"Albert Einstein. The world as I see it (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

Lorentz has also devoted his energies to the service of international
cultural ends in another way, by consenting to serve on the League of
Nations Commission for international intellectual co-operation, which was
called into existence some five years ago with Bergson as chairman. For the
last year Lorentz has presided over the Commission, which, with the active
support of its subordinate, the Paris Institute, is to act as a go-between
in the domain of intellectual and artistic work among the various spheres of
culture. There too the beneficent influence of this intelligent, humane, and
modest personality, whose unspoken but faithfully followed advice is, "Not
mastery but service," will lead people in the right way.

May his example contribute to the triumph of that spirit !


In Honour of Arnold Berliner's Seventieth Birthday

(Arnold Berliner is the editor of the periodical Die
Naturrvissenschaften.)

I should like to take this opportunity of telling my friend Berliner
and the readers of this paper why I rate him and his work so highly. It has
to be done here because it is one's only chance of getting such things said;
since our training in objectivity has led to a taboo on everything personal,
which we mortals may transgress only on quite exceptional occasions such as
the present one.

And now, after this dash for liberty, back to the objective! The
province of scientifically determined fact has been enormously extended,
theoretical knowledge has become vastly more profound in every department of
science. But the assimilative power of the human intellect is and remains
strictly limited. Hence it was inevitable that the activity of the
individual investigator should be confined to a smaller and smaller section
of human knowledge. Worse still, as a result of this specialization, it is
becoming increasingly difficult for even a rough general grasp of science as
a whole, without which the true spirit of research is inevitably
handicapped, to keep pace with progress. A situation is developing similar
to the one symbolically represented in the Bible by the story of the Tower
of Babel. Every serious scientific worker is painfully conscious of this
involuntary relegation to an ever-narrowing sphere of knowledge, which is
threatening to deprive the investigator of his broad horizon and degrade him
to the level of a mechanic.

We have all suffered under this evil, without making any effort to
mitigate it. But Berliner has come to the rescue, as far as the
German-speaking world is concerned, in the most admirable way: He saw that
the existing popular periodicals were sufficient to instruct and stimulate
the layman; but he also saw that a first-class, well-edited organ was needed
for the guidance of the scientific worker who desired to be put sufficiently
au courant of developments in scientific problems, methods, and results to
be able to form a judgment of his own. Through many years of hard work he