According to the new school of scientists, technology is an overlooked force in expanding the horizons of scientific knowledge. Science moves forward , they say, not so much through the insights of great men of genius as because of more ordinary things like improved techniques and tools. In short, a leader of the new school contends , the scientific revolution, as we call it, was largely the improvement and invention and use of a series of instruments that expanded the reach of science in innumerable direction.
Over the years, tools and technology themselves as a source of fundamental innovation have largely been ignored by historians and philosophers of science. The modern school that hails technology argues that such masters as Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, and inventors such as Edison attached great importance to, and derived great benefit from, craft information and technological devices of different kinds that were usable in scientific experiments.
The centerpiece of the argument of a technology-yes, genius-no advocate was an analysis of Galileo’s role at the start of the scientific revolution. The wisdom of the day was derived from Ptolemy, an astronomer of the second century, whose elaborate system of the sky put Earth at the center of all heavenly motions. Galileo’s greatest glory was that in 1609 he was the first person to turn the newly invented telescope on the heavens to prove that the planets revolve around the sun rather than around the earth. But the real hero of the story, according to the new school of scientists, was the long evolution in the improvement of machinery for making eyeglasses.
Federal policy is necessarily involved in the technology vs. genius dispute. Whether the Government should increase the financing of pure science at the expense of technology or vice versa often depends on the issue of which is seen as the driving force.