The night had closed in dark as pitch, and the wind swept on furiously from the stormy sky. Evans steered his little boat over the waves, guided by the familiar lights in the distance. To the south the lights of a tow of barges and a coasting schooner, threading the ship channel through the shoals, grew dimmer and finally were lost in the murk.
The conversation drifted on to the question of the use of scientists in war. Evans summed up his views on this point as follows:
“Make free use of scientists, but use them with skill. A scientist in war, if he hasn’t engineering sense as well as scientific spirit, is apt to be like a drunken man trying to make a speech; his mind is so discursive he can never get to the point. In peace the best measure of a scientist’s merit is the patience with which he can seek truth for its own sake, and his indifference to the application of his work to tangible results. In war this point of view is out of season; the man’s value then depends on his impatience to apply all he knows to getting results of the most tangible kind. At the dinner hour we sit down to eat our food and digest it; the dinner hour over, eating becomes unseasonable, and we must absorb what we have eaten and utilize it in the performance of the day’s work.
“In the war with Germany a vast amount of time was wasted by scientists who couldn’t adapt their points of view to war-time conditions. They insisted on laying their foundations with the same painstaking thoroughness and patience with which they would pave the way to a new theory of light; they kept before them the same ideal of perfection which the highest standards of peace-time scholarship demand. The Armistice found them still laying their foundations, and their efforts all wasted, as far as winning the war was concerned. Of course it pays to keep some fundamental work going on the chance of the war lasting a good many years, but there’s such a thing as sense of proportion about it; and that’s what lots of scientists lack.”
“How is the non-scientific head of a big department to know whether a line of research promises to bring results in a finite time or not?” asked Mortimer.
“That’s difficult,” said Evans. “The best thing is to have on hand some men of large caliber whom you can trust to have engineering sense as well as scientific vision, and make them keep the others in the paths of reason.”
Among other things Evans pointed out the great importance of weather forecasting in naval warfare.
“It doesn’t take much imagination to see that it might come in handy to know a little beforehand when something like what hit us to-day is coming. Imagine trying to carry out some kinds of naval operations during the worst of that squall. Then the direction of the wind may affect the visibility in different directions, so as to make it a decisive factor in a naval action.”
“Weather prediction is still pretty much a matter of guesswork, isn’t it?” asked Mortimer.
“No, there’s a good deal of science to it,” said Evans, “and there’s more coming to fruition than is generally known. Professor Jeremy is probably the ablest meteorologist in the world. He has been doing some wonderful research on the causes of weather changes, and I believe he’s in a way to reach some very important conclusions before long. You couldn’t do better than put him in charge of your Naval Weather Service, with a free hand to do things his own way. He’d have a sense of proportion, and go at the most practical kind of research which would in a few months give our navy so much better knowledge of weather prediction than the enemy as to be a really important military advantage. Then the trouble would be to make the admirals appreciate what they had, and use it.”