Science, the Endless Frontier

Science, the Endless Frontier PDF Author: Vannevar Bush
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069120165X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
The classic case for why government must support science—with a new essay by physicist and former congressman Rush Holt on what democracy needs from science today Science, the Endless Frontier is recognized as the landmark argument for the essential role of science in society and government’s responsibility to support scientific endeavors. First issued when Vannevar Bush was the director of the US Office of Scientific Research and Development during the Second World War, this classic remains vital in making the case that scientific progress is necessary to a nation’s health, security, and prosperity. Bush’s vision set the course for US science policy for more than half a century, building the world’s most productive scientific enterprise. Today, amid a changing funding landscape and challenges to science’s very credibility, Science, the Endless Frontier resonates as a powerful reminder that scientific progress and public well-being alike depend on the successful symbiosis between science and government. This timely new edition presents this iconic text alongside a new companion essay from scientist and former congressman Rush Holt, who offers a brief introduction and consideration of what society needs most from science now. Reflecting on the report’s legacy and relevance along with its limitations, Holt contends that the public’s ability to cope with today’s issues—such as public health, the changing climate and environment, and challenging technologies in modern society—requires a more capacious understanding of what science can contribute. Holt considers how scientists should think of their obligation to society and what the public should demand from science, and he calls for a renewed understanding of science’s value for democracy and society at large. A touchstone for concerned citizens, scientists, and policymakers, Science, the Endless Frontier endures as a passionate articulation of the power and potential of science.

Science, the Endless Frontier

Science, the Endless Frontier PDF Author: Vannevar Bush
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069120165X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 186

Get Book Here

Book Description
The classic case for why government must support science—with a new essay by physicist and former congressman Rush Holt on what democracy needs from science today Science, the Endless Frontier is recognized as the landmark argument for the essential role of science in society and government’s responsibility to support scientific endeavors. First issued when Vannevar Bush was the director of the US Office of Scientific Research and Development during the Second World War, this classic remains vital in making the case that scientific progress is necessary to a nation’s health, security, and prosperity. Bush’s vision set the course for US science policy for more than half a century, building the world’s most productive scientific enterprise. Today, amid a changing funding landscape and challenges to science’s very credibility, Science, the Endless Frontier resonates as a powerful reminder that scientific progress and public well-being alike depend on the successful symbiosis between science and government. This timely new edition presents this iconic text alongside a new companion essay from scientist and former congressman Rush Holt, who offers a brief introduction and consideration of what society needs most from science now. Reflecting on the report’s legacy and relevance along with its limitations, Holt contends that the public’s ability to cope with today’s issues—such as public health, the changing climate and environment, and challenging technologies in modern society—requires a more capacious understanding of what science can contribute. Holt considers how scientists should think of their obligation to society and what the public should demand from science, and he calls for a renewed understanding of science’s value for democracy and society at large. A touchstone for concerned citizens, scientists, and policymakers, Science, the Endless Frontier endures as a passionate articulation of the power and potential of science.

Science, the Endless Frontier

Science, the Endless Frontier PDF Author: United States. Office of Scientific Research and Development
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Government publications
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
This influential report described science as "a largely unexplored hinterland" that would provide the "essential key" to the economic prosperity of the post World War II years.

Endless Frontier

Endless Frontier PDF Author: G. Pascal Zachary
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501196464
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 560

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Book Description
A prodigiously researched biography of Vannevar Bush, one of America’s most awe-inspiring polymaths and the secret force behind the biggest technological breakthroughs of the twentieth century. As the inventor and public entrepreneur who launched the Manhattan Project, helped to create the military-industrial complex, conceived a permanent system of government support for science and engineering, and anticipated both the personal computer and the Internet, Vannevar Bush is the twentieth century’s Ben Franklin. In this engaging look at one of America’s most awe-inspiring polymaths, writer G. Pascal Zachary brings to life an American original—a man of his time, ours, and beyond. Zachary details how Bush cofounded Raytheon and helped build one of the most powerful early computers in the world at MIT. During World War II, he served as Roosevelt’s adviser and chief contact on all matters of military technology, including the atomic bomb. He launched the Manhattan Project and oversaw a collection of 6,000 civilian scientists who designed scores of new weapons. After the war, his attention turned to the future. He wrote essays that anticipated the rise of the Internet and boldly equated national security with research strength, outlining a system of permanent federal funding for university research that endures to this day. However, Bush’s hopeful vision of science and technology was leavened by an understanding of the darker possibilities. While cheering after witnessing the Trinity atomic test, he warned against the perils of a nuclear arms race. He led a secret appeal to convince President Truman not to test the Hydrogen Bomb and campaigned against the Red Scare. Elegantly and expertly relayed by Zachary, Vannevar’s story is a grand tour of the digital leviathan we know as the modern American life.

The Changing Frontier

The Changing Frontier PDF Author: Adam B. Jaffe
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022628672X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 441

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Book Description
In 1945, Vannevar Bush, founder of Raytheon and one-time engineering dean at MIT, delivered a report to the president of the United States that argued for the importance of public support for science, and the importance of science for the future of the nation. The report, Science: The Endless Frontier, set America on a path toward strong and well-funded institutions of science, creating an intellectual architecture that still defines scientific endeavor today. In The Changing Frontier, Adam B. Jaffe and Benjamin Jones bring together a group of prominent scholars to consider the changes in science and innovation in the ensuing decades. The contributors take on such topics as changes in the organization of scientific research, the geography of innovation, modes of entrepreneurship, and the structure of research institutions and linkages between science and innovation. An important analysis of where science stands today, The Changing Frontier will be invaluable to practitioners and policy makers alike.

Pursuing the Endless Frontier

Pursuing the Endless Frontier PDF Author: Charles M. Vest
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262516780
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
The former president of MIT discusses challenges and policy issues confronting academia, science and technology, and the world at large. In his fourteen years as president of MIT, Charles Vest worked continuously to realize his vision of rebuilding America's trust in science and technology. In a time when the federal government dramatically reduced its funding of academic research programs and industry shifted its R&D resources into the short-term product-development process, Vest called for new partnerships with business and government. He called for universities to meet the intellectual challenges posed by the innovation-driven, globally connected needs of industry even as he reaffirmed basic academic values and the continuing need for longer-term scientific inquiry. In Pursuing the Endless Frontier, Vest addresses these and other issues in a series of essays written during his tenure as president of MIT. He discusses the research university's need to shift to a broader, more international outlook, the value of diversity in the academic community, the greater leadership role for faculty outside the classroom, and the boundless opportunity of new scientific and technological developments even when coupled with financial constraints. In the provocative essay "What We Don't Know," Vest reminds us of what he calls "the most critical point of all," that science is driven by a deep human need to understand nature, to answer the "big questions"—that what we don't know is more important than what we do. In another essay, on the future of MIT, he celebrates MIT's strengths as being extraordinarily well-suited to the needs of an era of unprecedented change in science and technology. In "Disturbing the Educational Universe: Universities in the Digital Age—Dinosaurs or Prometheans," he describes MIT's innovative OpenCourseWare initiative, which builds on the fundamental nature of the Internet as an enabling and liberating technology. Vest, who is stepping down from MIT's presidency in the fall of 2004, writes with clarity and insight about the issues facing academic institutions in the twenty-first century. His essays in Pursuing the Endless Frontier offer inspiration to educators and researchers seeking the way forward.

Cycles of Invention and Discovery

Cycles of Invention and Discovery PDF Author: Venkatesh Narayanamurti
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674967968
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
Using Nobel Prize–winning examples like the transistor, laser, and magnetic resonance imaging, Venky Narayanamurti and Tolu Odumosu explore the daily micro-practices of research and show that distinctions between the search for knowledge and creative problem solving break down when one pays attention to how pathbreaking research actually happens.

Politics on the Endless Frontier

Politics on the Endless Frontier PDF Author: Daniel Lee Kleinman
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822315988
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Toward what end does the U.S. government support science and technology? How do the legacies and institutions of the past constrain current efforts to restructure federal research policy? Not since the end of World War II have these questions been so pressing, as scientists and policymakers debate anew the desirability and purpose of a federal agenda for funding research. Probing the values that have become embodied in the postwar federal research establishment, Politics on the Endless Frontier clarifies the terms of these debates and reveals what is at stake in attempts to reorganize that establishment. Although it ended up as only one among a host of federal research policymaking agencies, the National Science Foundation was originally conceived as central to the federal research policymaking system. Kleinman's historical examination of the National Science Foundation exposes the sociological and political workings of the system, particularly the way in which a small group of elite scientists shaped the policymaking process and defined the foundation's structure and future. Beginning with Vannevar Bush's 1945 manifesto The Endless Frontier, Kleinman explores elite and populist visions for a postwar research policy agency and shows how the structure of the American state led to the establishment of a fragmented and uncoordinated system for federal research policymaking. His book concludes with an analysis of recent efforts to reorient research policy and to remake federal policymaking institutions in light of the current "crisis" of economic competitiveness. A particularly timely study, Politics on the Endless Frontier will be of interest to historians and sociologists of science and technology and to science policy analysts.

Science on a Mission

Science on a Mission PDF Author: Naomi Oreskes
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022673241X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 749

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Book Description
A vivid portrait of how Naval oversight shaped American oceanography, revealing what difference it makes who pays for science. What difference does it make who pays for science? Some might say none. If scientists seek to discover fundamental truths about the world, and they do so in an objective manner using well-established methods, then how could it matter who’s footing the bill? History, however, suggests otherwise. In science, as elsewhere, money is power. Tracing the recent history of oceanography, Naomi Oreskes discloses dramatic changes in American ocean science since the Cold War, uncovering how and why it changed. Much of it has to do with who pays. After World War II, the US military turned to a new, uncharted theater of warfare: the deep sea. The earth sciences—particularly physical oceanography and marine geophysics—became essential to the US Navy, which poured unprecedented money and logistical support into their study. Science on a Mission brings to light how this influx of military funding was both enabling and constricting: it resulted in the creation of important domains of knowledge but also significant, lasting, and consequential domains of ignorance. As Oreskes delves into the role of patronage in the history of science, what emerges is a vivid portrait of how naval oversight transformed what we know about the sea. It is a detailed, sweeping history that illuminates the ways funding shapes the subject, scope, and tenor of scientific work, and it raises profound questions about the purpose and character of American science. What difference does it make who pays? The short answer is: a lot.

The Essential Writings of Vannevar Bush

The Essential Writings of Vannevar Bush PDF Author: Vannevar Bush
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231552475
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 536

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Book Description
The influence of Vannevar Bush on the history and institutions of twentieth-century American science and technology is staggeringly vast. As a leading figure in the creation of the National Science Foundation, the organizer of the Manhattan Project, and an adviser to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman during and after World War II, he played an indispensable role in the mobilization of scientific innovation for a changing world. A polymath, Bush was a cofounder of Raytheon, a pioneer of computing technology, and a visionary who foresaw the personal computer and might have coined the term “web.” Edited by Bush’s biographer, G. Pascal Zachary, this collection presents more than fifty of Bush’s most important works across four decades. His subjects are as varied as his professional pursuits. Here are his thoughts on the management of innovation, the politics of science, research and national security, technology in public life, and the relationship of scientific advancement to human flourishing. It includes his landmark introduction to Science, the Endless Frontier, the blueprint for how government should support research and development, and much more. The works are as illuminating as they are prescient, from considerations of civil-military relations and the perils of the nuclear arms race to future encyclopedias and information overload, the Apollo program, and computing and consciousness. Together, these pieces reveal Bush as a major figure in the history of science, computerization, and technological development and a prophet of the information age.

The End Of Science

The End Of Science PDF Author: John Horgan
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465050859
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
As staff writer for Scientific American, John Horgan has a window on contemporary science unsurpassed in all the world. Who else routinely interviews the likes of Lynn Margulis, Roger Penrose, Francis Crick, Richard Dawkins, Freeman Dyson, Murray Gell-Mann, Stephen Jay Gould, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn, Chris Langton, Karl Popper, Stephen Weinberg, and E.O. Wilson, with the freedom to probe their innermost thoughts? In The End Of Science, Horgan displays his genius for getting these larger-than-life figures to be simply human, and scientists, he writes, "are rarely so human . . . so at there mercy of their fears and desires, as when they are confronting the limits of knowledge."This is the secret fear that Horgan pursues throughout this remarkable book: Have the big questions all been answered? Has all the knowledge worth pursuing become known? Will there be a final "theory of everything" that signals the end? Is the age of great discoverers behind us? Is science today reduced to mere puzzle solving and adding detains to existing theories? Horgan extracts surprisingly candid answers to there and other delicate questions as he discusses God, Star Trek, superstrings, quarks, plectics, consciousness, Neural Darwinism, Marx's view of progress, Kuhn's view of revolutions, cellular automata, robots, and the Omega Point, with Fred Hoyle, Noam Chomsky, John Wheeler, Clifford Geertz, and dozens of other eminent scholars. The resulting narrative will both infuriate and delight as it mindless Horgan's smart, contrarian argument for "endism" with a witty, thoughtful, even profound overview of the entire scientific enterprise. Scientists have always set themselves apart from other scholars in the belief that they do not construct the truth, they discover it. Their work is not interpretation but simple revelation of what exists in the empirical universe. But science itself keeps imposing limits on its own power. Special relativity prohibits the transmission of matter or information as speeds faster than that of light; quantum mechanics dictates uncertainty; and chaos theory confirms the impossibility of complete prediction. Meanwhile, the very idea of scientific rationality is under fire from Neo-Luddites, animal-rights activists, religious fundamentalists, and New Agers alike. As Horgan makes clear, perhaps the greatest threat to science may come from losing its special place in the hierarchy of disciplines, being reduced to something more akin to literaty criticism as more and more theoreticians engage in the theory twiddling he calls "ironic science." Still, while Horgan offers his critique, grounded in the thinking of the world's leading researchers, he offers homage too. If science is ending, he maintains, it is only because it has done its work so well.