were brought together by the man of science, who nurtured 

 their development, watched over their progress, marshaled them from 

 time to time into more efficient groups as regards their potentialities, 

 until finally we had in the world of today radio, television, and a 

 hundred other things whose operations, if viewed for the first time, 

 would seem so complicated, so unrelated, and so miraculous that no 

 brain would have the courage to interpret them. If we could im- 

 agine some supergenius of the inventor kind who, by a rule of thumb 

 and horse sense — it would have to be a very special kind of a horse — 

 had arrived where we have arrived today in the science of electronics, 

 but without knowledge of the basic fundamentals pertaining to the 

 subject, and had presented us with the various pieces of equipment, 

 with sales bulletins telling us how to turn on the switches to set it in 

 operation, we would have a marvelous time for a week; and even if 

 the apparatus continued to function for longer, I venture to say that 

 further improvement in its operation would take place very slowly 

 indeed, if at all. 



INVENTORS 



As distinct from the procedure of the conventional man of science, 

 one has that of the inventor. Frequently the inventor is very hazy 

 as regards the fundamental principles that control the phenomena 

 with which he deals. In a certain sense, this is an advantage to him 

 in his method of working because he tends to compensate for his lack 

 of power as regards rigidity of prediction by the utilization of knowl- 

 edge of an enormous number of experimental facts and processes which 

 he combines in all sorts of ways in search of the end he desires. There 



