The British Food Journal Volume 59 Issue 11 1957

Abstract

“To complain of the age we live in, to murmer at the present … to lament the past, and to conceive extravagant hopes of the future, are the common disposition of the greatest part of mankind.” So wrote Burke, the better part of two centuries ago, and it is an interesting if idle speculation to wonder what he, or other great men of history, would have to say about the present world and of its future. An eminent American physicist, Dr. Percy W. Bridgman, has been pondering on this subject, and in his essay under the rather familiar title of “ Science and the Future ”, he deals briefly but ably with the ever deepening impact of science on society, and on the need for what he terms “a basis for the peaceful co‐existence of the scientific and the non‐scientific temperaments”. He looks over his shoulder at past episodes among the changes forced by science on world outlook; Newton's laws of motion, that shocked his generation, and those that followed, into realizing what an insignificant part their earth played in the movements of the stellar universe; Darwin, on evolution, putting into words, with chapter and verse, what had been suspected and hinted by many before him, shaking man's pedestal of Special Creation. Others followed, succeeded by Einstein, who greatly upset what we had learned at our mother's knees; and now, the atomic age, with new moons for good measure.

Citation

(1957), "The British Food Journal Volume 59 Issue 11 1957", British Food Journal, Vol. 59 No. 11, pp. 101-110. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb011548