STATE OF SCIENCE—COMPTON 397 
To our visitor from Mars, I would point out that the scientist and 
engineer are busy not only in the laboratory and library but in many 
strange places on, above, and below the surface of the earth. On one 
of the highest peaks in America, one group of scientists measures the 
effects of cosmic radiation, while many feet below the surface of the 
earth, in a dark tunnel or at the bottom of a lake, other groups check 
on the cosmic bullets that pierce the surface of the earth. In bathy- 
spheres as strange in appearance as though they themselves had come 
from Mars, men try new fathoms of the ocean depths. And missiles 
of extraordinary shape and size hurtle hundreds of miles above the 
earth to seek new data on the upper atmosphere and the spheres that 
lie above it. So that if to our neighbor, Mars, we appear as a race 
of ants, busy with a complex and remarkable division of labor, we 
must also appear as the possessors of an extraordinary intellectual 
curiosity—examining every aspect of our tiny globe and then pro- 
jecting ourselves beyond it into the infinities of space. 
The marvels thus uncovered have been so numerous and so dazzling 
in recent years that we have come to accept each new announcement 
with a certain complacency, almost indifference, as though nothing 
were to be wondered at. Yet these things to which we adjust our- 
selves so quickly as to be almost unconscious of change, and which 
we quickly come to count as necessities and ‘‘rights”’ of life, are often 
things which were entirely unknown to our parents or grandparents. 
It is not inappropriate then, that we should take stock, at the mid- 
century, of exactly where we do stand in scientific achievement and 
of what is yet to be accomplished. For the scientist is not apt to 
find himself in the predicament of Alexander the Great, who wept 
because there were no more worlds to conquer. We shall see, I think, 
that much needs to be done on an ever-widening scale toward meeting 
the physical needs and opportunities facing mankind and that science 
is responsive, also, to those who see in it a method of approach to the 
deeper social problems of our times. 
In assessing the status of science and society today, it is a tempta- 
tion to use as a point of comparison the middle of the last century. 
Politically, the world then turned in an aura of unrest, not unlike that 
in which we now find ourselves. The revolutions which had swept 
across central Europe in 1848 with an upsurge of liberalism and self- 
determination had been succeeded by counterrevolutions and strong 
reaction of 1849 and 1850. ‘To those seekers of freedom who had 
sought to introduce new concepts of human rights into the ancient 
monarchies of Europe, it must have seemed that their work and sacri- 
fices had been in vain. The efforts for a democratic federation of 
states in Germany had failed; Austria had regained its autocratic 
domination of central Europe; and the progress that had been made in 
Italy had been lost in the tide of reaction. 
