FAITH FOR THE SPACE AGE
By Donald H. Andrews

Ever since the first sputnik crashed through the roof of the sky into outer space, most of us have been aware of a big new question mark on the horizon of the future. What will these satellites do to national security? How long before they can be propelled’ by atomic power? How soon will they be able to carry hydrogen bombs? Is there something worse even than the hydrogen bomb just around the corner?

These are the pessimistic questions. But, thank heaven, there are just as many optimistic questions, too! Will atomic energy bring the world new prosperity? Will this mean a truly richer life for our children and grandchildren? Can a great new prosperity ease world tension and give us at last permanent world peace?

These are not foolish questions. Satellites are with us. Greatly expanded atomic power is just around the corner. The great “come and get it” day is somewhere ahead when we can “burn” water like gasoline, and get a million miles on a gallon. But what will this do to our world economy? What will it do to our world political structure? Is the human race capable of rising to the moral stature necessary to survive in such a “total power” world?

These are questions which you and I have to start thinking about right now. As responsible citizens, as men of good will, it is up to us to start finding the answers. For it is certain that if we can all work together and can find the answers, then we can open the door to an unbelievably wonderful new world for our children and grandchildren and the generations yet to come.

As we look around us today it seems clear that the two keys to this golden future are atomics and automation. Atomics will provide the power; automation will make this power productive. So to get a perspective on this new world of the future let us take a look at the atom first and then see what we can do with it.

As you know, you could hold right in your hand the little ball of uranium metal which was the heart of the bomb that dropped on Hiroshima. It was roughly the size of a softball. Yet packed in that little ball there was the explosive force of twenty thousand tons of TNT. That is enough TNT to fill the tower of the Empire State building; and if you saw a bomb that size hurtling down on you from the sky you would be pretty sure that something big would happen when it hit.

Now uranium bombs were bad enough, but their use might have been limited by the control of the sources of uranium. For uranium is scarce; it is found in only a few places in the world.

But we had hardly begun to adjust our thinking in terms of these atomic uranium bombs, when the hydrogen bomb appeared on the scene. And hydrogen is just as plentiful as uranium is scarce. There is hydrogen in wood, hydrogen in our food, hydrogen in water. The formula for water is H₂0 and the H stands for hydrogen. There is hydrogen in our bodies. If you could snap your fingers and release in one instant all the power of the atoms in your body you would explode with the force of more than a hundred of the bombs that dropped on Hiroshima. Probably you will never try this experiment. At least I hope you never will. But imagine what a bang a whole room full of us would make if, atomically speaking, we could all let ourselves go. We could blow several states off the map, even states the size of Texas. And then think how little even a few thousand of us amounts to compared with a medium-sized lake, the Gulf of Mexico or the ocean. The ocean is salt water but it contains hydrogen just the same. If the day ever comes when a mad scientist can stand on the seashore, light an atomic match and ignite the ocean then it is certain that our earth will turn into a star.

HAS SCIENCE GONE TOO FAR?

Many people after thinking this over conclude that science has gone too far. They are in favor of stopping atomic research, impounding the uranium and locking up the laboratories. Other people say that this will not do any good because scientists are so curious; if we lock their laboratories, they will go on experimenting at home down in the cellar or up in the attic. Conclusion: the only answer is to shoot all the scientists. I am not in favor of this particular solution, but if we were faced with only this negative side of the problem, perhaps we would have to do some. thing this drastic.

The other side of the picture is the vast productivity, all the wonderful things which can be brought to pass if we can put the atom to constructive use. Suppose you knew the secret so that you were able to take hold of a copper wire and let your energy flow out as electricity. You could rent yourself out to the electric light companies and with just the power in your body you could light all the lamps and run all the power plants in the entire United States for days. Suppose all of us here this morning knew this secret and we pooled our energy, what a wonderful public utilities company we would make. We could run the whole world for years with just the power present in a single room full of people.

Now think again how few atoms a room full of us represent as compared with a lake or with the ocean. When the day arrives in which we can through our new nuclear science “burn” water as a fuel, then we will have a limitless supply of power for millions of years to come.

For example, each one of us can have in the cellars of our homes our own private power plant to produce our heat, and light, and enough electricity to spare to run every conceivable kind of home appliance. The fuel cost will be less than a postage stamp per year.

Think what this new power will mean in terms of transportation. A glass of water will fly an airplane across the Atlantic. A gallon will run an ocean liner around the world. Of course, the development of the appropriate atomic motors may take some time. We know that the present atomic engines have a weight that runs up into tons. This is all right for a ship but hardly suitable for an airplane. However, knowing the rate at which science develops we can be sure that someday the weight will be reduced from tons to pounds or to ounces or even less. Perhaps someday when you want to take a thousand mile trip you won’t even bother with an airplane. You will put a pair of wings on your shoulders, clip something like a fountain pen on your belt, touch a button, hop into the air and off you go. We know that the concentration of power is available to make this possible.

It is even possible that most of our future transportation will not even be through the air but in tunnels. When the day comes when we can direct an atomic jet, we will be able to cut through solid rock as easily as a hydraulic jet cuts through a sand bank. It may be possible, for instance, to have a tunnel from New York to San Francisco. It will be lined with melted rock; we will have cars operating on roller bearings running in a vacuum; we will run on the power from New York to Kansas City, put on the brakes from Kansas City to San Francisco and get there in less than an hour. Someone has remarked that they had better be pretty good brakes or when we get to San Francisco instead of seeing the Golden Gate we will see the pearly gates.

Of course, I will not guarantee that someday you will be able to take exactly this kind of a trip, but I do guarantee that if we can keep peace in the world, things equally fantastic will be happening in a few decades. There is absolutely no doubt that right around the corner is this unbelievably vast supply of power which, coupled with automation, can provide untold wealth for everyone on earth,-abundant living for every man, woman and child everywhere.

It is equally clear that if this power is not controlled but is turned to destructive use it can mean the end of life on earth.

ATOMIC POWER AS A CREATIVE FORCE

How then, can we make sure that this new atomic wealth will be used not to destroy but to create. The answer is plain. For centuries we have been trying to operate our world on the principle of balance of power. We have tried to maintain world equilibrium by balancing the physical power of one nation or a group of nations against that of another nation or group of nations. A few hundred years ago this worked reasonably well, but as the world’s store of power has increased the balance has become more and more precarious. The last two world wars demonstrate this. Today we are tossing on the scales this new and unbelievably vast store of atomic power and it is clear that we have now passed the point where we can hope to keep peace in the world by balance of power. We can no longer control physical power by physical power. Our one hope is to control physical power by a higher kind of force. We must control this power of the atom by a more powerful force of the human spirit.

Many people think that this is a pessimistic answer. Where, they say, can we hope to find a new power of this spirit to maintain peace in the world today? We are no better than olir fathers and mothers or our grandfathers and grandmothers; we have no greater moral stature. What are we going to do?

Here is where our new knowledge of the atom also brings us new hope for a deeper understanding of ourselves and of our world problems. For the same experiments which are giving us atomic power, are also giving us atomic vision; we can look inside the atom and see that there is something there beyond the material. We can see through to a new horizon of the spirit.

To give you an idea of this new atomic vision I want to take you on a little trip inside of an atom. For instance, let’s take an atom of calcium in the tip of the bone of your index finger. First you must realize how small that atom is. One way of seeing this is to get a vivid idea of the total number of atoms in your body. Your body has about an octillion atoms and that is a very large number indeed.

I was trying to illustrate this for my class in chemistry and thought I would calculate how much space an octillion peas would occupy. I counted out a hundred peas at the kitchen table and found that they filled about one cubic inch. I then calculated that a million peas would just about fill our household refrigerator and a billion peas would fill our house from cellar to attic. A trillion peas would fill up a town of one thousand houses and a quadrillion peas would fill all the buildings in a city of the size of Dallas.

At this rate we might run out of buildings fairly quickly so let us take the State of Texas as our measuring rod. Imagine that there is a blizzard over Texas, only instead of snowing snow it snows peas. The whole State of Texas is covered with a layer of peas a foot deep all the way from Louisiana to New Mexico and from the Rio Grande River up to Oklahoma and Arkansas. Then this vast blanket of peas would contain about a quintillion. But we still have a long way to go. Suppose now that we have this blizzard of peas over all the land areas of the world and that it is now four feet deep, peas covering North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Then we will have a sextillion peas. Next we have the oceans frozen over and the entire surface of the globe covered with peas four feet deep and go out into the Milky Way and round up two hundred and fifty planets each the size of the earth, and cover these with peas also. Then we will have a septillion peas. Finally we go out into the farthest reaches of the Milky Way, collect two hundred and fifty thousand planets each the size of the earth, cover these with peas four feet deep and then we will have an octillion peas, a number equal to the number of atoms in your body. So you see how complicated you are and how small an atom is.

A LOOK INSIDE THE ATOM

Even though the atom is thus almost infinitesimally small, we can by imagination enlarge it and have a look at it. Suppose that you can eat an Alice-in-Wonderland pill and start growing very rapidly and as you grow, this atom of calcium in the tip of your finger grows too. You shoot up through the ceiling, through the roof, up into the sky, past the clouds, through the stratosphere, out past the moon and finally out among the planets. Your body becomes over one hundred and fifty million miles long. You can lie with your feet at one end of the earth’s orbit around the sun, your head at the other and hold the planet Mercury in one hand and Venus in the other. When you are enlarged to this tremendous extent, this atom of calcium in the bone of your finger will be enlarged to a great balloon about a hundred yards across. It will be a balloon big enough to put a football field inside. Then leaving your atom this big, you pull back to normal size and step inside the atom to see what it looks like.

First of all you will see circulating up over your head, down at the sides, and under your feet, some twenty luminous balls about the size of footballs. These footballs move in great circles, circulating around like planets around the sun. These are the electrons. If you wonder what holds them in their courses and look down at the center of the atom, there you will see a tiny whirling point of light about the size of the head of a pin. This is the atomic “sun” the atomic nucleus, the tiny point in which essentially all the matter and weight of the atom is concentrated as well as its atomic energy and the positive charge of electricity which holds the negative electrons in their orbits. Thus even in an atom enlarged to the size where it could contain a football field, the nucleus is only about the size of the head of a pin.

You ask what else there is and the answer is essentially only empty space. And since you are made of atoms you are mostly nothing but empty space too. If I were “superman” and could squeeze your body in my hands, squeeze you down, squeeze these atomic holes out of you the way one squeezes holes out of a sponge you would get smaller and smaller until finally when the last hold was gone you would be smaller than the smallest speck of dust that you could see here on a piece of paper. Someone has remarked that this is certainly the ultimate in “reducing.”

This was the picture which we had of the atom about forty years ago. It is the so-called particle picture. According to this picture the atoms behaved like little machines subject to the laws of mechanics and electricity. And since we are made of atoms, it looked then as if we were machines, too. The motto of scientific philosophy was “the whole is equal to the sum of the parts.” It was this point of view which made so many scientists agnostic. They felt that we and the rest of the universe were just parts of a super-machine, gears grinding around through all eternity with no room for soul or any meaning to life.

Then following the year 1925 there came a series of remarkable discoveries which gave us an entirely new picture of the atom, the picture which we have today. In order to see what this picture is like, suppose that we can go back inside our atom of calcium, the size of a football field and have a new look around while we take more powerful glasses and use an imaginary electronic hearing aid. Now instead of flying footballs we see around us ripples and waves, such as you get when you drop a stone through the surface of a pond. These ripples spread out in great circles and wave patterns and fill the entire volume of our atom.

Now, we turn up our atomic hearing aid and become aware of music like great rolling organ music all about us, intermingling melody and harmony like a hundred vast pipe organs playing at once. Our atom sings and it is answered by music in all the neighboring atoms which stretch out into this vast assembly that make up the total human body. In a word, atoms are not matter but music; and since we are made of atoms, we are music too; and it is in this music that we find the real significance of life and the significance of the universe.

It is still too soon to say just exactly what this music is but we are learning a good deal about it. In the first place, this music obeys laws very different from those of a machine. Thus, the new motto of science appears to be that “the whole is more than the sum of the parts.”

Again this is difficult to explain with words, but you can get an idea of the meaning by considering the nature of the life process through which you carry on your day by day existence. We know that life consists of a continuous flow of atoms into and out of living matter. Every time you breathe, you breathe in some quintillions of oxygen and nitrogen atoms, absorb much of the oxygen and then breathe out other quintillions of carbon dioxide atoms. Breath by breath, minute by minute, hour by hour the atoms of your body are changing. Eventually, perhaps every five years, you get a whole new set of atoms. Today atomically speaking you are a brand new man compared to what you were five years ago. Yet anatomically you are practically unchanged; your personality varies very little; you keep your memories; you remain pretty much the same old fellow.

What is it which has somehow dominated this vast flux of atoms making up your stream of existence? What is it which can control this great flow and maintain your body and yourself pretty much the same throughout this vast series of changes?

Today science recognizes that one of the most significant hallmarks of reality is invariance under transformation. Whatever it is which keeps your life on its steady course through these vast changes, call it “spark of life,” spirit or soul,—it is that mysterious force which according to our new science has the supreme claim to reality. And now that we understand the atom as music and the universe as music we begin to see beyond the familiar visible and tangible world around us a new invisible world of music. And in this new unseen world of music around us we recognize the signs of the existence of the great spiritual realities which have, been the foundation for human faith down through the centuries.

A hundred years ago science, men thought, was opposed to religion. Today, science through this new atomic vision is affirming religion.

A NEW AFFIRMATION

Now turning from human life to the whole vast universe we see there too a new affirmation. For science brings us evidence that about five billion years ago there was some initial event, a time when everything started, a time of creation. We see signs that in this initial instant there was a great burst of light from which radiated all the matter and energy of the universe, atoms and electrons which condensed to form the stars, our own galaxy, our sun and our earth. In the beginning God said LET THERE BE LIGHT and there was light. Today, as yet we see only the intimations of this great cosmic story but they are intimations which point beyond a material universe. If the atoms within us are singing, so too are the atoms in the stars. The music of the spheres is not a poet’s dream but a reality. As yet we have learned to hear this music only dimly but we may hope that future generations of mankind will hear with a new understanding.

Thus we know that in this corporal music of the human body, there is the dominant all pervading harmony at the core, the music of the spirit which is our being. Looking out past the sky we can believe that in the corporate music of the stars, the music of the spheres, there is also a dominant all pervading harmony of the spirit, the spirit of the Creator. Here is affirmation for faith in a Creator who holds in His hands the farthest reaches of the stars and still stands close to each one of us a loving Father, ready to strengthen and sustain us if we will turn to Him.

Through this vision we see that the dominant power of the universe is not the shattering physical power of the atom, but the power of love. It is this power, and this alone which can guard us and guide us as we move forward into the awesome new world of atomics and automation, rockets and space.

Now the physical power of the atom is released by chain-reaction. One atom explodes two, two explode four, four explode eight, until finally the wave of explosion has released the total shattering power.

Today we need a chain reaction of the spirit to release in the world a new power of love. If only a few of us can have this new faith, and have it intensely, we can be the torch which will start the chain reaction to ignite men’s hearts throughout the world. To us of all nations comes this challenge, and we can and we will meet it. We can and we will open the doors to a golden future for all mankind. And as the dawn of that new day brightens to a radiant morning, we will understand at the last the meaning of the words: “The truth shall make you free.”

_________________

Donald H. Andrews is Professor of Chemistry at Johns Hopkins University.
 

 

SCIENCE AND RELIGION

In this mid-twentieth century science has rightly or wrongly attained enormous prestige. I think it is no exaggeration that in many areas science is threatening to supplant religion as a guide to life. Certainly if there were ever a time when we needed the most effective spiritual guidance, it is right now in this age when physical power stemming from science has grown so great as to threaten all life on earth.

It is for this reason that I think there is an imperative call for theologians, philosophers, and scientists to help each other to attain a deeper understanding of these problems where all three disciplines meet on common ground. A clearer view of beginnings is almost certain to mean a clearer view of ends. Perhaps a clearer understanding of creation will give us a clearer understanding of destiny. This kind of wisdom is needed today.—Donald H. Andrews, The Christian Scholar, Vol. 41, p. 360.