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SCIENCE IN THE UNIVERSITIES
That Science has radically altered man's material environment needs no saying. It has brought within the reach of common man (but not everywhere so far) a level of prosperity never attained before At all times great seers and sages have dreamt of such a world, but till now the necessary means, depending as they do not on science and technology, have been lacking in the great civilisations and cultures of antiquity, and as also of later times, slave labour was an integral clement Aristotle said slavery could only be abolished when machines could be invented to do manual work This is what has happened, but it has taken more than two thousand years to do it Just as machines have now liberated man of manual drudgery, so the new developments in cybernetics--computation and automationcould in the near future take away from him the burden of boring work and mental rudgery Again, whereas till now it has been the pressure of environment which has influenced the course of organic evolution, now man using his unique faculty of mind and utilising the power that the discovery of science has given him can, it appears, shape in a deliberate way his own destiny
The pursuit of material affluence and power, which has been till now a dominant thing, is likely to give way to pursuit of higher values and fulfilment in a deeper sense-fulfilment society to use Huxley's term This is what Acharya Vinoba Bhave calls the age of science and spirituality. All this would come if man can escape a nuclear holocaust There is no hiding the grim fact that man today faces an unprecedented peril in depth and extent in the shape of a possible misuse, deliberate or accidental, of nuclear knowledge The explosion energy released in war by man in all history totals to about 5 million tons (5 megatons) of chemical explosive, say, TNT The total energy released in nuclear test explosions during these years of 'peace is equivalent to more than 500 megatons of TNT, Ifa full-scale nuclear war breaks out the explosion energy may reach tens of thousands of megatons, and hundreds of millions of fatalities in the first few hours to a few days of the outburst of war. 5-500-50,000 MT are the awesome pumbers of our times Atom and ahımnsa, or to put it differently man's knowledge of outer space and the space within his skull, are not in balance It 18 this imbalance which mankind must seek to redress.
Man now faces himself He faces the choice of rolling down an abyss to partial extinction or raising himself to new heights of fulfilment as yet unimagined
| SR No. | 010772 |
| Book Title | Ratnamuni Smruti Granth |
| Original Sutra Author | N/A |
| Author | Vijaymuni Shastri, Harishankar Sharma |
| Publisher | Gurudev Smruti Granth Samiti |
| Publication Year | 1964 |
| Total Pages | 687 |
| Language | Hindi |
| Classification | Book_Devnagari |
| File Size | 21 MB |