Great Ideas E02 – Great Scientific Ideas That Changed the World

By Steven L. Goldman

It is easy to fall into one of two traps in dealing with ideas: either to dismiss them as abstractions and, thus, of less consequence than concrete things, such as swords, plowshares, and factories, or to glorify them as abstractions, as creative inventions of the mind, and thus, praiseworthy independent of any practical consequences whatsoever. Ideas are, nevertheless, as concrete as swords and plowshares because they are always tied to a concrete context of values, actions, beliefs, artifacts, and institutions out of which they arise and on which they may act. The concreteness of ideas derives from their being produced not only within a particular cultural context but out of that context, and it is because ideas are produced out of a particular context that ideas are able to influence and even to reshape that context. Treating ideas out of context, then, treating them as if their existence were, in principle, independent of any particular context, deeply distorts the reality of ideas and obscures their power to affect the world.

Ideas and their contexts interact in complex, mutually influential ways such that the resultant effect on society of introducing a new idea is unpredictable. The evolution of the Internet from a modest computer networking project to a global technology transforming commerce, industry, politics, warfare, communication, education, entertainment, and research illustrates the unpredictability of the idea-social context interaction. The still-unfolding consequences of a small number of innovative ideas introduced to solve technical problems posed by enabling different kinds of computers in different locations to share information in real time continue to surprise, confound, and disturb us!

Unpredictable though it may be, however, for 200 years now, the interaction of science and technology with society has been the primary driver of social and cultural change, first in the West, then globally and at an accelerating rate. During this period, social and personal values and relationships; social, political, and economic institutions; and cultural values and activities have changed and continue to change almost beyond recognition by our great-grandparents. What is it that has enabled such deep transformations of ways of life that have been entrenched for centuries and even millennia?

Certainly, we can identify artifacts—the telephone, the automobile, airplanes, television, the computer— that appear to be causes of social change. But identifying artifacts does not reach down to the causes of innovation itself, nor does it expose those features of the sociocultural infrastructure that enable innovations to be causes of social change. Artifacts, in spite of their high visibility, are symptoms of causes at work; they are not themselves causes. It is not television or automobiles or the Internet that have changed society. Instead, forces at work within the network of relationships that we call society are causing television and automobiles and the Internet to take the changing forms that they take. One of these forces is ideas, explicitly in the case of new scientific ideas and implicitly in the case of ideas in the past that have been internalized selectively by society, thereby shaping both the sociocultural infrastructure and the lines along which it is vulnerable to change.

Source: From “Great Scientific Ideas That Changed the World” by Steven L. Goldman