DEVELOPMENT OF THE PLANETARIUM — CHAMBERLAIN 271 



selves were the world's first motion picture theater. The ancients had no 

 broad, smooth highways upon which to speed in automobiles. They had no 

 cinema. They had no brightly lighted concert halls. The heavens, at night, 

 were their theater. We know that they watched the skies intently and we 

 know that they peopled them with amazing creatures : the Great Bear and the 

 Little Bear ; the Dragon ; the Charioteer ; Orion, the great hunter, and his two 

 dogs ; Cygnus, the swan ; and many others. And about them they wove legends 

 and tales which have come down to us today. Sophisticated moderns that we 

 are, we look at the stars and cannot for the life of us see the Great Bear. We 

 call it the Big Dipper. We utterly fail to visualize the figures in the sky as 

 the ancients did. This, we must believe, is because their imaginations were 

 keener than ours, more naive and childlike, less dulled by artificial stimuli. 

 Yet I have never known a city-bred person who, transported to the open country 

 on a vacation, failed to look upon the heavens in wonder and in rapture and to 

 be filled with a longing to know about them. This longing, this curiosity is 

 worth satisfying because it has to do with the very stuff of which creation 

 itself is made. 



I like to think that there is another reason why the popular study of as- 

 tronomy, as made possible by a planetarium, is worthwhile, and that is that it 

 teaches us that everything in the universe takes place in compliance with eternal 

 and unchanging laws. These laws are so precise and exacting that we are able 

 to predict with absolute certainty the position of any planet at any time as seen 

 from any spot on the earth. We know to the minute the coming of an eclipse 

 centuries ahead and exactly in what part of the earth its totality will be 

 present. There is no referendum, no amendment, no repeal. There is only 

 certainty. Nothing in the laws of men is comparable to this. When a man 

 has once grasped the import of what this means, it is difficult to see how ever 

 again he can be other than humble, or can ever again be satisfied with anything 

 that is half-way, or slipshod, or unworthy . . . 



It seems to me, moreover, that there is a second — a philosophical — reason 

 why Pittsburgh should have such an Institution of Popular Science . . . 



I submit to you that one reason that society has not been able to advance its 

 social controls as rapidly as some would wish, to meet the new situations cre- 

 ated by the forward march of science and invention, is that the people at large 

 have had an insufficient understanding of scientific progress. For too long new 

 scientific discoveries were the prized and secret possessions of scientists who re- 

 garded popularization as vulgarization. There was for years an attitude in 

 many scientific quarters that seemed to say that the people could not be made 

 to understand science ; and it was a little short of unethical to try to put scien- 

 tific truths into plain English. Fortunately, that day is passing rapidly. To- 

 day the scientist of great achievement is sometimes one who can discover new 

 truths and also state the matter so simply that a high school boy can under- 

 stand and find challenge and inspiration in the understanding. In a democracy 

 the source of social action is the people. It seems obvious, therefore, that if 

 the people are called upon to take social action as a result of advances on the 

 frontiers of science, they should have every facility to understand what these 

 advances are, how they have been achieved, and where they may be expected to 

 lead us. 1 



The Buhl Planetarium has, during the past 18 years, established 

 itself as a unique community-service organization. The program 



1 Dedication of the Buhl Planetarium and Institute of Popular Science, a pro- 

 gram published by the Planetarium, Pittsburgh, Pa., Oct. 24, 1939. 



