Science: Digging for Truth

“Systematic investigation of matter and energy without regard to immediate prac tical ends has turned out to be the most direct road to social riches.” This is the basic thesis of Atoms In Action* published this week by George Russell Harrison, California-born professor of physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “In the long run,” says he, “digging for truth has always proved not only more interesting, but more profitable, than digging for gold. If urged on by the love of digging, one digs deeper than if searching for some particular nugget. Practicality is inevitably shortsighted, and is self-handicapped by the fact that it is looking so hard for some single objective that it may miss much that nature presents. . . .”

For example, the men who did the original work on photoelectricity, the phenomenon that now magically opens restaurant and railway station doors and performs a thousand sorting jobs in industry, were all pure scientists. And the man who first clarified photoelectricity by describing it mathematically was none other than Albert Einstein.

Some farsighted industrial laboratories have long since recognized the value of pure science. At the General Electric laboratories, Irving Langmuir was told by the director not to bother with practical applications, but to find out what he could about what went on inside the bulb of an incandescent lamp. Thereafter Langmuir spent three years “investigating facts,” discovered some—for example, that a bulb filled with nitrogen or argon works better than an evacuated bulb—which now save electricity consumers several million dollars a day.

In Atoms In Action, Author Harrison shows how the discoveries of fundamental science have been applied in communications, agriculture, glassmaking, radio, medicine, weather prediction, aviation, a dozen other technologies. Atoms In Action is not only authoritative but readable, for Author Harrison has a fine flair for colorful analogy, e.g., “When one of the modern atom-smashing devices is put into operation the atomic debris comes flying out like dirt from a gopher hole in which a very industrious puppy is scratching.”

*Morrow ($3.30).