Science & Technology Thinking

Science & Technological thinking has played a role in science throughout history. During the ancient period mechanical devices served as ways to investigate mathematical and scientific ideas. In the medieval period the mechanical clock provided scientists with a new way to conceive of time. By the period of the Scientific Revolution the clock came to play an important role in the development of the mechanical philosophy and new devices, like the air pump served as the basis for the experimental philosophy. During that period technology also came to provide a new ideology for science. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the emergence of the engineering sciences played an important role in scientific thinking with thermodynamics serving as a new way to understand all scientific processes. Engineering concepts such as strain, elasticity, and vortex motion provided a way to think about electromagnetism and theories of the aether. The scientification of technology during the second half of the nineteenth century led to science-based industries which in turn led to industry-based science emerging from the industrial research laboratories. By the twentieth century the military-industrial-academic complex and the emergence of big science combined to create technoscience in which the distinctions between science and technology became blurred. The role of technological thinking in science culminated in the computer replacing the heat engine, and the clock before that, as a new model to understand scientific phenomena.