Section A
According to a new school of scientists, technology has been overlooked as a force in expanding the horizons of scientific knowledge.【51】Science moves forward, they say, not so much through the insights of great men of genius but by more ordinary things like improved techniques and tools.【52】" In short, " a leader of the new school contends "the scientific revolution, as we call it, has been largely caused by the improvement, invention and use of a series of instruments that have expanded the reach of science in innumerable directions.
【53】Over the years, tools, and technology themselves as a source of fundamental innovation have largely been ignored by historians and philosophers of science. The modern school that hails technology argues that such masters as Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, and Einstein, and inventors such as Edison, attached great importance to and derived great benefit from, crafty information and technological devices of different kinds that were used in scientific experiments.
The centerpiece of the argument for technology was an analysis of Galileo’s role at the start of the scientific revolution. The wisdom of the day was derived from Ptolemy, an astronomer of the second century, whose elaborate system of the sky put Earth at the center of all heavenly motion.【54】Galileo’s greatest glory was that in 1609 he was the first person to turn the newly invented telescope on the heavens to prove that the planets revolve around the sun rather than around the Earth. But the real hero of the story, according to the new school of scientists, were improvements in the machinery used for making eye-glasses.
Federal policy is necessarily involved in the technology vs. genius dispute.【55】Whether governments should increase financing for pure science at the expense of technology or vice versa often depends on the issue of which of the two is seen as the driving force.
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