晨读英语美文60篇38 The Shift in The Methodology of Discovery

[00:00.00]The Shift in The Methodology of Discovery

[00:06.61]He changed the future without ever winning a vote or commanding an army.

[00:12.64]All Albert Einstein did was having an idea.

[00:16.68]It’s not a particularly easy one to grasp in all its ramifications,

[00:22.15]but the basic insight he expressed in his 1905 paper on special relativity

[00:28.61]is almost childlike in its simplicity.

[00:31.66]And yet it ushered in a new golden age of physics

[00:35.80]and did much to shape the course of the 20th century.

[00:39.52]It also transformed the way the future is made:

[00:43.37]not with wars and revolutions but with scientific insights.

[00:47.75]That much is still true.

[00:49.95]But it is history that science precedes

[00:52.81]at the hands of the occasional lone genius.

[00:56.91]These days, vast networks of laboratories sponsored by government

[01:00.95]are all pushing to find the new thing.

[01:03.45]Discovery and invention,

[01:05.53]in the developed countries at least, have become regularized.

[01:09.69]The insights of individuals are still important, of course,

[01:13.51]but the overall effort relies less on any one genius.

[01:18.21]“In the late 19th century, you had predominantly the private inventor,”

[01:22.80]says Yale historian Daniel Kevles.

[01:25.77]“Now you have the organized inventor.

[01:28.83]Scientific fields are crowded with geniuses.

[01:32.20]Everybody’s working at the big problems all the time.”

[01:35.36]This shift in the discovery has complicated matters.

[01:40.18]It is chiefly responsible for the complexity of machines,

[01:44.02]but also for the growing complexity of the act of inventing and building.

[01:48.92]The Pentagon awards a contract for a new jet fighter to a prime contractor,

[01:54.30]which passed the various systems and subsystems and components down

[02:00.19]through layers of subcontractors.

[02:02.39]“Henry Ford could understand every piece of his assembly line,”

[02:07.20]says Don Kash, a technology expert at George Mason University in Washington D.C.,

[02:13.88]“Nobody can do that at Toyota.”

[02:17.26]What’s different now, though, is now comfortable we’ve become with complexity.

[02:21.85]Innovation is part of our lives in a way it hasn’t been for previous generations.

[02:27.76]In 1970,

[02:29.72]Alvin Toffler argued in Future Shock that technology was changing society so quickly

[02:35.84]that a person in the span of single lifetime would find himself a stranger in his own culture.

[02:42.53]Toffler’s book struck home

[02:45.27]because many people felt that new technologies were bringing about change

[02:49.64]at a pace that was disorienting and not a little disturbing.

[02:54.01]These days we’ve learned how to ride the rocket of innovation.

[02:58.16]“My father thought the world would be the same,” says Kash.

[03:02.32]“My children wake up every day thinking the world will be different.”