Word: scientists
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Never before has the U.S. scientist been so important to government and industry. But does that mean he never had it so good? Last week at Indiana's Wabash College, Norbert (Cybernetics) Wiener, professor of mathematics at M.I.T., flatly answered no. Politics aside, said he, the role the scientist now plays can seriously endanger his intellectual health...
...thrown into the effort. As many of these young men were not yet in a position to work freely on their own, and as much of the effort was of a military and secret nature, scientific tasks were divided up by the [scientific] administrators into small pieces, and scientists were employed for very specific purposes." Result: the individual scientist was not only unaware of the vast, basic problem he was dealing with, but his curiosity about the problem was often discouraged. "The secrecy of military effort merely reinforced a growing policy of secrecy on the part of the commercial firms...
...Delusion. In addition to this departmentalization "was a growing attitude of worship of the gadget." The new computing machines worked at such dazzling speeds that they tended to assume more importance than the ideas fed into them. As projects grew and machines multiplied, "the ideal of the great original scientist [gave] way largely to that of the scientific administrator who is more concerned to parcel out his effort and to keep his machines, staff and ideas busy than to develop his concepts...
...this atmosphere of delusion, there has been so much dead space and dead wood placed between those really capable of ideas that even they are forced to work less effectively than ever before. The scientist is valued in accordance with the amount of money that he spends, and his secrecy often protects him from the inspection which would force upon him the need to spend this money and develop his ideas to good advantage...
...more astonishing is the evidence of a scientific society that produced a calendar (circa 353 B.C.), based on astronomical observations, which is considered more accurate than the Julian calendar that was devised in 46 B.C. The Mayans reckoned time from a zero date beginning, according to one scientist, with Oct. 15, 3375 B.C. Their month (urinal) lasted 20 days; a year (tun) 18 months, or 360 days,' which was completed (to correspond more accurately to the solar year) by adding five so-called "unlucky days." Thus they had a fixed calendar year of 365 days. It was nearly...