174 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 



regarded as more practical than the pure physicist, are for that very reason 

 more concerned to calculate correctly ? The physicist at every stage can 

 test his theory by experiment : in engineering, nine times out of ten, the 

 only real check on calculation — a test to destruction — is too expensive 

 and dangerous to contemplate. Here, I think, is the real explanation 

 of what I have termed ' factors of uncertainty ' : they are needed because 

 we can rely neither on our materials nor on our calculations, and only 

 improved methods will enable us to reduce them. 



Confessedly (for I do not claim to be propounding more than a personal 

 point of view) I think of university research as approximating more and 

 more closely, with the passage of time, to what in the last century was 

 called pure physics. Avoiding mention of the living, I would say that it 

 is in Osborne Reynolds and Ewing — yes, and Clerk Maxwell, Rayleigh, 

 Kelvin, Heaviside in some of their manifold activities — that future pro- 

 fessors of engineering will find the models which they should aspire to 

 emulate. Their aim will be, not so much to make inventions in the manner 

 of Bessemer, Parsons, Otto, Diesel, or to test the working of large prime 

 movers (that will be done at works and in the research institutions), as 

 to break new ground in the physics that has application to engineering — 

 more especially near the ' border-lines ' that tend always to be drawn too 

 sharply when research is highly organised. Where controlled research 

 has become too systematic, there they will try to be a disturbing factor ; 

 and having made their small disturbance, they will seek not to pursue the 

 new problems themselves, but as soon as possible to turn them over to 

 men who command greater facilities but have less freedom of choice. 

 As I envisage the future, it is the universities who must maintain that 

 irresponsible quality which otherwise research is in danger of losing, pre- 

 cisely because now it is taken so seriously, as a matter of national concern. 



III. 



13. So I come to my third heading — ' public relations ', or engineering 

 as it concerns the community. Time is short, and here my remarks must 

 be very brief. In any event I should not have wished to say much- 

 conscious that I am trespassing on ground belonging to a specially ap- 

 pointed joint committee of the Engineering Institutions, and should be 

 better occupied listening to its chairman Sir Clement Hindley. 



Briefly, here too my thesis is that we should avoid undue humility ! 

 The times are out of joint, and having attained to command of Nature 

 greater than the world has seen before, because man has not learned to 

 use his mastery wisely, illogically now (as it seems to me) he inclines to 

 question the value of that mastery, and the labours that have given it. 

 In particular I want to record my protest against what seems to be an 

 implication in much that is written nowadays, that because the range 

 of engineering includes guns, battleships, aeroplanes, tanks, therefore 

 engineers are to be regarded as a class more than others responsible for 

 the horrors of modern war. 



Here are words spoken by Sir Alfred Ewing, in a presidential address 

 to the Association (1932) which I keep to read ever and again, for its 

 showing of what at the best an engineer's outlook may be : 



