COSMOLOGY AND TECHNOLOGY 107 



rine as a bleaching agent, and the miner's safety lamp. However, 

 Binkley is quite right in maintaining that only about a century ago 

 did the acti\^ely creative role of science in technology become ap- 

 parent—with the establishment of electrical and chemical industries 

 that owed their creation wholly to the antecedent existence of sci- 

 ence. From the thus completed interaction between them develops a 

 genuinely symbiotic relation of science and technology. 



Conceptual exchanges. The "gas laws," relations worked out en- 

 tirely in science, render important services to technologists concerned 

 with the design of compressors, superchargers, internal combustion 

 engines, steam and gas turbines, and the like. In place of the many 

 separate relations, the engineer may prefer to use the correlative de- 

 vice constituted by the kinetic theory: he works then with a few more 

 general equations in which all the individual laws are implicit. In 

 either case, by routine use of the anticipatory apparatus, he avoids 

 wasteful cut-and-try endeavors; he more swiftly attains his goals by 

 processes having, in Conant's phrase, a "low degree of empiricism." 



For all its progressiveness, technology tends to maintain itself 

 within a fixed frame of reference, by which ultimately it can be con- 

 fined. A spectacular liberation may then occur under the impact of 

 new ideas generated in science. Consider rapid communication as 

 the problem it was in 1800. Treating it purely technologically, one 

 might seek to achieve brighter beacons ( or larger mirrors ) on higher 

 hills, smoother post roads traversed by horses bred for speed and 

 stamina, the use of homing pigeons similarly bred, and so on. Were 

 one well traveled, he might even think of trying larger drums or 

 blacker smoke. Exploitation of such possibilities does indeed lead to 

 technologic advance, which is however inevitably canalized and 

 limited by a narrow conception of what are possible means of com- 

 munication. 



In 1800 no technologist ignorant of science could apprehend the 

 reformulation of the problem of communication that was to be 

 produced from the bizarre studies— of the attraction of bits of chaflF 

 to rubbed amber or glass, or of the twitching of the leg of a dead frog 

 —which fascinated a few contemporary scholars. Yet, well within half 

 a century, these studies eventuated in scientific ideas that formed 

 the basis for the development by Morse and Bell of the telegraph 

 and the telephone, respectively. These were revolutionary ap- 

 proaches to the problem of communication. The same cycle is subse- 



