Discovery and Invention: The Newtonian Revolution in Systems Technology
2003; American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics; Volume: 26; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2514/2.6917
ISSN1533-3884
Autores Tópico(s)Cognitive Science and Education Research
ResumoRevolutions? T HIS year we are celebrating the dawn of ight: powered, controlled, manned ight. This was a revolution, but a very slow revolution. It began many millennia ago, with Daedalus, the rst great engineer in the history of engineering.1 And it was not the only technological revolution. Besides wanting to y like a bird, man also fancied swimming like a sh (underwater), rising to the stars (as in the imagination of poets), and seeing/hearing the past (movies/television/sound recording). About 150 years ago, things started to liven up, and we have had three or four simultaneous and interrelated technological revolutions.They were foreseen and romanticizedby JulesVerne (1828–1905), the fatherof technology ction, favorite writer of my youth, and also that of my engineer father.Verne’s visionscame tobe the prehistoryofwhat followed,as inRobur, the Conqueror(1886) ( yingmachine/helicopter),Twenty ThousandLeaguesunder the Seas (1870) (privatesubmarine),From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and Around the Moon (1870) (space tourism),andCastle in theCarpathians(1892)(recordingand recreation of opera in stereo sound and sight). Like (probably) all contributors to our centennial celebration, I am in a poor position to say anything personal about the dawn of ight, having been born exactly half a century too late. [My S.B. degree,MassachusettsInstituteof Technology(MIT), was in 1953.] Much the same holdsfor theotherdevelopmentsjustmentioned.My admiration for the courage and initiative of the pioneers of ight is, so to say, boundless, but it is purely intellectual, not emotional. I wasn’t present at the creation. If I am to make an emotional/intellectual contribution to this celebration,I should look farthera eld and bring back intomemory a different revolution.The Newtonian revolution.A revolution that, in my days, has profoundly affected all of the other revolutions mentioned before; and much more: a revolution that is likely to be the most permanent of any of them. This is a revolution I have always liked. I have contributed to it. It is not a revolution that Verne had anticipated. I would exclude here The 500 Millions of the Begum (1879) (in which a private weapon of mass destruction turns out to be useless because of inadequate mathematical modeling in the planning stage) as well as Topsy–Turvy (1889)(inwhichanattempt to repositionthe axis of the Earth for privatepro t zzles becauseofmathematicalerror).These stories did involve mathematics but had a very negative message. My message is totally positive. All revolutions are not “created equal.” One may shudder at the memoryof theviolenceof theFrenchRevolution(1789)not to speak of the brutality of the Russian Revolution (1917), but one should not overlook the bloodless JapaneseRevolution (Meiji Restoration, 1867)which was far more important to the world and is still a major
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