Fifty years ago, science took for granted that the rate of
acceleration could not last. The world forgets quickly, but even
today the habit remains of founding statistics on the faith that
consumption will continue nearly stationary. Two generations,
with John Stuart Mill, talked of this stationary period, which
was to follow the explosion of new power. All the men who were
elderly in the forties died in this faith, and other men grew old
nursing the same conviction, and happy in it; while science, for
fifty years, permitted, or encouraged, society to think that
force would prove to be limited in supply. This mental inertia of
science lasted through the eighties before showing signs of
breaking up; and nothing short of radium fairly wakened men to
the fact, long since evident, that force was inexhaustible. Even
then the scientific authorities vehemently resisted.
Nothing so revolutionary had happened since the year 300.
Thought had more than once been upset, but never caught and
whirled about in the vortex of infinite forces. Power leaped from
every atom, and enough of it to supply the stellar universe
showed itself running to waste at every pore of matter. Man could
no longer hold it off. Forces grasped his wrists and flung him
about as though he had hold of a live wire or a runaway
automobile; which was very nearly the exact truth for the
purposes of an elderly and timid single gentleman in Paris, who
never drove down the Champs Elysees without expecting an
accident, and commonly witnessing one; or found himself in the
neighborhood of an official without calculating the chances of a
bomb.
Pages:
695
696
697
698
699
700
701
702
703
704
705
706
707
708
709
710
711
712
713
714
715
716
717
718
719