It is in our power to change that in our own generation.As nations, we can apply to affairs of state the realism of science:holding to what works and discarding what does not.As individuals, we can grasp the commonsense ideas of science.And there is the most important lesson we must learn:it is the ideas of science that are remaking the world, not its mechanical achievements.When we have learned that, we will see the achievements too in their proper place.The atomic bomb is not a great achievement of science.But science has made a great discovery: the fundamental discovery that we can tap atomic energy.That is an achievement not of bickering nations but of man.And we have the whole history of science to tell usthat every fundamental discovery has in the end brought men more good than harm.I said "has in the end" almost by habit: has, if we are willing to look forward.Every scientist looks forward;what else is research but to begin what others will finish and enjoy?And what other incentive can satisfy any of us but that sense of the future?Disaster threatens us only if we perpetuate the division between science and our own everyday living and thinking.Let no one tell you again that science is only for specialists; it is not.
