Volume 1

The life of the universe as conceived by man from the earliest ages to the present time / by Svante Arrhenius, translated by Dr. H. Borns.

  • Arrhenius, Svante, 1859-1927.
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The life of the universe as conceived by man from the earliest ages to the present time / by Svante Arrhenius, translated by Dr. H. Borns. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    know at present. During the space of scarcely ten thousand years which we assign to the history of civilisation, much greater progress has no doubt been made than during the whole of the pre- historic ages. There was a sad cultural retro- gression during the Middle Ages. Yet we may assert that we have advanced more in the last thousand years than in all the previous ages together. And again, with all admiration for the eminent work which Laplace and Herschel did a hundred years ago, we may assert that the last hun- dred years have helped us on more than the nine hundred previous years. The application of the mechanical theory of heat to cosmogonic prob- lems alone has done more to elucidate those problems than all the previous investigations, and when we think of the vast fields which spec- trum analysis and the study of thermal radiation, of the radiation pressure, and of radioactivity have opened up to us, the balance will decidedly turn in favour of the past century. It is true that we cannot anticipate the judgment which the future may pass on the real achievements of the present age. Yet no scientist will dispute the fact that science has never advanced so rapidly as in our time.