Three and a half centuries ago Francis Bacon hailed the advancement of scientific learning and mechanical invention as the surest means of relieving man's estate: with a few expiatory gestures of piety, he turned his back upon religion and philosophy and art and pinned every hope for human improvement on the development of mechanical invention. ... Neither Bacon nor his eager followers in science and technics...had any anticipation of the fact that all our hard-won mastery of the physical world might, in the twentieth century, threaten the very existence of the human race. If by some clairvoyance Bacon could have followed to their ultimate conclusions the developments he forecast with such unqualified optimism, he might easily have decided, instead of continuing his speculations in science, to write Shakespeare's plays, as at least a more innocent occupation.
(pp. 4-5)
Already by adolescence music had seduced me away from cultivating a latent interest in science which had always existed more in word than deed. The disparity in earning potential between the two tracks leads unavoidably to grass-is-always-greener moments for those of us who followed our muse, but I must confess that current technological events have thoroughly eliminated any purely altruistic regrets. I'm not sure there's anything we can do to slow down the forces that have already been set in motion, and I'm not sure we should; but I am very glad, for the sake of my own conscience, that I haven't invented any of it myself.
My paternal grandfather the scientist is said to have remarked that he would have rather lived in the nineteenth century with penicillin. I find myself leaning that way nowadays.
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