WSP03964

• File Number: 8210.110.60
• Description: Colorado River Water Users Association
• Basin: Colorado Mainstem
• Date: 12/4/1958
• Author: CRWUA
• Title: Proceedings of the 15th Annual Conference
• Water Supply Pro - Doc Type: Annual Report

Most of these developments and progress are within the understanding
of the ordinary man because they are the conventional values of his life and
work-explained in his education and experience. But this is not true of atomic
energy. Here uncertainty takes over in a mixture of science and politics, and
the well-advertised wonderland of the atomic age. The hopes and fears of the
future popularly reside in the mystery of the atom, and the mystery of the
atom is still unsolved.

This becomes confusing to follow and the easy solution is to enjoy
the new luxuries of living of the period and leave the understanding of what
is going on to a supposedly gifted few.

But it is apparent that the achievements or progress of the past
twenty years are the prelude only to a still more intensive period of inter-
national competition and vast public expenditures whose objectives are, in
substantial part, the further exploration of abstract science.

The majority of the developments of the past twenty years have
centered in Ame rica, because at the start of the period, this country possessed
the greatest known resources of energy and the largest group of engineers and
research workers in the world capable of converting the discoveries of abstract
science into the reality of use. It also had the stimulus of freedom and the
unlimited financing of World War U.

The result has been explo sion of progress in engineering and funda-
mental science, of which the use and application of atomic energy was only a
part.

The fact that Russia, also possessing vast undeveloped resources of
energy, is now racing to equal or exceed the wealth of America in resources
and technology by forced mobilization of education and manpower and is giving
America no time to relax in the softening luxuries of present achievement. It
is increasingly evident that the average citizen must seek some understanding
of the situation in words which he can understand and some answer to the
question of what it is all about.

The question is an old one. It is the same question of "what and how
is the world made" as voiced by Thales of Miletus twenty-five centuries ago,
and it still has the same lack of a final answer, whether based on the philosophy
of the ancient Greeks or the modern mathematical devices of quantum mechanics.

But each step of progres s in search of "what the world is made of",
or the ultimate particle of creation, has resulted in tremendous change and
advancement of civilization. The competition for further knowledge is no
longer an academic one, and enough has been disclosed to indicate that the
answer, when found, will be contained in the familiar yet mysterious phenomena
of energy.

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