SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

1. Before you start

1. Why did you choose to study at the faculty of High Technologies?

2. Can you explain what High Technologies are?

3. What kind of technologies is considered advanced nowadays?

4. What are the most perspective technologies nowadays?

2. Pronunciation

2.1 Read and practise the pronunciation of the following words.

3. Reading

3.1 Read the text to know more about science and technology.

Science and Technology

A lot of technological inventions and advances (from steam engines to organ transplantation, from radio to semiconductors and so on) made peoples lives easier, safer and more comfortable. But technology goes alongside with science. Moreover the history of technology is longer than and distinct from the history of science. Science is the systematic attempt to understand and interpret the world; technology is the systematic study of techniques for making and doing things. While technology is concerned with the fabrication and use of artifacts, science is devoted to the more conceptual understanding of the environment, and it depends upon the comparatively sophisticated skills of literacy and numeracy. Such skills became available only with the emergence of the great world civilizations, so it is possible to say that science began with those civilizations, some 3000 years BC, whereas technology is as old as manlike life. Science and technology developed as different and separate activities, the science was practised by a class of aristocratic philosophers, while the technology remained a matter of essentially practical concern to craftsmen of many types. There were points of intersection, such as the use of mathematical concepts in building and irrigation work.

The situation began to change during the medieval period of development in the West (AD 500-1500), when both technical innovation and scientific understanding interacted with the stimuli of commercial expansion and a flourishing urban culture. The robust growth of technology in these centuries attracted the interest of educated men. Early in the 17^th century, the natural philosopher Francis Bacon had recognized three great technological innovations – the magnetic compass, the printing press, and gunpowder – as the distinguishing achievements of modern man, and he had advocated experimental science as a means of enlarging man’s dominion over nature. By emphasizing a practical role for science in this way, Bacon implied a harmonization of science and technology, and he made his intention explicit by urging scientists to study the methods of craftsmen and craftsmen to learn more science. Still over the next 200 years, carpenters and mechanics – practical men - built iron bridges, steam engines, and textile machinery without much reference to scientific principles, while scientists – still amateurs – pursued their investigation in a haphazard manner. Only in the 19^th century the Royal Society in London formed in 1660 represented a determined effort to direct scientific research towards useful ends, first by improving navigation and cartography, and ultimately by stimulating industrial innovation and the search for mineral resources. Similar bodies of scholars developed in other European countries, and by the 19^th century scientists were moving toward a professionalism in which many of the goals were clearly the same as those of the technologists. Thus Justus von Liebig of Germany, one of the fathers of organic chemistry and the first proponent of mineral fertilizer, provided the scientific impulse that led to the development of synthetic dyes, high explosives, artificial fibres, and plastics; and Michael Faraday, the brilliant British experimental scientist in the field of electromagnetism, prepared the ground that was exploited by Thomas A. Edison and many others.

The role of Edison is particularly significant in the deepening relationship between science and technology, because the prodigious trial-and-error process by which he selected the carbon filament for his electric light bulb in 1879 resulted in the creation at Menlo Park, N.J., of what may be regarded as the world’s first genuine industrial research laboratory. From the achievement the application of scientific principles to technology grew rapidly. It led easily to the engineering rationalism applied by Frederick W. Taylor to the organization of workers in mass production, and to the time-and-motion studies of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth at the beginning of the 20^th century. It provided a model that was applied rigorously by Henry Ford in his automobile assembly plant and that was followed by every modern mass-production process. It pointed the way to the development of systems engineering, operations research, stimulation studies, mathematical modeling, and technological assessment in industrial processes. This was not just a one-way influence of science on technology, because technology created new tools and machines with which the scientists were able to achieve an ever-increasing insight into the natural world. Taken together, these developments brought technology to its modern highly efficient level of performance.

In the present day sense a technology is study and utilization of manufacturing and industrial methods, systematic application of knowledge to practical tasks in industry. Whereas a science is considered as an absolute authority, technology becomes the cutting edge of history, the new frontier. In the early 1970s the phrase “high technology” began to appear as a synonym for computer technology. Today “high technology” has become a symbol of progress, like the space program in the 1960s, biotechnology innovations in the 1980s or the development of new medical techniques in the 1990s.

(encyclopedia Britannica, 2001, Deluxe edition)

3.2 What new facts about the development of science and technology have you learnt from the text?

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