Science As A Refuge

That science can be a refuge from the world is a conviction comman among men and women who turn to it. Abraham Pais remarks that Einstein "once commented that he had sold himself body and soul to science, being in flight from the 'I' and the 'we' to the 'it'." But science as a means of escaping from the familiar world of birth and childhood and language when that world mounts an overwhelming threat- science as a way out, a portable culture, an international fellowship and the only abiding certitude- must become a more desperate and therefore a more total dependency. Chaim Weizmann gives some measure of that totality in the harsher world of the Russian Pole when he writes that "the acquisition of knowledge was not for us so much a normal process of education as the storing up of weapons in an arsenal by means of which we hoped later to be able to hold our own in a hostile world."