Books: Science, Englished

THE LIMITATIONS OF SCIENCE—]. W. N. Sullivan—Viking ($2.75). Many plain men are puzzled, irritated or tantalized about Science and would like to know what it is up to. But scientists in general, their noses close to their peculiar grindstones, either have no interest in showing visitors through the mill or talk such a Hottentot lingo of pure mathematics that the plain man can make no sense of it. If it were not for such bilingual scientists as Bertrand Russell, James Jeans, Arthur Eddington, J. B. S. Haldane, the flimsy bridge between modern science and modern life would be made of newspapers. Of the contemporary interpreters of science, the most lucid are Russell, Haldane and John William Navin Sullivan. Himself more of a plain man than a scientist, Interpreter Sullivan puts his meaty subject in a nutshell, then cracks the nut. In no uncertain terms, Author Sullivan states the findings, seekings, final uncertainty of modern science. From Pythagoras to Einstein he traces its development: from philosophy through magic and materialism to its present indeterminate flux. Modern scientists, says Sullivan, are really estheticians in disguise. Science’s chief fascination to them is “because it provides the contemplative imagination with objects of great esthetic charm.” To take Science as a religion is a mistaken act of faith from which agnostics have still to recover. Science has already given up the idea that its mathematics can ever be a cosmic Esperanto. Men-in-the-street, always up on news of the day but behindhand on news of the century, still think in terms of an outmoded scientific materialism, unaware that in the last 40 years there has been the greatest scientific revolution since Copernicus. In this new dispensation “matter began to thin away into the completely spectral thing it has now become. . . . The notion of substance had to be replaced by the notion of behaviour. . . . Determinism has broken down, and the principle of indeterminacy has taken its place. There is great difference of opinion at present as to whether this is a genuine discovery, or as to whether it is a merely temporary technical device.” Einstein thinks “strict causality” will some day be reinstated; Eddington thinks that rascal is out for good. On the whole, says Sullivan, man should lift up his heart again, contemplate the universe with renewed hope. Science is no longer implacable and omniscient; it has become “selfconscious and comparatively humble. . . . The discovery that science no longer compels us to believe in our own essential futility is greeted with acclamation, even by some scientific men.” The Author. Shy. solitary son of an Irish sailor. John William Navin Sullivan has always been more interested in ”reality” than in real life. He thinks “the most horrible of lives is that of a lawyer and. next to that, a business man.” Working for an electrical manufacturing com-pany roused his interest in science, gave him the idea of putting himself through University College. London. He went to the U. S., which he found ”very agreeable,” left because life there lacked “mental excitement.” After the War, he became science editor of the London Athenaeum. His hobbies are music and mathematics; his heroes Beethoven (on whom he has written a book), Isaac Newton (of whom he hopes to write “an enormous critical study and biography”). Other books: Three Men Discuss Relativity,Aspects of Science, But for the Grace of God (TIME, Sept. 5, 1932).