The Sun, the Genome & the Internet: Tools of Scientific RevolutionsIn this visionary look into the future, Freeman Dyson argues that technological changes fundamentally alter our ethical and social arrangements and that three rapidly advancing new technologies--solar energy, genetic engineering, and world-wide communication--together have the potential to create a more equal distribution of the world's wealth. Dyson begins by rejecting the idea that scientific revolutions are primarily concept driven. He shows rather that new tools are more often the sparks that ignite scientific discovery. Such tool-driven revolutions have profound social consequences--the invention of the telescope turning the Medieval world view upside down, the widespread use of household appliances in the 1950s replacing servants, to cite just two examples. In looking ahead, Dyson suggests that solar energy, genetics, and the Internet will have similarly transformative effects, with the potential to produce a more just and equitable society. Solar power could bring electricity to even the poorest, most remote areas of third world nations, allowing everyone access to the vast stores of information on the Internet and effectively ending the cultural isolation of the poorest countries. Similarly, breakthroughs in genetics may well enable us to give our children healthier lives and grow more efficient crops, thus restoring the economic and human vitality of village cultures devalued and dislocated by the global market. Written with passionate conviction about the ethical uses of science, The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet is both a brilliant reinterpretation of the scientific process and a challenge to use new technologies to close, rather than widen, the gap between rich and poor. |
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The Sun, the Genome & the Internet: Tools of Scientific Revolutions Freeman J. Dyson No preview available - 1999 |
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aims artificial intelligence astronomers become biologists biology cavity magnetron cell century cheap cloning comets cost craft industries discovery Earth electricity energy crops England Europa exist expensive explore Fred Sanger future galaxies Galison genes genetic engineering genome project gravitational tomography human genome human genome project hundred Ian Wilmut important invented invisible mass Jupiter Kasparov Kuhn Kuiper Belt laser launch laser propulsion launch system lectures Leik Myrabo lensing Lightcraft live machines Mars rocks mathematics meteorites microlensing microwave millisecond pulsar move networks objects observed orbit payload physicist physics planets Princeton problem projectile protein pulsar pulses ram accelerator reading-frames remote reprogenetics ring scientific revolutions scientists sequence servants shuttle slingatron social justice solar energy solar system spacecraft species star sunlight surface telescope thousand tion universe unmanned missions village virus viruses warm-blooded warm-blooded plants Wolszczan