SPACE AND THE HYDROGEN AGE
Walter Russell delivered this address at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York on May 13, 1939, at the annual convention of The Eastern Electronic Association.
Hydrogen is the most plentiful substance that the sun generates in its outer atmosphere, and the most plentiful of our outer atmosphere beyond twenty miles. Our oceans are inexhaustible storehouses of voided hydrogen, which can be regenerated to active hydrogen.
I shall talk to you tonight about the reality of space as an equal partner with the solids of matter, which float in it. I shall also talk to you about the hydrogen age which is at our door, for an intimate knowledge of space is also at our door and it is that knowledge of space which will give us our hydrogen age. Also it will give us our new cosmogony. In fact, the very secrets of life and death, which have eluded man for ages, lie within a knowledge of space. This subject is very timely because of the concern of the present generation over the fuel problems of future generations. One of our distinguished scientists delivered an address recently, which was pessimistic in regard to future progress.
My talk tonight is not only a more hopeful answer, but it is also a general protest against the expanding universe theory, which modern science has conceived out of misinterpretations of natural phenomena. This idea that the universe is committing suicide has grown out of the unbalanced, one-way theory of the universe created by modern science, which investigates matter to form its conclusions and as yet knows practically nothing about space. With a knowledge of space, the dying universe, and its authority in the unbalanced second law of thermodynamics would be impossible.
Our distinguished scientist said that we had nearly reached the end of the tremendous progress of the last century. In fifty years from now, he states, we would be going on about as now with only slight improvements. In fifty years our oil supply will be exhausted; our coal will last for a thousand years, but we will probably not be able to get more work out of a pound of coal than we do now. Hence our enforced stoppage of progress.
Let me quote him: “There are, I think, no other possible sources of power of comparable cheapness. When the oil and coal are gone, we shall get our power directly from the sun through solar motors, or wind mills, or tidal machines, or else directly through growing and burning plants.”
UNLIMITED HYDROGEN: THE CHEAPEST AND BEST FUEL
It is very saddening to hear such an eminent scientist repeat the fears of past ages of men who insisted that we would have to go to bed in the dark when the whales were all killed. But sadder still is the lack of vision of all the scientists who fail to see an unlimited supply of hydrogen, the cheapest and best fuel the world has ever known, waiting for man to use it. Hydrogen is the most plentiful substance, which the sun generates in its outer atmosphere, and the most plentiful of our outer atmosphere beyond twenty miles. Also, our oceans are inexhaustible storehouses of voided hydrogen, which can be regenerated to active hydrogen.
Before the whales were all killed, man’s intelligence gave us kerosene and gas, then coal and gasoline. Before these are exhausted, his intelligence will give us hydrogen.
Do you realize what the coming of hydrogen in plentiful quantities would mean to the world? Let me stimulate your imagination by picturing an ocean liner manufacturing its own fuel, as it is needed, from either the water under it or the air above it, in one room of the capacity of one or two of its coal bunkers. It would not even need storage space for extra supply, for the hydrogen generators would be in the very fire chambers under the boilers.
Do not tell me that there is no hydrogen in air, for if you do, I will tell you that there is none in water. Water, air, hydrogen, and oxygen are not things; they are conditions of the light of the sun and the dark of space from which they sprang.
WE MUST KNOW THE SECRETS OF THE STRUCTURE OF SPACE
Through knowledge, we can supply the conditions that will give us hydrogen by voiding nitrogen as simply as we can supply the conditions that yield those elements by voiding water. By knowing how Nature blankets our earth with miles of hydrogen above the nitrogen and how the sun produces the conditions for making its huge hydrogen bonfires, we can do likewise. To acquire this knowledge one must know the secrets of the structure of space, for space is just fifty percent of the universal potential, a fact which science has not yet suspected.
Science already knows the chemical relation of hydrogen to water, but it has never suspected the spatial relation of hydrogen to nitrogen, which forms 88% of the lower part of the insulating blanket that we call air.
When this spatial relation is known, it will have so great an effect upon the new world of its making that a new chemistry will be ushered into our civilization, a chemistry which will take spatial pressures into partnership with material ones, as it should.
After all, the upper-earth hydrogen blanket is separated (and also insulated) from the surface-of-earth oxygen by the nitrogenous strata of a valence equaling the two. Nitrogen can therefore be easily voided and replaced by incandescent hydrogen, such as is found in the sun’s upper atmosphere.
ELEMENTS OF MATTER ARE NOT PERMANENTLY EXISTENT
To comprehend my meaning, you must disabuse your minds of the idea that the elements are permanently existent, for they are not. Metals are entirely voided in their salts, oxides, and silicates, and both hydrogen and oxygen are as entirely voided by water as sound is voided by silence. There is no such thing as transmutation of one element into another. One never can become another for each is voided when another condition makes its continuance impossible and another one possible.
Hydrogen flames leap for thousands of miles into the sun’s atmosphere, yet there is no hydrogen at all upon the sun’s surface until the time of its leaping into flame. If the amount of hydrogen which explodes from the sun’s surface in one week existed upon the sun, there would be no sun. It would explode. The sun generates hydrogen and burns it simultaneously, and an ocean liner could do the same.
Elements are not things; they are conditions. Produce a certain condition which is the pattern for hydrogen, or carbon dioxide, or sodium chloride, and they appear from space into which they continually disappear when the conditions are favorable, exactly as apples appear as the solids of apples and disappear as the gases of apples when conditions favor each stage of each cycle.
Science has already discovered the conditions necessary for producing hydrogen by voiding water, but by the primitive, cumbersome, and expensive method known as electrolysis. If the sun could speak, it would be very satirical about the inability of humans to perceive so obvious a thing as the sun’s method of solving its fuel problems in plentiful fashion.
ELEMENTS ARE BUT DIFFERENT CONDITIONS OF LIGHT PRESSURES
The trouble with humans is in forming wrong conclusions in relation to Nature’s expressions. We think, for example, that elements are different substances and that each substance is permanently existent as such. That is not true. Elements are but different conditions of light pressures. They are the raw materials for the fashioning of Creation’s images in the patterns controlled by light waves. They appear when the pressure necessary for their conditions appear and disappear when those pressure conditions cease. Every element in each octave occupies its own pressure position in its wave. Each element seems to be a different substance as the electric pressure conditions of each position in each wave of matter changes. However, it is not the substance that changes, it is the condition of the substance.
Voidance and re-creation is one of the simplest and most obvious principles of Nature. I cannot imagine how it has escaped discovery during the centuries. Oxygen, for example, is voided when you breathe it in. You produce a condition that calls for the pattern of carbon dioxide, and oxygen, as raw material, is as voided as though it never was. Iron, likewise, voids oxygen and oxygen voids iron by rusting. And so it goes all down through the octave waves.
THE TRUE NATURE OF SPACE
The greatest error of science is in relation to space. Science thinks of space either as a void or as an ether through which solids of matter travel. Sir Oliver Lodge tried to find a drag in this ether caused by the earth’s passage through it, but could not; therefore, he came to the conclusion that there was nothing there.
The fact is that space travels with its solids, for each solid is surrounded by a minus zero equal-and-opposite vacuity of the plus zero which we call matter. Matter floats in these insulating spatial counterparts. Positive electricity is accountable for the solids and negative electricity is accountable for the space.
The potential of solids is unequal, volume for volume, to the space that surrounds it, but space and its solids as wholes are equal to each other in potential. This makes the condition possible for performing what science calls work, which necessitates a high and low potential for inter-oscillation.
The centripetal power of gravity in great whirling nebula as expressed by positive electricity is winding energy uphill into those hot balls of fire, which hang in cold space by those two black arms in each spiral nucleus. Gravitation, uphill flow of energy, and positive electricity are the same thing.
Likewise, the two fiery white arms of such nebula are unwinding the cosmic clock by the centrifugal power of negative electricity, which science calls radiant energy. The black arms represent as great a force as the white suns, for matter is formed from them.
Our scientist friend says that the second law of thermodynamics is as firmly established as the law of gravitation. That could not be possible, for gravitation is an uphill flow of energy, and believers in the second law of thermodynamics refuse to concede the possibility of a simultaneous equal and opposite balance between the uphill and downhill flow of energy. In fact, that law is based upon the belief that energy flows only downhill.
All matter comes out of space by the action of positive electricity and is returned to space by the action of negative electricity. White-hot suns come from the blackness of cold space and cold space radiates from hot suns. The matter of space consists of holes surrounded by corpuscular solids, while the matter of solids consists of small dense cores surrounded by vast tenuous holes of space.
The very purpose of the hot suns is to act as crucibles for melting the raw materials which the Creator needs for expressing the idea of the universe. Contrarily, the very purpose of space is to cool the melted matter set out in order that it may become conditioned for the complex expressions of Creation. The two-way interchange between spatial holes and material solids is continuous.
Space has a structure that gives crystal forms to its solid counterparts. Each pair of solids in the universe is not only separated by its spatial envelope, but is insulated by space from contact with other solids. For this reason, it is impossible for two particles of matter actually to come in contact with each other.
Also, the path of every two solids in the universe is controlled by two foci, which keep the entire universe in balance. One of these foci represents density and the other one represents vacuity.
ABSOLUTE BALANCE IN NATURE
The most conspicuously obvious thing about all cause and effect in this universe is Balance. The second law of thermodynamic reeks with unbalance. It has no place whatsoever in Nature.
Every effect in Nature is based upon the wave and the wave is absolute in its balance. There is nothing in Nature outside of the wave; therefore, there can be no unbalanced thing in Nature.
The entire universe of motion is expressed by positive and negative electric opposites, which thrust away from each other in just the reverse manner from that which the Coulomb Law sets forth. Positive electricity charges through gravitation. The falling rain charges and heats the earth. Negative electricity discharges through radiation. The rising vapors discharge and cool the earth. Both expressions are equal and opposite. Expansion cannot exceed contraction. Each is actually the cause of the other. They spring from each other and their continuity constitutes a cycle, which could be recorded thus: heat radiates, radiation expands, expansion cools, cold generates, generation contracts, and contraction heats.
A NEW COSMOGONY
Time will not permit further development of this idea, so I will conclude by saying that the hydrogen age could be here within a year or two if it were not for the tremendous resistance set up by modern science to the most obvious simple truths of Nature. I know these secrets of space, which will give hydrogen to science, but my cosmogony is so radically different from that of modern science that every attempt to give voice to it meets with the usual fate of those whose ideas do not fit conventional patterns.
In order that it may not be lost to the world, I have put all this knowledge of space and the electric octave wave from which all things come into a book called The Cosmic Plan.1 Any scientist who comprehends the principles laid down in that book can produce hydrogen the way the sun produces it, or the way space enfolds our planet with it.
There are principles laid down in that book which will make a new world, but it cannot be printed until I can print it at my own expense because publishers submit my manuscripts to orthodox physicists for their approval of it. They might as well submit a book by Galileo to the Pope. The Cosmic Plan is a new cosmogony, which differs as much from this present one as the Copernican cosmogony differs from its Ptolemaic predecessor. Naturally, the orthodox believer in the theory of the dying, one-way, unbalanced universe will not approve of a theory of a two-way, balanced, living universe.
Scientists regard me as sort of an interloper in their difficult field, and I do not blame them a bit. As a sculptor I would feel the same about a physicist who thought he could revolutionize sculpture. They call me a mystic or an intuitive with a keen imagination, a person who does not use the recognized legitimate research laboratory methods of gaining knowledge.
THE UNIVERSE IS BUT ONE THING: LIGHT
I might say in reply that my laboratory is God’s whole big universe of all Nature, which I have observed as a thinker and found to be very simple. I see it as a whole, not as many separate parts. To me, the universe is but one thing-light, which is expressed in octave waves of light patterned into different conditions of light, which we call the elements of matter. I do not regard the elements of matter as different substances. To me they are but different conditions of the one thing, which the two opposed electric forces have divided into pairs of many seeming opposite expressions of the one thing from which they sprang.
I see no reason why man should not produce hydrogen the same way that Nature produces it. He has all the tools with which to do it when he but acquires the knowledge of Nature’s methods.
SEEMING COMPLEXITIES CONFUSE – TRUTH IS SIMPLE
Scientific observers of grains of sand in laboratories are handicapped by the kaleidoscopic multiplicity of things in their separate universes. They see their many things complexly instead of simply. Hence we find a preponderance of scientists who are merely photographers, mathematicians, statisticians, measurers, and quantity surveyors. There are too few thinkers in science and those who do think see things too complexly. Let me give you an example. Einstein once said, in effect: “It may sometime be shown that matter emerges from space, to again be swallowed up in it.”
To other physicists, this seemed a very liberal and radical statement. But to me, it sounded as though a man, looking at the sun, were to say: “It may sometime be shown that the light which vitalizes things on this earth has its origin in the sun.”
I wish to leave with you this one idea-that we are still primates, hardly out of the jungle, and hardly yet able to think. Anyone who tells you that we are near the end of the great progress of the last century is not taking into account our extreme youth as human thinkers. We still have so far to go that the progress of the last century will seem as nothing as compared with what will immediately follow a more intimate knowledge of space.
1. The Cosmic Plan, originally printed in 1953 as the Russell Cosmogony, has been republished by the University of Science and Philosophy under the title, A New Concept of the Universe: A Brief Treatise on the Russell Cosmogony.
Hydrogen is the most plentiful substance that the sun generates in its outer atmosphere, and the most plentiful of our outer atmosphere beyond twenty miles. Our oceans are inexhaustible storehouses of voided hydrogen, which can be regenerated to active hydrogen.
I shall talk to you tonight about the reality of space as an equal partner with the solids of matter, which float in it. I shall also talk to you about the hydrogen age which is at our door, for an intimate knowledge of space is also at our door and it is that knowledge of space which will give us our hydrogen age. Also it will give us our new cosmogony. In fact, the very secrets of life and death, which have eluded man for ages, lie within a knowledge of space. This subject is very timely because of the concern of the present generation over the fuel problems of future generations. One of our distinguished scientists delivered an address recently, which was pessimistic in regard to future progress.
My talk tonight is not only a more hopeful answer, but it is also a general protest against the expanding universe theory, which modern science has conceived out of misinterpretations of natural phenomena. This idea that the universe is committing suicide has grown out of the unbalanced, one-way theory of the universe created by modern science, which investigates matter to form its conclusions and as yet knows practically nothing about space. With a knowledge of space, the dying universe, and its authority in the unbalanced second law of thermodynamics would be impossible.
Our distinguished scientist said that we had nearly reached the end of the tremendous progress of the last century. In fifty years from now, he states, we would be going on about as now with only slight improvements. In fifty years our oil supply will be exhausted; our coal will last for a thousand years, but we will probably not be able to get more work out of a pound of coal than we do now. Hence our enforced stoppage of progress.
Let me quote him: “There are, I think, no other possible sources of power of comparable cheapness. When the oil and coal are gone, we shall get our power directly from the sun through solar motors, or wind mills, or tidal machines, or else directly through growing and burning plants.”
UNLIMITED HYDROGEN: THE CHEAPEST AND BEST FUEL
It is very saddening to hear such an eminent scientist repeat the fears of past ages of men who insisted that we would have to go to bed in the dark when the whales were all killed. But sadder still is the lack of vision of all the scientists who fail to see an unlimited supply of hydrogen, the cheapest and best fuel the world has ever known, waiting for man to use it. Hydrogen is the most plentiful substance, which the sun generates in its outer atmosphere, and the most plentiful of our outer atmosphere beyond twenty miles. Also, our oceans are inexhaustible storehouses of voided hydrogen, which can be regenerated to active hydrogen.
Before the whales were all killed, man’s intelligence gave us kerosene and gas, then coal and gasoline. Before these are exhausted, his intelligence will give us hydrogen.
Do you realize what the coming of hydrogen in plentiful quantities would mean to the world? Let me stimulate your imagination by picturing an ocean liner manufacturing its own fuel, as it is needed, from either the water under it or the air above it, in one room of the capacity of one or two of its coal bunkers. It would not even need storage space for extra supply, for the hydrogen generators would be in the very fire chambers under the boilers.
Do not tell me that there is no hydrogen in air, for if you do, I will tell you that there is none in water. Water, air, hydrogen, and oxygen are not things; they are conditions of the light of the sun and the dark of space from which they sprang.
WE MUST KNOW THE SECRETS OF THE STRUCTURE OF SPACE
Through knowledge, we can supply the conditions that will give us hydrogen by voiding nitrogen as simply as we can supply the conditions that yield those elements by voiding water. By knowing how Nature blankets our earth with miles of hydrogen above the nitrogen and how the sun produces the conditions for making its huge hydrogen bonfires, we can do likewise. To acquire this knowledge one must know the secrets of the structure of space, for space is just fifty percent of the universal potential, a fact which science has not yet suspected.
Science already knows the chemical relation of hydrogen to water, but it has never suspected the spatial relation of hydrogen to nitrogen, which forms 88% of the lower part of the insulating blanket that we call air.
When this spatial relation is known, it will have so great an effect upon the new world of its making that a new chemistry will be ushered into our civilization, a chemistry which will take spatial pressures into partnership with material ones, as it should.
After all, the upper-earth hydrogen blanket is separated (and also insulated) from the surface-of-earth oxygen by the nitrogenous strata of a valence equaling the two. Nitrogen can therefore be easily voided and replaced by incandescent hydrogen, such as is found in the sun’s upper atmosphere.
ELEMENTS OF MATTER ARE NOT PERMANENTLY EXISTENT
To comprehend my meaning, you must disabuse your minds of the idea that the elements are permanently existent, for they are not. Metals are entirely voided in their salts, oxides, and silicates, and both hydrogen and oxygen are as entirely voided by water as sound is voided by silence. There is no such thing as transmutation of one element into another. One never can become another for each is voided when another condition makes its continuance impossible and another one possible.
Hydrogen flames leap for thousands of miles into the sun’s atmosphere, yet there is no hydrogen at all upon the sun’s surface until the time of its leaping into flame. If the amount of hydrogen which explodes from the sun’s surface in one week existed upon the sun, there would be no sun. It would explode. The sun generates hydrogen and burns it simultaneously, and an ocean liner could do the same.
Elements are not things; they are conditions. Produce a certain condition which is the pattern for hydrogen, or carbon dioxide, or sodium chloride, and they appear from space into which they continually disappear when the conditions are favorable, exactly as apples appear as the solids of apples and disappear as the gases of apples when conditions favor each stage of each cycle.
Science has already discovered the conditions necessary for producing hydrogen by voiding water, but by the primitive, cumbersome, and expensive method known as electrolysis. If the sun could speak, it would be very satirical about the inability of humans to perceive so obvious a thing as the sun’s method of solving its fuel problems in plentiful fashion.
ELEMENTS ARE BUT DIFFERENT CONDITIONS OF LIGHT PRESSURES
The trouble with humans is in forming wrong conclusions in relation to Nature’s expressions. We think, for example, that elements are different substances and that each substance is permanently existent as such. That is not true. Elements are but different conditions of light pressures. They are the raw materials for the fashioning of Creation’s images in the patterns controlled by light waves. They appear when the pressure necessary for their conditions appear and disappear when those pressure conditions cease. Every element in each octave occupies its own pressure position in its wave. Each element seems to be a different substance as the electric pressure conditions of each position in each wave of matter changes. However, it is not the substance that changes, it is the condition of the substance.
Voidance and re-creation is one of the simplest and most obvious principles of Nature. I cannot imagine how it has escaped discovery during the centuries. Oxygen, for example, is voided when you breathe it in. You produce a condition that calls for the pattern of carbon dioxide, and oxygen, as raw material, is as voided as though it never was. Iron, likewise, voids oxygen and oxygen voids iron by rusting. And so it goes all down through the octave waves.
THE TRUE NATURE OF SPACE
The greatest error of science is in relation to space. Science thinks of space either as a void or as an ether through which solids of matter travel. Sir Oliver Lodge tried to find a drag in this ether caused by the earth’s passage through it, but could not; therefore, he came to the conclusion that there was nothing there.
The fact is that space travels with its solids, for each solid is surrounded by a minus zero equal-and-opposite vacuity of the plus zero which we call matter. Matter floats in these insulating spatial counterparts. Positive electricity is accountable for the solids and negative electricity is accountable for the space.
The potential of solids is unequal, volume for volume, to the space that surrounds it, but space and its solids as wholes are equal to each other in potential. This makes the condition possible for performing what science calls work, which necessitates a high and low potential for inter-oscillation.
The centripetal power of gravity in great whirling nebula as expressed by positive electricity is winding energy uphill into those hot balls of fire, which hang in cold space by those two black arms in each spiral nucleus. Gravitation, uphill flow of energy, and positive electricity are the same thing.
Likewise, the two fiery white arms of such nebula are unwinding the cosmic clock by the centrifugal power of negative electricity, which science calls radiant energy. The black arms represent as great a force as the white suns, for matter is formed from them.
Our scientist friend says that the second law of thermodynamics is as firmly established as the law of gravitation. That could not be possible, for gravitation is an uphill flow of energy, and believers in the second law of thermodynamics refuse to concede the possibility of a simultaneous equal and opposite balance between the uphill and downhill flow of energy. In fact, that law is based upon the belief that energy flows only downhill.
All matter comes out of space by the action of positive electricity and is returned to space by the action of negative electricity. White-hot suns come from the blackness of cold space and cold space radiates from hot suns. The matter of space consists of holes surrounded by corpuscular solids, while the matter of solids consists of small dense cores surrounded by vast tenuous holes of space.
The very purpose of the hot suns is to act as crucibles for melting the raw materials which the Creator needs for expressing the idea of the universe. Contrarily, the very purpose of space is to cool the melted matter set out in order that it may become conditioned for the complex expressions of Creation. The two-way interchange between spatial holes and material solids is continuous.
Space has a structure that gives crystal forms to its solid counterparts. Each pair of solids in the universe is not only separated by its spatial envelope, but is insulated by space from contact with other solids. For this reason, it is impossible for two particles of matter actually to come in contact with each other.
Also, the path of every two solids in the universe is controlled by two foci, which keep the entire universe in balance. One of these foci represents density and the other one represents vacuity.
ABSOLUTE BALANCE IN NATURE
The most conspicuously obvious thing about all cause and effect in this universe is Balance. The second law of thermodynamic reeks with unbalance. It has no place whatsoever in Nature.
Every effect in Nature is based upon the wave and the wave is absolute in its balance. There is nothing in Nature outside of the wave; therefore, there can be no unbalanced thing in Nature.
The entire universe of motion is expressed by positive and negative electric opposites, which thrust away from each other in just the reverse manner from that which the Coulomb Law sets forth. Positive electricity charges through gravitation. The falling rain charges and heats the earth. Negative electricity discharges through radiation. The rising vapors discharge and cool the earth. Both expressions are equal and opposite. Expansion cannot exceed contraction. Each is actually the cause of the other. They spring from each other and their continuity constitutes a cycle, which could be recorded thus: heat radiates, radiation expands, expansion cools, cold generates, generation contracts, and contraction heats.
A NEW COSMOGONY
Time will not permit further development of this idea, so I will conclude by saying that the hydrogen age could be here within a year or two if it were not for the tremendous resistance set up by modern science to the most obvious simple truths of Nature. I know these secrets of space, which will give hydrogen to science, but my cosmogony is so radically different from that of modern science that every attempt to give voice to it meets with the usual fate of those whose ideas do not fit conventional patterns.
In order that it may not be lost to the world, I have put all this knowledge of space and the electric octave wave from which all things come into a book called The Cosmic Plan.1 Any scientist who comprehends the principles laid down in that book can produce hydrogen the way the sun produces it, or the way space enfolds our planet with it.
There are principles laid down in that book which will make a new world, but it cannot be printed until I can print it at my own expense because publishers submit my manuscripts to orthodox physicists for their approval of it. They might as well submit a book by Galileo to the Pope. The Cosmic Plan is a new cosmogony, which differs as much from this present one as the Copernican cosmogony differs from its Ptolemaic predecessor. Naturally, the orthodox believer in the theory of the dying, one-way, unbalanced universe will not approve of a theory of a two-way, balanced, living universe.
Scientists regard me as sort of an interloper in their difficult field, and I do not blame them a bit. As a sculptor I would feel the same about a physicist who thought he could revolutionize sculpture. They call me a mystic or an intuitive with a keen imagination, a person who does not use the recognized legitimate research laboratory methods of gaining knowledge.
THE UNIVERSE IS BUT ONE THING: LIGHT
I might say in reply that my laboratory is God’s whole big universe of all Nature, which I have observed as a thinker and found to be very simple. I see it as a whole, not as many separate parts. To me, the universe is but one thing-light, which is expressed in octave waves of light patterned into different conditions of light, which we call the elements of matter. I do not regard the elements of matter as different substances. To me they are but different conditions of the one thing, which the two opposed electric forces have divided into pairs of many seeming opposite expressions of the one thing from which they sprang.
I see no reason why man should not produce hydrogen the same way that Nature produces it. He has all the tools with which to do it when he but acquires the knowledge of Nature’s methods.
SEEMING COMPLEXITIES CONFUSE – TRUTH IS SIMPLE
Scientific observers of grains of sand in laboratories are handicapped by the kaleidoscopic multiplicity of things in their separate universes. They see their many things complexly instead of simply. Hence we find a preponderance of scientists who are merely photographers, mathematicians, statisticians, measurers, and quantity surveyors. There are too few thinkers in science and those who do think see things too complexly. Let me give you an example. Einstein once said, in effect: “It may sometime be shown that matter emerges from space, to again be swallowed up in it.”
To other physicists, this seemed a very liberal and radical statement. But to me, it sounded as though a man, looking at the sun, were to say: “It may sometime be shown that the light which vitalizes things on this earth has its origin in the sun.”
I wish to leave with you this one idea-that we are still primates, hardly out of the jungle, and hardly yet able to think. Anyone who tells you that we are near the end of the great progress of the last century is not taking into account our extreme youth as human thinkers. We still have so far to go that the progress of the last century will seem as nothing as compared with what will immediately follow a more intimate knowledge of space.
1. The Cosmic Plan, originally printed in 1953 as the Russell Cosmogony, has been republished by the University of Science and Philosophy under the title, A New Concept of the Universe: A Brief Treatise on the Russell Cosmogony.