The responsibilities of physicists for the future

“Scientists should have a greater awareness of their responsibilities to society.” This statement, often heard nowadays, has the ring of truth, but the specific responsibilities are seldom listed except in a vague way. When they are discussed by humanists some of the principal responsibilities turn out to be of a sort scientists cannot accept. Usually there lurks in the, background an insinuation that physicists, having released on an unsuspecting world some sinister force such as nuclear energy, should bottle up their djinn again and be more careful in the future. A number of commentators have even gone so far as to state flatly that humanity would be much better off if science had been nipped in the first bud and never allowed to develop its materialistic control over man at all.