THE FRATERNITY OF SCIENCE

Michael Pupin is known to many as the author of an autobiography, unique among its contemporaries in sanity and in self restraint. Yet his name will linger in history as one of the foremost scientists of his time. So it is with a certain respect that one reads his address at the gathering of the International Electro-Technical Commission in which he suggests the fraternity which is concomitant with science.

"The names Volt, Ampere, Ohm, Faraday, Henry, Gauss, Coulomb, Joule are household gods, and they remind us that we have the same interest and worship at the altar of the same patron saints--Kelven, Helmholtz, Maxwell. Heitz, Sumens, Cramme, Paccenotte. We have the same household gods and the same patron saints. We are all one. So each one of these meetings looks more and more like a family gathering. I wish that the American Congress were here and the American Senate to watch our proceedings and learn that the scientist and the engineer have discovered the great secret--greater than anything in electrical science or in any other science--the secret of how to lay the true foundation for a true League of Nations."

These are apparently strange words from a pure scientist. Yet Professor Pupin's position and experience merely serve to give them greater weight. Science has made the world smaller, bringing about multifarious political factions. Perhaps it is now going to find a method to eliminate these frictions by establishing a fraternity of science in an age when the fraternity of religion is at best a remembrance. At least any efforts made in that direction will receive the cooperation of intelligent minds scientific or other wise.