The Knowledge & the Danger

The top brass of science and their camp followers, 800 strong, trooped up California's Palomar Mountain last week to dedicate man's newest wonder, the 200-inch telescope. They were told that the giant eye would first be turned on the distant nebulae to test Astronomer Edwin Hubble's theory of the exploding universe. Dr. Hubble's first look at the Corona Borealis cluster (nebulae 120 million light-years away) astounded him. "We had hoped," said Hubble, "that the 200-inch would be this good, and it is, by God."

Later, when the stars came out over Palomar, the guests too got a peek--at Saturn, which looked like a bright silver dollar amidst its moons and rings. Apparently it took imagination to make much out of it: the New York World-Telegram headlined its story THE SHOW'S A FLOP, but New York Times Science Reporter William L. Laurence wrote that he had been "dazzled by a new radiance from the light of distant stars."

But the Hale telescope,* with its range of a billion lightyears, could do much more than magnify nearby planets. The important work will be done with photographic negatives, some of them showing only faint lines or smudges. The astronomers will study them with microscopes, and interpret them in terms of atomic physics, relativity and quantum mechanics.

Good or Evil? What will this knowledge mean to mankind, which lives in fear and bewilderment of the knowledge it already has? Raymond B. Fosdick, president of the Rockefeller Foundation (which financed the telescope), told the scientists gathered on Palomar Mountain:

"Twenty years ago, when the 200-inch telescope project came up before our group in New York, one of the trustees raised an objection . . . 'Aren't we acquiring more knowledge than we can assimilate?' . . . Obviously the difficulty lies in the fact that there is no way of foretelling what particular kind of knowledge is divertible to destructive ends . . . All knowledge has become dangerous. Indeed, knowledge has always been dangerous; for knowledge means power, and power can be used to degrade as well as to ennoble . . .

"Do we stop building telescopes? Do we forbid the extension of knowledge? Do we retreat to some safe, underground existence where we can barricade ourselves against our fears and the unwelcome intrusion of new ideas?

"The questions answer themselves. Any attempt to fix boundaries [to] intellectual adventure . . . would return us to an animal existence . . ."

Slaughterhouse or Survival? "The towering enemy of man is not his science but his moral inadequacy. Around the world today, laboratories . . . are feverishly pushing their research in the development of physical and bacteriological weapons which overnight could turn this planet into a gigantic slaughterhouse . . .

"If this final Nemesis overtakes the pretensions of modern man, it will not be his science that has betrayed him, but rather the complete prostration of his moral values . . . Our generation is presented with what may well be the final choice between the use of knowledge to build a rational world or its use to arm, for one last desperate affray, the savage and uncivilized passions of mankind."

Orator Fosdick, no scientist himself, tried hard to be optimistic: ". . . This telescope can furnish our stricken society with some measure of healing perspective. This great new window to the stars will bring . . . into fresh focus the mystery of the universe, its order, its beauty, its power. ... Adrift in a cosmos whose shores he cannot even imagine, man spends his energies in fighting with his fellow man over issues which a single look through this telescope would show to be utterly inconsequential."

* Named after the late Dr. George Ellery Hale, founder of Mt. Wilson Observatory, who started the 200-inch telescope project. He died in 1938.

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