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by Vannevar Bush
As We May Think
poss是什么意思As Director of the Office of Scientific Rearch and Development, Dr. Vannevar Bush has coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare. In this significant article he holds up an incentive for scientists when the fighting has cead. He urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge. For years inventions have extended man's physical powers rather than the powers of his mind. Trip hammers that multiply the fists, microscopes that sharpen the eye, and engines of destruction and detection are new results, but not the end results, of modern science. Now, says Dr. Bush, instruments are at hand which, if properly developed, will give man access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages. The perfection of the pacific instruments should be the first objective of our scientists as they emerge from their war work. Like Emerson's famous address of 1837 on "The American Scholar," this paper by Dr.
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Bush calls for a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge. —THE EDITOR
This has not been a scientist's war; it has been a war in which all have had a part. The scientists, burying their old professional competition in the demand of a common cau, have shared greatly and learned much. It has been exhilarating to work in effective partnership. Now, for many, this appears to be approaching an end. What are the scientists to do next?
For the biologists, and particularly for the medical scientists, there can be little indecision, for their war has hardly required them to leave the old paths. Many indeed have been able to carry on their war rearch in their familiar peacetime laboratories. Their objectives remain much the same.
It is the physicists who have been thrown most violently off stride, who have left academic pursuits for the making of strange destructive gadgets, who have had to devi new methods for their unanticipated assignments. They have done their part on the deviccabinet是什么意思
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es that made it possible to turn back the enemy, have worked in combined effort with the physicists of our allies. They have felt within themlves the stir of achievement. They have been part of a great team. Now, as peace approaches, one asks where they will find objectives worthy of their best.
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Of what lasting benefit has been man's u of science and of the new instruments which his rearch brought into existence? First, they have incread his control of his material environment. They have improved his food, his clothing, his shelter; they have incread his curity and relead him partly from the bondage of bare existence. They have given him incread knowledge of his own biological process so that he has had a progressive freedom from dia and an incread span of life. They are illuminating the interactions of his physiological and psychological functions, giving the promi of an improved mental health.
theresa mayScience has provided the swiftest communication between individuals; it has provided a r
footballerecord of ideas and has enabled man to manipulate and to make extracts from that record so that knowledge evolves and endures throughout the life of a race rather than that of an individual.
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There is a growing mountain of rearch. But there is incread evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers—conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial.
Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of rearch are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpo. If the aggregate time spent in writing scholarly works and in reading them could be evaluated, the ratio between the amounts of time might well be startling. Tho who conscientiously attempt to keep abreast of current thought, even in restricted fields, by clo and continu
银行风险防控ous reading might well shy away from an examination calculated to show how much of the previous month's efforts could be produced on call. Mendel's concept of the laws of genetics was lost to the world for a generation becau his publication did not reach the few who were capable of grasping and extending it; and this sort of catastrophe is undoubtedly being repeated all about us, as truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconquential.
The difficulty ems to be, not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of prent day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our prent ability to make real u of the record. The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we u for threading through the conquent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was ud in the days of square-rigged ships.
But there are signs of a change as new and powerful instrumentalities come into u. Photocells capable of eing things in a physical n, advanced photography which ca
n record what is en or even what is not, thermionic tubes capable of controlling potent forces under the guidance of less power than a mosquito us to vibrate his wings, cathode ray tubes rendering visible an occurrence so brief that by comparison a microcond is a long time, relay combinations which will carry out involved quences of movements more reliably than any human operator and thousands of times as fast—there are plenty of mechanical aids with which to effect a transformation in scientific records.
