The Full Area Of Ignorance Is Not

Hunger And Sex Still Dominate The Primitive Mammalian Side Of Human Existence, But At The Present Time It Looks As If Humanity Were Within Sight Of Their Satisfaction. Permanent Plenty, No Longer A Utopian Dream, Awaits The Arrival Of Permanent Peace.

In My Own Field, X-ray Crystallography, We Used To Work Out The Structure Of Minerals By Various Dodges Which We Never Bothered To Write Down, We Just Used Them. Then Linus Pauling Came Along To The Laboratory, Saw What We Were Doing And Wrote Out What We Now Call Pauling's Rules. We Had All Been Using Pauling's Rules For About Three Or Four Years Before Pauling Told Us What The Rules Were.

Pauling Was Shocked By The Freedom With Which The X-ray Crystallographers Of The Time, Including Particularly Astbury, Played With The Intimate Chemical Structure Of Their Models. They Seemed To Think That If The Atoms Were Arranged In The Right Order And About The Right Distance Apart, That Was All That Mattered, That No Further Restrictions Need To Be Put On Them.

The Problem [of Specialization] Is Essentially That Of Communications To An Army In Action. After A Rapid Advance Communications Become Disorganized, And There Is A Temporary Halting Until They Are Again In Working Order.

In Fact, We Will Have To Give Up Taking Things For Granted, Even The Apparently Simple Things. We Have To Learn To Understand Nature And Not Merely To Observe It And Endure What It Imposes On Us. Stupidity, From Being An Amiable Individual Defect, Has Become A Social Crime.