Abstract
IN his Rede lecture at Cambridge on March 4, Sir Daniel Hall discussed the way in which State control is tending to retard the rate of material progress based upon science, and the effect of this tendency on scientific life and thought. From the re-birth of science at the Renaissance, the time-span of social and technical progress has steadily diminished. The two centuries between the invention of printing and the foundation of the Royal Society; the hundred and forty years from that time to the close of the eighteenth century; the first ninety years of the nineteenth century; and the last forty years can be regarded as a series of diminishing time-spans of approximately equal material advance. Material progress which formerly was spread over several generations now occurs within a single lifetime, and our social economy is correspondingly disturbed. This disturbance is the greater because of the persistence of a social structure developed when agriculture was the dominant as well as the primary industry of mankind. Agriculture is at present the outstanding example of an industry brought to an economic standstill because of our inability to handle the enhanced powers of production due to science. The theory of over-production, however, postulates a static society and an inelastic demand, and the disturbing effect of science in the form of invention and discovery is enhanced by greater efficiency, made possible through advances in the technique of organisation.
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The Pace of Progress. Nature 135, 367 (1935). https://doi.org/10.1038/135367a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/135367a0