Jason Crawford

That's all we're thinking about, pure understanding.

You see a little bit of this in Vannevar Bush's report, Science Sandals Frontier.

And that science always precedes invention.

The science always comes first, and then the invention comes along.

We've already seen examples that disprove that.

That science kind of comes up with these...

clean, you know, elegant natural laws, just very crisply formulated, and then are thrown over the transom to engineering, you know?

Okay, now you please, engineers, go figure out something useful to do with this, right?

And then that engineering itself or invention is kind of a straightforward deductive application of science.

Okay, I've caricatured this as hard as I can to make a point.

Every one of these bullets is wrong.

Okay, so I think there is, like I said, an element of truth in the model.

Science is the epistemic base for invention.

That term epistemic base, by the way, comes from the economic historian Joel McKeer.

I particularly recommend his book, The Gifts of Athena, on this topic in general.

And so we will spend about half our time looking at how is this true?

How is it that science provides the epistemic base for invention, especially given this sort of, you know, these tinkering examples that we've seen.

But here's where it's wrong.

Technology gets ahead of science, again, as in the examples that we've seen.

And as we'll see, technology feeds back into science.