STEEP CURVE TO LEVEL FOUR

The 20th Century has a characteristic unique in history -- the headlong, accelerating growth of scientific knowledge. The curve of knowledge is exponential, growing steeper like the curve of squares (1--4--9--16--25--36--49 . . .). It has changed men's lives more in the past 20 years than in the previous 50; more in that 50 years than in the previous 200. Man cannot, dare not stop its growth, though he does not know where it is taking him.

The most startling discoveries came in the last 50 years, and they were made when many scientists had decided that the age of discovery was about over.

Orderly World. To the grave, sedate scientists of the late 19th Century, the physical world seemed almost as orderly as Queen Victoria's garden parties. Its byways held a few shadows still, but these most scientists were sure would soon be lightened.

The physicists of those days believed that the universe was built foursquare on Newton's Laws of Motion. Their laboratories were stiff with reassuring certainties. Matter was matter, they stated dogmatically. It could, of course, be used in combustion to release energy, but matter itself could not be turned into energy. The chemical elements were indestructible; no atom of one could be transmuted into an atom of another. The scientists were confident that if they applied such well-known rules with greater & greater precision, they could eventually explain everything in the universe. Few of them suspected, and fewer dared suggest, that the basic rules might be wrong.

With hindsight it is plain to modern scientists that classical physics was dodging issues. It had nothing to say about X rays (discovered by Roentgen in 1895) or about radioactivity (Becquerel, 1896). Yet these were no small shadow patches. They were signposts pointing to a new world of knowledge.

Frivolous Jumps. In the neatly appropriate year of 1900, a discovery was made that was to knock the props from under classical physics. In his Berlin laboratory, Max Planck, a 42-year-old German physicist, was trying to describe mathematically the emission of light by glowing bodies. No one had done it and Planck could not do it either--until, in a sort of desperation, he assumed that light does not flow in a smooth stream, as everyone supposed, but in tiny, indivisible bursts.

At the time this was frivolity, almost like saying that a railroad train moves in one-foot jumps. But as soon as Planck made his daring assumption, his equations came to heel, describing the emission of radiant energy with elegant precision.

Here was something important, but Planck did not realize it. For years he worked to eliminate the frivolous jumps of energy. They refused to get out of the picture; when Planck made light flow smoothly, his equations would not work. At last he accepted the jumps as actually existing. He named them "quanta" and found that they vary in size with the frequency of the light. Then he wrote his famous equation. Said Planck: "One quantum of energy equals 'h' times the frequency of light."

Mighty Constant. To laymen "h" (Planck's constant) is a tiny number (.000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 006 6 . . .), but it shook the scientific world. The little quanta of energy are the building stones of the universe, far more fundamental than big, clumsy atoms or even protons or electrons. Out of their discovery grew Einstein's relativity, including his historic proof, not then considered fraught with danger to civilization, that matter is equivalent to energy. Out of it grew Niels Bohr's description of the atom as a sort of sun surrounded by electron planets which jump from orbit to orbit emitting quanta of light. Out of it developed the quantum theory, to laymen more arcane than the inner reaches of medieval theology; the quantum theory reduces solid matter to "waves of probability." Out of it blossomed the atomic bomb. No more appropriate discovery than Planck's could have opened the 20th Century.

What were the practical effects of these discoveries? For the first few decades of the century, there were essentially none. Once or twice the public took interest, as it did when the first atoms were "smashed" by Rutherford in 1919. For the most part the new physics ticked like a time bomb underground.

Age of Harvest. Practical technology did not need the new physics. Classical physics, along with chemistry and biology, gave technicians all the tools they could handle.

The early part of the 20th Century was not an age of great invention. It was rather a period of harvest. Most of the modern objects which are used so lavishly today had beginnings before 1900. Internal combustion engines, which made automobiles and airplanes inevitable, were running in the 1880's. Radio waves were discovered by Hertz in 1887, and the first paid radiogram was sent from the Isle of Wight in 1898. The first public telephone exchange was opened in New Haven, Conn, in 1878. The "germ theory" of disease dates from the 1860s. It is hard to find an important technological element in modern life that did not have its roots in the age of pre-Planckian innocence.

The wide exploitation of these inventions, largely in the past 50 years, was another matter. Since 1900, the life of technological man has changed beyond recognition. He acquired unprecedented mobility, and electronic eyes and ears. Through public sanitation and chemotherapy, his internal parasites (disease microorganisms) were practically eliminated as causes of death in advanced countries. Nothing comparable had happened since man's external parasites (carnivorous animals) were licked back in the Stone Age. As a result, the average civilized man lives to a good old age instead of dying young. The effects of this deep biological change are being felt in every sector of modern society.

Leisure to Invest. Modern man's increased leisure, largely due to power-driven machines, is having an effect only a little less basic. For one thing, the average man now can let his children be educated; they are not needed immediately for productive work. More & more of their early years can be invested in education--which makes them more productive later on. In the 19th Century few children went beyond grammar school. Now some 40% of U.S. children go through high school, about 7% graduate from college. One important byproduct: more trained personnel for the research laboratories that are the reproductive organs of our technical culture.

Perhaps the deepest change is the disappearance of the economically self-sufficient individual. In pretechnical times most people were cultivators who lived very largely (and usually poorly) on what they produced at home. Throughout the 19th Century, this type lost ground steadily. Now in advanced countries it is almost extinct. The U.S. farmer who raises cash crops with the help of complex machines is as specialized as an airplane pilot and as dependent on others. This ever-tightening cooperation is unprecedented among mammals. The nearest biological analogies are the colonial ants and termites.

Man's culture may develop further along these same lines. But some students of cultural growth believe that by 1940 it was close to its peak. The lack of new, basic inventions is one proof they offer. Power-driven production machines were still growing more productive, but at a slower rate. According to these theorists, the original impetus given to cultural development by fuel-burning engines was almost exhausted.

Levels of Culture. These students of culture (Professor Leslie A. White of the University of Michigan wants to call them "culturologists") divide human history into "levels of energy use." All life, including human life, they hold, struggles to capture free energy. Men first captured energy by gathering edible wild plants or by catching edible wild animals. This method, used until about 5000 B.C., yielded poor returns. Man never raised a high culture on what nature put directly in his hands.

The first breakthrough came with the domestication (almost simultaneous) of plants and animals. Agricultural man, who appeared in the Middle East about 7,000 years ago, filled whole fields with food plants and thus turned more solar energy into a form he could use. This method (level two) was much more effective than level one. About 1,000 years after its start, high civilizations were flourishing, with big cities, proud kings, complex religions and devastating wars. Many such cultures rose and fell with rhythmic repetition. But except for such cycles, there was little change for nearly 6,000 years.

The next breakthrough (level three) came in the early 1700's, when western Europeans began using fossil fuels: coal, then later oil and natural gas. Their use in various heat-engines started a new cultural cycle that soon shot far above the peaks of level two. Many fossil fuel cultures might have risen and fallen, but they never got a chance. Before the first of them, our own, had reached its peak, level four began when the first atomic bomb was set off at Alamogordo, N. Mex., July 16, 1945.

Scientific Underground. During the first four decades of the 20th Century, the new physics had developed a kind of unintended secrecy. Walled off from public comprehension by the difficulty of their subject, the physicists battered their way into the heart of matter. Just before World War II they made the critical discovery: the fission of uranium (Otto Hahn, 1939). Whipped on by wartime urgency, theory turned into technology in six racing years.

So far, atomic power has not been used for any constructive purpose. The most important peacetime gifts of the fissioning atoms are radioactive tracers, which have already revolutionized biology and medical research. Biologists hope that such research will produce a cure for cancer. It may postpone senility; many physiologists believe that human beings could live vigorously for 125 years if the chemistry of their bodies were understood. The greatest promise of level four culture is practically costless power. There have been guesses about how it might be used: in air-conditioning cities, freshening seawater for irrigating deserts, blasting away mountain ranges. But atomic technology is still too new to furnish any guides for guessing. When the first crude Newcomen steam engines began pumping out British coal mines in 1711, no one could have imagined how they would transform society. One way to help in the projection of the atomic age is to compare present-day life with that of driven Egyptian slaves or verminous medieval peasants. Descendants of present-day man, on the high plateau of level four, may be just as far from life in 1950.

Means for Suicide. To guess at all is starry-eyed, for atomic energy still means the Abomb, a world of terror, not of promise. Uranium fission is only a beginning. The building-up of hydrogen into helium, if it could be achieved, would theoretically yield vastly more energy--which could also be used for bombs. The quantum theorists, roaming in abstract ecstacy among their lacy equations, long ago entered a world where matter and energy are almost indistinguishable. They talk matter-of-factly of turning all of a sample of matter into energy. A single pound of anything, unfrozen in this way, will yield as much power as burning about 4 billion pounds of coal. Wrote Professor Henry D. Smyth (now an AECommissioner) in his famous 1945 Report: "Should a scheme be devised for converting to energy as much as a few percent of some common material, civilization would have the means to commit suicide at will."

Many people, alarmed by these possibilities, wish that science could be "stopped." Novelist E. M. Forster has denounced the "implacable offensive of Science," blaming it for the world's present confusion.

The Way of an Airplane. But to stop science (even if it could be done) would create more problems than solutions. Aside from military considerations (a nation without fast-moving science is militarily helpless), it would be disastrous to freeze culture at its present high point. The highly technical civilization of the 20th Century is like an airplane in flight, supported by its forward motion. It cannot stop without falling. If all the world's inhabitants, for instance, learn to use natural resources as fast as Americans do now, many necessary substances would be exhausted. Scientists confidently count on improvements, including atomic energy, to provide ample substitutes. Present techniques won't do it.

A deeper reason is that the present moment is probably the worst time to stop. The world's fourth-level culture possesses a frightful means of destruction, but it has not yet discovered how to keep it from being used. Many scientists hope that science can find an "inhibitor" of some sort; man, who studies atoms, can also study himself and his social institutions for a solution to his direful problem.

Where will man's curve of scientific knowledge take him ultimately? The surprises since 1900 have made scientists humble. They know that as science grows it only penetrates deeper into mystery. Human knowledge may be visualized as an expanding sphere whose volume grows larger as its diameter increases. But the area of the sphere's surface, its frontier with the unknown, increases as the square of the diameter. Beyond that frontier--nobody can know, until the frontier advances.

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