SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND SOCIETY — HAFSTAD 215 



or secondary schools, but in our present predominantly superkinder- 

 garten system of education it is postponed until college. Here it is 

 in conflict with the needs of ever more highly specialized professional 

 training. The engineer remains inarticulate and the general public 

 uninformed ; thus the impedance mismatch is continuously increased, 

 not decreased, and must eventually approach instability. 



Dr. Glenn Frank stated this problem with fine understanding. 

 He said, 



The practical value of every social invention or material discovery depends 

 upon its being adequately interpreted to the masses. The future of scientific 

 progress depends as much on the interpretative mind as it does upon the 

 creative mind. . . . The interpreter stands between the layman, whose knowl- 

 edge of all things is indefinite — and the scientist whose knowledge of one thing 



is authoritative. . . . The scientist advances knowledge The interpreter 



advances progress. . . . History affords abundant evidence that civilization 

 has advanced in direct ratio to the efficiency with which the thought of the 

 thinkers has been translated into the language of the masses. (9) 



In contacts with students and even with reasonably informed 

 grownups, I have found not only that such simple and basic things as 

 the relation between research and engineering, between technology 

 and the standard of living, or between progress and incentive, are 

 not understood but also that the discussion of these concepts is itself 

 a fascinating new experience. An Operations Research approach 

 to some of these problems might prove quite rewarding. 



Here are some simple examples which I have found to stimulate 

 considerable interest in discussion groups. 



First, in regard to the relation between science and engineering 

 or research and engineering, let us look at figure 3. This graph shows 

 the usual growth curve for costs of a project of some kind. Note 

 that the costs during the research or information-gathering phase 

 are small. It is only at the beginning of the development or inven- 

 tion phase that there is anything tangible to consider and that costs 

 begin to mount. It is here that the businessman first begins to take 

 an interest, and it is this phase of the effort which he considers 

 important. 



To a research man, however, the picture looks entirely different. 

 The business of the researcher is to get really new information, to 

 discover a relationship which previously had never been known, to 

 do something — not better or cheaper than somebody else — but to do 

 something for the first time in the history of the human race. Re- 

 search discoveries are rarely spectacular but may nevertheless be 

 highly significant. Thus, to bring out what is important in research 

 we might plot, not dollars expended, but the ratio of the information 

 available in a certain field before an experiment to that available 

 after the experiment. If something truly new has been discovered, 



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