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IN PRAISE OF SCIENCE    O'DELL

as a means of bringing fuller understanding of the complex present and perhaps even gaining some foresight on the road ahead. For today human society stands at the end of what has been a scientific millennium which has produced advances in scientific knowledge that are fully compatible with the Age of Liberation of which we are a part. This scientific thousand-year-span of time through which the great majority of mankind has passed, also places human society today on the threshold of a new renaissance in world culture and a new period in civilized world behavior.

Characteristic of one of the processes by which human knowledge is being internationalized UNESCO, a branch of the United Nations, has organized a worldwide observance commemorating the One Thousandth Anniversary of the birth of Abu Al Biruni, one of the great scientists of the Tenth Century. As a geographer, Al Biruni theorized on the spherical shape of the earth including the idea that the earth rotates on its own axis and predicted there was land in the western hemisphere. He published a scientific compendium of plants and their uses in pharmacology and did pioneering work in the science of hydrostatics, a branch of modern physics which studies the dynamics of liquids at rest. Born in what is now Soviet Central Asia, Al Biruni organized an Academy of Sciences in that area, one of the honored members of which was the great mathematician Avicenna, who originated the science of algebra. Writing in both the Arabic and Parsee languages, Al Biruni was one of the leading figures in world science during the medieval period in human history, when for six centuries Western Europe was in its "dark ages" and the illuminating influence in world knowledge rested primarily upon the creative work of Islamic scholarship. His collected works were published in 1957 in the USSR, the same year that SPUTNIK was launched. This year is also the 500th Anniversary of the birth of the great European scientist, Nicolaus Copernicus, an astronomer whose scientific inquiry led to the conclusion that the sun is the center of the solar system. Copernicus' work marked a nodal point in the development of science and mathematics on the European continent. Copernicus' major scientific work, after a struggle with the Church authorities, was finally published months before he died in 1543. This work reversed theories concerning the Universe that had held firm since the Roman period in Egypt in the second century of the Christian era.

This year 1973 is of no less significance in the sphere of the social sciences. It is the 125th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in

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