Abstract
IN the eighth Steinmetz Memorial Lecture delivered before the Schenectady Section of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers on January 10, Dr. C. E. Kenneth Mees, under the title “Scientific Thought and Social Reconstruction”, endeavoured to assess the contribution which men of science can make to the solution of our social and economic problems. While the lag between a scientific dis covery and its application tends to decrease and consequently the rate of change produced by scientific knowledge to increase, he does not think that the rate of change will continue to increase. It is highly probable that our social system is in an unstable phase, but after a period of rapid change in which the state of strain is relieved, it should settle into a new and stable phase. While admitting that the man of science must be actively concerned with the vast social and political experiments of our time, Dr. Mees does not consider it would be wise for him to take up the burdens of the politician. He believes that the chief contribution of science to social recon-struction is the method and spirit in which the scientific worker approaches his own work of creating ordered knowledge which is then available for all.
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Science and Social Reconstruction. Nature 134, 601 (1934). https://doi.org/10.1038/134601b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/134601b0