Today’s modern world has become slaves to science that we cannot see or breath and cannot live without its breath. It has become the main aspect of modern civilisation. Wonders of science and technology has excelled from the fairy tales wonders like flying carpet, the magic lamp. Science has immensely added to our comfort, health, knowledge, prosperity, peace and war as well.
Among other man has dominated the position on this planet by science and technologies. Others have taken nature as they find her, they have adapted to the environment that nature provides for them.
But human being has changed the environment, he can create an environment that suits for all human societies and it exists even among less developed communities. Right from Stone Age till today human being is keeping on changing and discovering new methods and development. All these are techniques for changing the wild habitat into an environment that suits him better.
Advance civilisation has more complex technologies, but the basic patterns are always the same. The hunters of the human has invented spears or bow and arrows for hunting, swords, spears, guns, etc. for fighting or for battle, hoe and plough for farming. Human has learned and understand the habit of other animals, so the community domesticates the ox or the horse and invented boat or the wheel.
They have invented clothes and huts to keep themselves comfortable and beat the nature. Human technological progress has been a natural continuation of earlier trends. When today we breed new strains of corn, we are following the same aims as the first farmers. And when we send a rocket above the atmosphere, we are following the line began by the invention of the wheel.
However, there is one respect in which our technology is markedly different. We have transformed the simple tools or the past into complex machines. For example, man has used such a tool as the hammer since long before historical records began.
But it was only in historical times that he discovered that the hammer could be made into a trip hammer – that it, could be made to deliver it’s below again and again automatically. When a tool is made to repeat the same mechanical action, it becomes a machine.
Modern civilisation is built on the use of machines in this way. However, clever they may appear, all machines at bottom are as simple as the water, and they do nothing but save us from but saved us from carrying out ourselves a fixed and repeated sequence of actions.
When machines repeat the actions, day in and day out, they need a constant source of power. Therefore, a great deal of human invention in the last 300 years has been directed to taming the power hidden in nature, and do channelling it into steady sources of energy that can drive machines. Accordingly, inventions in the field of energy – all the way from the steam engine to the nuclear reactor – have an important place in technological growth.
There is another aspect of the machine that will become more and more important in the century ahead of us. This is the discovery that machines are also good at adding on columns of figures of flying an aeroplane on a fixed beam. Until a few years ago, we used machines only to repeated work. Now we realise that all repetition is best done by machines even if the operation is as complex as controlling the sequence or processes in a chemical plant or calculating the price of its products. With this discovery we are on the threshold of a new age of industrial automation.
All progress in technology depends on a scientific understanding the way in which nature works, in order that we may make her work for our ends. Pure science and technology are not independent fields of study.
Agriculture cannot prosper without the study of genetics, light metals cannot be made without research in chemistry, and automation depends on electronic devices that need a detailed understanding of the physics of matter and of the logic of control systems.
Above all, though we must understand that technology is the application of scientific knowledge to human problems. Like all knowledge, it can be applied for good or evil – and even when applied with the best of intentions, it can have evil result.
In short, every human advance carries with it not only automatic benefits but also a new responsibility, and we must remain constantly aware of the dangers that lie in the possible misuse of enormous skills. If properly used, however, those very skills could enable whole populations to lead the kind of good life both material and spiritual that has once the privilege of a lucky few.
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