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Originally Posted by Engr.Aftab
dear dont b emotional and dont make the simple things difficult, without eduaction its impossible, if u know them than quote their name where u have seen the technology of those people, wot they have invented technically????????????
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Go through this material. This may give you some basis of of my argues:
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Does Engineering Drive Science?
Book Review
by Dennis L. Feucht
Innovatia Laboratories[/CENTER][/B]
Occasionally, extraordinary books that relate engineering to the wider world appear and deserve some attention. This article reviews the following book:
The Economic Laws of Scientific Research, by Terence Kealey, Palgrave Macmillan; ISBN: 0312173067; (May 1997)
Government funding of scientific research is a massive waste of money. Technological progress is not attributable to science. Privately-funded and hobby scientists have been the most productive. Sound preposterous? Kealey is a Cambridge University biochemist who explodes widespread myths about the relationships of science, technology, and economics by refuting rationalistic arguments of economists and politicians with historical and economic data.
He begins with the "linear model" of Francis Bacon, that government-funded science drives technology, by showing historically that the technological advancements of skilled, uneducated workers in England (such as Newcomen, who invented the steam engine) or the western European barbarians (who invented the saddle and domesticated the horse for farm use) drove technical advancement that led to scientific investigation. Basic science today contributes about 10 % to new technology; 90 % is driven by existing technology, just as old science largely drives new science.
Woven into his account is a summary of the history and development of both science and technology. He shows that technology came first in Western development, often from uneducated inventors like Newcomen. Dennis Papin, the leading gas scientist during the Industrial Revolution, "used to explain that he was prompted into studying vacuum steam engines because of Newcomen's success." James Watt's improvements of Newcomen's engine were not inspired by Joseph Black's discovery of latent heat, as conventionally supposed even in Watt's day, but was denied by Watt himself, who attributed them to "old established fact" known among steam practitioners. Very often, engineers such as Torricelli or Joule turned scientist.
"The irrelevance of academic science to technological or economic development during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries can best be illustrated by comparing Britain and France." England only had two universities, Oxford and Cambridge, "mouldering into dust," in Oxford alumnus Edward Gibbon's (1737-94) words. In contrast, in France a generous State assured the best-equipped scientific laboratories in the world. By the early 19th century, engineering was only a skilled craft in England, but had been established as a profession, with schools and formal exams in France. And yet, Kealey concludes, "it was Britain, not France, that produced the Industrial Revolution." To understand why leads to an examination of the economics and history of science funding. The essential difference between the two countries was that the British government adopted laissez faire policies, whole classes of taxes were abolished, and government withdrew from almost any function except defense and justice. The Royal Society was left to sink or swim. In contrast, France embraced dirigisme and the State ran every aspect of French society. Yet Britain grew rich and France remained poor.
Kealey gives two reasons for this. First, the academies and ecoles of France were fiendishly expensive, funded by high taxes for which the economic and social cost was horrific. Secondly, a centrally-planned economy can only work as well as the plans. The rulers of France, under Colbert in particular, subscribed to the Baconian model, with its trickle-down empowerment of technology. But "the industrial revolution was created by men looking for solutions to very particular problems - men who had the economic freedom and the economic incentive to invest their time and resources in experimentation and development." Kealey illustrates with Eli Whitney's cotton gin. Technical progress relied instead upon the inventiveness of local engineers relying upon technical know-how.
When Britain did turn to science, it was not funded by government but largely by hobbyists, industry, and private endowments of university science. Hobby scientists included Cavendish, Darwin, and William Parsons, Royal Society president from 1848-54. The increasing wealth of Britain enabled thousands who, due to low taxes and minimal government control, passionately took up science as a hobby. Thompson (Count Rumford of thermodynamics fame) "perceived that British industry needed more scientific research if it was to develop, and he had little difficulty in finding a group of industrialists who agreed with him and who provided the funding." In 1799, they created the Royal Institution. As industry grew it funded pure science because the industrialists perceived that that they were exhausting technological development.
Hobby science flourished until 1914, when laissez-faire Britain ended, and the hobby scientist is now practically extinct. One rare survivor was 1978 Nobelist Peter Mitchell. Kealey comments, "The loss of the hobby scientists has been unfortunate because the hobby scientists tended to be spectacularly good. They were good because they tended to do original science. Professional scientists tend to play it safe; they need to succeed, which tempts them into doing experiments that are certain to produce results. Similarly, grant-giving bodies which are accountable to government try only to give money for experiments that are likely to work...They represent the development of established science rather than the creation of the new. But the hobby scientist is unaccountable. He can follow the will-o'-the-wisp...Neither Cavendish nor Darwin would have survived in a modern university any better than did Mitchell, yet they were scientific giants..."
Einstein, Barbara McClintock, Wilson, Penzias, and Bednorz were a few Nobelists who were either hobby scientists or were working on technical problems.
Kealey opts for the alternative theory of Adam Smith over Bacon, that science and technology flourish in countries with free markets lacking government subsidization of either. He illustrates this thesis in some historic detail from the remarkable rise of England as a prosperous land, contrasted with countries on the continent which were dominated by government economic control.
The economic charts and tables begin to appear in Kealey's account of economic history since the 1870s. Illustrated by numerous historical examples, the trend is clear: "In the long term, there is only one factor that determines the rate of economic growth: productivity." And innovation is "a crucial contributor to improvements in productivity." Government investment in capital, education, and technology is not enough; the USSR invested in them to excess yet did not grow. Those that did (Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan) also wholeheartedly embraced a free-market economy.
Countries with laissez faire economics, such as 19th-century Britain, the USA, and Japan, are markedly more productive in science than dirigiste countries, such as France, Germany, and present-day Japan. In tracing the development of US science policy, "Nineteenth-century America simply did not believe that research, or knowledge for its own sake, was a proper responsibility of the Federal Government." The two reasons Kealey gives are: The widespread belief in Adam Smith's view that all government intervention into society should be minimized; and states received greater loyalty than the central government, especially in the South. Even as late as the FDR era, "scientists resisted government funding because it led to government control and to a loss of academic freedom." Influenced by Baconian-model advocate Vannevar Bush, after 1950 the federal government discarded its laissez faire policies of nearly two centuries, and took on the responsibility for basic science. After 20 years of huge government investment in science, it was during the 1960s that Washington suddenly realized the economy had failed to take off. Officials started to doubt the Baconian model. (British Prime Minister Wilson's Baconian experiment on science funding fared no better.) The defense department commissioned a vast study, Project Hindsight, concluding that applied science built on applied science, not on pure science. "Indeed, the evidence suggested that, if anything, it was the unexpected discoveries made by technologists or engineers that boosted pure science, rather than the other way around."
Running through Kealey's book are the negative effects of war on science in that it reshapes a nation's culture. "During war, a government must intervene to regulate all aspects of a nation's life, and that experience of government control legitimizes dirigisme, central planning and dependence on the State."
Kealey then turns from the history to the logic of why the Baconian model fails. "Governments are dreadful judges of commercial opportunities," such as the British funding of Babbage, Japan's MITI-driven fifth-generation computer project, analog HDTV, and the US Sematech semiconductor consortium. Wealth is created by industry, and "to tax industry, therefore, to enable governments to subsidize it must, in general terms, be absurd."
Kealey posits another myth of science: "... published science is freely available. It is not." To research and understand the science literature is a significant task in itself, one which must be done in competitive industry which must employ scientists for this purpose.
In the chapter, "The Real Economics of Research," Kealey delivers on the book title, and gives the three laws of funding for civil R&D, along with copious data in support:
"The percentage of national GDP spent [on R&D] increases with national GPD per capita." The more prosperous the country, the more is spent within it on R&D.
"Public [government] and private funding displace each other." If government spends more on R&D, industry spends less, and if government decreases spending, industry increases
"Public [government] funds displace more than they provide." In other words, government funding is always less efficient than private funding of R&D.
Kealey argues these assertions rather thoroughly, including the debunking of counter-arguments. In the last chapters of this rather content-intensive book, Kealey argues that both British and US R&D are not in decline, and that one must be careful not to confuse rates with absolute amounts for developed countries.
Finally, he widens the scope to philosophy of science, where he denounces the influence of Rousseau and his disciples, the Nazis and Communists. "Rousseau's distrust of science inspired such proto-fascist tracts as Spengler's Decline of the West, published in 1918 and 1922, which glorified a German romantic nationalism that inspired Hitler. Rousseau's worship of the State fed the philosophies of a stream of influential thinkers including Hegel ('The state walks with God') and Marx, it fed the philosophies of tyrants like Robespierre, Hitler of course ('The Age of Reason is dead'), Lenin, Mao, and Mussolini and [Matthew] Arnold."
This book is highly recommended reading or as a reference for anyone in science or technology who thinks about how these enterprises relate to the larger world of economics, politics, and philosophical concerns.
Contact the author
Dennis Feucht
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There are various other examples also through which we can prove our point but this is sufficient to answer your objection.
Regards
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