Science And Technology example essay topic

Technology is the systematic study of techniques for making and doing things; science is the systematic attempt to understand and interpret the world. While technology is concerned with the fabrication and use of artifacts, science is devoted to the more conceptual enterprise of understanding the environment, and it depends upon the comparatively sophisticated skills of literacy and numeracy. Such skills became available only with the emergence of the great world civilizations, so that it is possible to say that science began with those civilizations, some 3,000 years BC, whereas technology, as we have seen, is as old as manlike life. Science and technology developed as different and separate activities, the former being for several millennia a field of fairly abstruse speculation practiced by a class of aristocratic philosophers, while the latter remained a matter of essentially practical concern to craftsmen of many types. There were points of intersection, such as the use of mathematical concepts in building and irrigation work, but for the most part the functions of scientist and technologist (to use these modern terms retrospectively) remained distinct in the ancient cultures. The situation began to change during the medieval period of development in the West (AD 500-1500), when both technical innovation and scientific understanding interacted with the stimuli of commercial expansion and a flourishing urban culture.

The robust growth of technology in these centuries could not fail to attract the interest of educated men. Early in the 17th century, the natural philosopher Francis Bacon had recognized three great technological innovations-the magnetic compass, the printing press, and gunpowder-as the distinguishing achievements of modern man, and he had advocated experimental science as a means of enlarging man's dominion over nature. By emphasizing a practical role for science in this way, Bacon implied a harmonization of science and technology, and he made his intention explicit by urging scientists to study the methods of craftsmen and craftsmen to learn more science. Bacon, with Descartes and other contemporaries, for the first time saw man becoming the master of nature, and a convergence between the traditional pursuits of science and technology was to be the way by which such mastery could be achieved. The role of Edison is also particularly significant in the deepening relationship between science and technology, because the prodigious trial-and-error process by which he selected the carbon filament for his electric light bulb in 1879 resulted in the creation of what may be regarded as the world's first genuine industrial research laboratory.

From this achievement the application of scientific principles to technology grew rapidly. This was not just a one-way influence of science on technology, because technology created new tools and machines with which the scientists were able to achieve an ever-increasing insight into the natural world. Taken together, these developments brought technology to its modern highly efficient level of performance. Judged entirely on its own traditional grounds of evaluation-that is, in terms of efficiency-the achievement of modern technology has been admirable.

Voices from other fields, however, began to raise disturbing questions, grounded in other modes of evaluation, as technology became a dominant influence in society. In the mid-19th century, the non-technologists were almost unanimously enchanted by the wonders of the new man-made environment growing up around them. Even Marx and Engels, espousing a radically different political orientation, welcomed technological progress because in their eyes it produced an imperative need for socialist ownership and control of industry. Yet even in the midst of this optimism, a few voices of dissent were heard, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson's ominous warning that "Things are in the saddle and ride mankind". For the first time it began to seem as if "things"-the artifacts made by man in his campaign of conquest over nature-might get out of control and come to dominate him. The theme of technological tyranny over man's individuality and his traditional patterns of life was expressed by Jacques Ellul, who asserted that technology had become so pervasive that man now lived in a milieu of technology rather than of nature.

He characterized milieu as artificial, autonomous, self-determining, nihilistic (that is, not directed to ends, though proceeding by cause and effect), and, in fact, with means enjoying primacy over ends. Technology, Ellul held, had become so powerful and ubiquitous that other social phenomena such as politics and economics had become situated in it rather than influenced by it. The individual, in short, had come to be adapted to the technical milieu rather than the other way round. The second observation about the spate of technological pessimism in the advanced countries is that it has not managed to slow the pace of.