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The Legacy of Science
Change is one of mankind's most mysterious creations. The factors that operate to cause it came into play when man produced his first tool. With it he changed the world forever, and bound himself to the artifacts he would create in order, always, to make tomorrow better than today. But how does change operate? What triggers a new invention, a different philosophy, an altered society? The interactive network of man's activities links the strangest, most disparate elements, bringing together the most unlikely combinations in unexpected ways to create a new world.
Is there a pattern to change in different times and separate places in our history? Can change be forecast? How does society live with perpetual innovation that, in changing the shape of its environment, also transforms its attitudes, morals, values? If the prime effect of change is more change, is there a limit beyond which we will not be able to go without anarchy, or have we adaptive abilities, as yet only minimally activated, which will make of our future a place very different from anything we have ever experienced before?
Somebody once apparently said to the philosopher Wittgenstein, "What a bunch of no-knows we medieval Europeans must have been, back in the days before Copernicus, to have looked up at the sky and thought that what we saw up there was the Sun going round the Earth, when, as everybody knows, the Earth goes round the Sun, and it doesn't take too many brains to understand that!" Wittgenstein replied, "Yes, but I wonder what it would have looked like if the Sun had been going round the Earth." The point is that it would, of course, have looked exactly the same. What he was saying was that you see what you want to see.
Consider also the medieval Londoner or eighteenth-century American who, when asked what he thought of the prospect that