Science and Technology in World History - An Introduction by James E McClellan & Harold Dorn (1999).pdf - Historia techniki - crassial

INTRODUCTION

The Guiding Themes

The twentieth century witnessed a fateful change in the relationship

between science and society. In World War I scientists were conscripted

and died in the trenches. In World War II they were exempted as

national treasures and committed to secrecy, and they rallied behind

their country’s war effort. The explanation of the change is not hard to

ﬁnd—governments came to believe that theoretical research can pro-

duce practical improvements in industry, agriculture, and medicine.

That belief was ﬁrmly reinforced by developments such as the discov-

ery of antibiotics and the application of nuclear physics to the produc-

tion of atomic weapons. Science became so identiﬁed with practical

beneﬁts that the dependence of technology on science is commonly

assumed to be a timeless relationship and a single enterprise. Science

and technology, research and development—these are assumed to be

almost inseparable twins. These rank among the sacred phrases of our

time. The belief in the coupling of science and technology is now pet-

riﬁed in the dictionary deﬁnition of technology as applied science, and

journalistic reports under the rubric of “science news” are, in fact,

often accounts of engineering rather than scientiﬁc achievements.

That belief, however, is an artifact of today’s cultural attitudes super-

imposed without warrant on the historical record. Although the his-

torical record shows that in the earliest civilizations under the patron-

age of pharaohs and kings, and in general whenever centralized states

arose, knowledge of nature was exploited for useful purposes, it can-

not be said that science and technology were systemically and closely

related. By the same token, in ancient Greece (where theoretical science

had its beginning), among the scholastics of the Middle Ages, in the

time of Galileo and Newton, and even for Darwin and his contempo-

raries in the nineteenth century, science constituted a learned calling

whose results were recorded in scientiﬁc publications, while technol-

ogy was understood as the crafts practiced by unschooled artisans.

Until the second half of the nineteenth century few artisans or engineers

attended a university or, in many cases, received any formal schooling

at all. Conversely, the science curriculum of the university centered

largely on pure mathematics and what was often termed natural phi-

losophy—the philosophy of nature—and was written in technical terms

(and often language) foreign to artisans and engineers.

In some measure, the wish engenders the thought. Science has un-

doubtedly bestowed genuine beneﬁts on humankind, and it has fos-

tered the hope that research can be channeled in the direction of social

utility. But a more secure understanding of science, one less bound by

the cultural biases of our time, can be gained by viewing it through the

lens of history. Seen thus, with its splendid achievements but also with

its blemishes and sometimes in an elitist posture inconsistent with our

democratic preferences, science becomes a multidimensional reality

rather than a culture-bound misconception. At the same time, a more

accurate historical appreciation of technology will place proper empha-

sis on independent traditions of skilled artisans whose talents crafted

everyday necessities and amenities throughout the millennia of human

existence. Such a historical reappraisal will also show that in many

instances technology directed the development of science, rather than

the other way around.

In order to develop the argument that the relationship between sci-

ence and technology has been a historical process and not an inherent

identity, in this book we trace the joint and separate histories of science

and technology from the prehistoric era to the present. We intend to

review the common assumption that technology is applied science and

show, instead, that in most historical situations prior to the twentieth

century science and technology have progressed in either partial or full

isolation from each other—both intellectually and sociologically. In

the end, an understanding of the historical process will shed light on

the circumstances under which science and technology have indeed

merged over the past hundred years.

INTRODUCTION

PART I

From Ape to Alexander

Technology in the form of stone tools originated literally hand in hand

with humankind. Two million years ago a species of primate evolved

which anthropologists have labeled Homo habilis, or “handy man,” in

recognition of its ability, far beyond that of any other primate, to fash-

ion tools. Over the next 2,000 millennia our ancestors continued to

forage for food, using a toolkit that slowly became more elaborate and

complex. Only toward the end of that long prehistoric era did they

begin to observe the natural world systematically in ways that appear

akin to science. Even when a few communities gave up the foraging

way of life, around 12,000 years ago, in favor of farming or herding

and developed radically new tools and techniques for earning a living,

they established societies that show no evidence of patronizing scien-

tists or fostering scientiﬁc research. Only when civilized—city-based—

empires emerged in the ancient Near East did monarchs come to value

higher learning for its applications in the management of complex

societies and found institutions for those ends. The ancient Greeks

then added natural philosophy, and abstract theoretical science took

its place as a component of knowledge. An account of these develop-

ments forms the subject matter of part 1.

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