N XXII THE POSSIBILITIES OF COÖPERATION IN RESEARCH GEORGE ELLERY HALE O one can survey the part played by science in the war without reflecting on the ultimate influence of the war on science. Able investigators have been killed or incapacitated, and with them a host of men who might have taken high places in research. Sources of revenue have been cut off, and the heavy financial burdens permanently imposed upon individuals, institutions, and governments must tend to reduce the funds available for the advancement of science. On the other hand, the usefulness of science is appreciated as it never has been before, and some newly enlightened governments have already recognized that large appropriations for research will bring manifold benefits to the state. The leaders of industry have also been quick to appreciate the increased returns that research renders possible, and industrial laboratories are multiplying at an unprecedented rate. The dearth of available investigators, and the higher salary scale of the industrial world, have seriously affected educational institutions, members of whose scientific staffs, inadequately paid and tempted by offers of powerful instrumental equipment, have been drawn into the industries. On the other hand, industrial leaders have repeatedly emphasized the fundamental importance of scientific researches made solely for the advancement of knowledge, and the necessity of basing all great industrial advances on the results of such investigations. Thus they may be expected to contribute even more liberally than before to the development of laboratories organized for work of this nature. Educational institutions are also likely to recognize that science should play a larger part in their curriculum, and that men skilled in research should be developed in greatly increased numbers. The enlarged appreciation of science by the public, the demand for investigators in the industries, and the attitude of industrial leaders of wide vision toward fundamental science, should facilitate attempts to secure the added endowments and equipment required. On the whole, the outlook in America seems most encouraging. But the great advance in science that thus appears to be within reach cannot be attained without organized effort and much hard work. On the one hand, the present interest of the public in science must be developed and utilized to the full, and on the other, the spirit of coöperation that played so large a part during the war must be applied to the lasting advantage of science and research. Fortunately enough, this spirit has not been confined within national boundaries. The harmony of purpose and unity of effort displayed by the nations of the Entente in the prosecution of the war have also drawn them more closely together in science and research, with consequences that are bound to prove fruitful in coming years. The Honorable Elihu Root, who combines the wide vision of a great statesman with a keen appreciation of the importance and methods of scientific research, has recently expressed himself as follows: Science has been arranging, classifying, methodizing, simplifying everything except itself. It has made possible the tremendous modern development of the power of organization which has so multiplied the effective power of human effort as to make the differences from the past seem to be of kind rather than of degree. It has organized itself very imperfectly. Scientific men are only recently realizing that the principles which apply to success on a large scale in transportation and manufacture and general staff work apply to them; that the difference between a mob and an army does not depend upon occupation or purpose but upon human nature; that the effective power of a great number of scientific men may be increased by organization just as the effective power of a great number of laborers may be increased by military discipline. The emphasis laid by Mr. Root on the importance of organization in science must not be misinterpreted. For many years he has been President of the Board of Trustees of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and an active member of its Executive Committee. Thus kept in close touch with scientific research, he is well aware of the vital importance of individual initiative and the necessity of encouraging the independent efforts of the original thinker. Thus he goes on to say: This attitude follows naturally from the demand of true scientific work for individual concentration and isolation. The sequence, however, is not necessary or laudable. Your isolated and concentrated scientist must know what has gone before, or he will waste his life in doing what has already been done, or in repeating past failures. He must know something about what his contemporaries are trying to do, or he will waste his life in duplicating effort. The history of science is so vast and contemporary effort is so active that if he undertakes to acquire this knowledge by himself alone his life is largely wasted in doing that; his initiative and creative power are gone before he is ready to use them. Occasionally a man appears who has the instinct to reject the negligible. A very great mind goes directly to the decisive fact, the determining symptom, and can afford not to burden itself with a great mass of unimportant facts; but there are few such minds even among those capable of real scientific work. All other minds need to be guided away from the useless and towards the useful. That can be done only by the application of scientific method to science itself through the purely scientific process of organizing effort. It is plain that if we are to have effective organization in science, it must be adapted to the needs of the individual worker, stimulating him to larger conceptions, emphasizing the value of original effort, and encouraging independence of action, while at the same time securing the advantages of wide coöperation and division of labor, reducing unnecessary duplication of work and providing the means of facilitating research and promoting discovery and progress. A casual view of the problem of effecting such organization of science might lead to the conclusion that the aims just enumerated are mutually incompatible. It can be shown by actual examples, however, that this is not the case, and that an important advance, in harmony with Mr. Root's conception, is entirely possible. It goes without saying that no scheme of organization, effected by lesser men, can ever duplicate the epoch-making discoveries of the Faradays, the Darwins, the Pasteurs, and the Rayleighs, who have worked largely unaided, and who will continue to open up the chief pathways of science. Even for such men, however, organization can accomplish much, not by seeking to plan their researches or control their methods, but by securing coöperation, if and when it is needed, and by rendering unnecessary some of the routine work they are now forced to perform. Let us now turn to some examples of organized research, beginning with a familiar case drawn from the field of astronomy, where the wide expanse of the heavens and the natural limitations of single observers, and even of the largest observatories, led long ago to coöperative effort. In the words of the late Sir David Gill, then Astronomer Royal at the Cape of Good Hope, the great comet of 1882 showed "an astonishing brilliancy as it rose behind the mountains on the east of Table Bay, and seemed in no way diminished in brightness when the sun rose a few minutes afterward. It was only necessary to shade the eye from direct sunlight with a hand at arm's length, to see the comet, with its brilliant white nucleus and dense white, sharply bordered tail of quite half a degree in length." This extraordinary phenomenon, more brilliant than any comet since 1843, marked the beginning of 1 Some duplication is frequently desirable. celestial photography at the Cape of Good Hope. No special photographic telescope was available, but Sir David enlisted the aid of a local photographer, whose camera, strapped to an equatorial telescope, immediately yielded pictures of exceptional value. But even more striking than the image of the comet itself was the dense background of stars simultaneously registered upon these plates. Stellar photographs had been taken before, but they had shown only a few of the brighter stars, and no such demonstration of the boundless possibilities of astronomical photography had ever been encountered. Always alive to new opportunities and keen in the appreciation of new methods, Sir David adopted similar means for the mapping of more than 450,000 stars, whose positions were determined through the coöperation of Professor Kapteyn of Groningen, who measured their images on the photographs. Stimulated by this success, the Henry Brothers soon adopted photographic methods for star charting at the Paris Observatory, and in 1887 an International Congress, called at Sir David's suggestion, met in Paris to arrange for a general survey of the entire heavens by photography. Fifty-six delegates of seventeen different nationalities resolved to construct a photographic chart of the whole sky, comprising stars down to the fourteenth magnitude, estimated to be twenty millions in number. A standard form of photographic telescope was adopted for use at eighteen observatories scattered over the globe, with results which have appeared in many volumes. These contain the measured positions of the stars, and are supplemented by heliogravure enlargements from the plates, estimated, when complete for the entire atlas of the sky, to form a pile thirty feet high and two tons in weight. The great coöperative undertaking just described is one that involves dealing with a task that is too large for a single institution, and therefore calls for a division of labor among a number of participants. It should be remembered, however, that a very different mode of attacking such a problem may be employed. In fact, although the difference between the two methods may |