Daedalus : $b or, Science and the futureHaldane, J. B. S. (John Burdon Sanderson)
Philosophy
Daedalus : $b or, Science and the future
Haldane, J. B. S. (John Burdon Sanderson)
Biology; Science
And if we must educate our poets and artists in science, we must
educate our masters, labour and capital, in art. Personally I believe
that we may have good hopes of both. The capitalist’s idea of art in
industry at present tends to limit itself to painting green and white
stripes on the front of his factories in certain cases. This is a
primitive type of decoration, but it has, I think, the root of the
matter in it. Before long someone may discover that frescoes inside a
factory increase the average efficiency of the worker 1.03% and art
will become a commercial proposition once more. Even now it is being
discovered that artistic advertising often pays. Similarly I do not
doubt that labour will come to find that it cannot live by bread (or
shall we say bread and beer) alone. But it can hardly be expected to
make this discovery until it is assured of its supply of bread and beer.
Applied chemistry has introduced into human life no radical novelty
of the importance of the heat-engine or the telegraph. It has vastly
increased the production of various types of substance the most
important being metals. But there were explosives, dyes, and drugs
before chemistry was a science, and its progress along present lines
will mainly alter life in a quantitative manner. Perhaps the biggest
problems before it in metallurgy are the utilization of low-grade iron
ores, and the production of aluminium from clay, which contains up to
24% of that metal. I do not think that even when this is accomplished
aluminium will oust iron and steel as they ousted bronze and flint,
but it and its alloys will certainly take the second, and possibly
the first place as industrial metals. There is just a hope, though I
fear little more, that a large-scale production of perfume may form
the basis of a re-education of our rather rudimentary sense of smell,
but the most interesting possibilities of chemical invention are very
clearly in biological chemistry, and for the following reasons.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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