Science Friction_ Where the Known Meets the Unknown - Michael Shermer [120]
13. Awareness of our own identity and ignorance
In similar fashion Richard Hardison, in Upon the Shoulders of Giants, noted that “the great builders of the world can be divided into two classes, those who build with stone and mortar and those who build with ideas.” Hardison’s roster of the fourteen builders and ideas that have “shaped the Modern Mind” included:
1. Copernicus and heliocentricism/Galileo and the scientific method
2. Darwin and evolution
3. Wundt and determinism applied to the study of man
4. Newton and gravity
5. Pascal and probabilities/statistics
6. Calvin, Luther, Protestant Reformation, the rise of humanism and capitalism
7. Pasteur/germ theory, vaccination, pasteurization, consequences of overpopulation
8. Rousseau/democracy
9. Einstein/relativity
10. Gutenberg/the printing press
11. Ford/assembly-line production
12. Faraday/the electric generator, Maxwell/electromagnetic field equations, Edison/the lightbulb
13. Babbage/the computer
14. Awareness of the challenge to our own identity and ignorance
The well-known futurist and author of the best-selling book Future Shock Alvin Toffler followed this work with another sweeping survey of our society in The Third Wave. This book includes a brief and broad history of culture that Toffler sees as moving in three massive waves. Toffler invokes the metaphor of the “wave” in the sense that Frederick Jackson Turner did in The Frontier in American History and Norbert Elias did in The Civilizing Process. A wave is “advancing integration over several centuries” (Elias), or a movement or migration of people (Turner) such as in the settlement of the American West—the pioneers, then the farmers, then the “third wave,” the business interests. In Toffler’s words, “Once I began thinking in terms of waves of change, colliding and overlapping, causing conflict and tension . . . it changed my perception of change itself.” In Toffler’s analysis, the three waves in human history are: (1) the Agricultural Revolution; (2) the Industrial Revolution; and (3) the Technological (electronic) Revolution. We are currently experiencing the third wave and, according to Toffler, these three waves are in collision in various parts of the world (especially in the so-called developing nations), causing much strife and conflict.
A number of thinkers have made history’s lists their vocational modus operandi. James Burke, for example, through the medium of television, has made a career of challenging viewers and readers to consider the forces in history that have shaped the modern world. In his first work in this genre, Connections, Burke drew on the various links between ideas, inventions, discoveries, people, and “forces that have caused change in the past, looking in particular at eight recent innovations which may be most influential in structuring our own futures.” Burke’s eight were:
1. The atomic bomb
2. The telephone
3. The computer
4. The production-line system of manufacture
5. The aircraft
6. Plastics
7. The guided rocket (which can carry atomic bombs)
8. Television
Burke summons the allegory of the “tools” of history that act as the triggers of change: “Each one of these is part of a family of similar devices, and is the result of a sequence of closely connected events extending from the ancient world until the present day. Each has enormous potential for man’s benefit—or his destruction.”
Burke takes a “great event” approach to history, and in his second work, The Day the Universe Changed, he presents the eight most significant “days,” or moments of change in Western history, to reveal how an alternate view triggered by an invention or discovery changed the lives of everyone in the culture. These are not just scientific revolutions. Burke describes ideological revolutions that affect all aspects of life. In his own words (my enumeration), Burke writes that: “Each chapter begins at the point where the view is about to shift.”
1. In the eleventh century before the extraordinary discoveries