Abstract
Technological thinking has played a role in science throughout history. During the ancient period mechanical devices served as ways to investigate mathematical and scientific ideas. In the medieval period the mechanical clock provided scientists with a new way to conceive of time. By the period of the Scientific Revolution the clock came to play an important role in the development of the mechanical philosophy and new devices, like the air pump served as the basis for the experimental philosophy. During that period technology also came to provide a new ideology for science. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the emergence of the engineering sciences played an important role in scientific thinking with thermodynamics serving as a new way to understand all scientific processes. Engineering concepts such as strain, elasticity, and vortex motion provided a way to think about electromagnetism and theories of the aether. The scientification of technology during the second half of the nineteenth century led to science-based industries which in turn led to industry-based science emerging from the industrial research laboratories. By the twentieth century the military-industrial-academic complex and the emergence of big science combined to create technoscience in which the distinctions between science and technology became blurred. The role of technological thinking in science culminated in the computer replacing the heat engine, and the clock before that, as a new model to understand scientific phenomena.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Ademann, H. B. (1966). Marcello Malpighi and the evolution of embryology (Vol. 1). Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Alon, U. (2006). An introduction to systems biology. Boca Raton: Chapman & Hall/CRC.
Archimedes. (1909). Geometrical solutions derived from mechanics. Chicago: Open Court.
Bacon, F. (1937). In R. Jones (Ed.), Essays, advancement of learning, new Atlantis and other pieces. New York: Odyssey Press.
Basalla, G. (1962). William Harvey and the heart as a pump. Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 36, 467–470.
Belloni, L. (1975). Marcello Malpighi and the founding of anatomical microscopy. In M. L. Righini Bonelli & W. R. Shea (Eds.), Reason, experiment and mysticism in the scientific revolution. New York: Science History Publications.
Boas, M. (1952). The establishment of the mechanical philosophy. Osiris, 10, 412–541.
Böhme, G., Van den Daele, W., & Krohn, W. (1978). The scientification of technology. In W. Krohn (Ed.), Dynamics of science and technology. Dordrecht: D. Reidel.
Briggs, J. (1989). Francis Bacon and the rhetoric of nature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Brush, S. (1967). Thermodynamics and history. The Graduate Journal, 7, 477–565.
Bush, V. (1945). Science, the endless frontier. Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office.
Cantor, G., & Hodge, M. (Eds.). (1981). Conception of the ether: Studies in the history of ether theories 1740–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Capshew, J., & Rader, K. (1992). Big science: Price to present. Osiris, 7, 3–25.
Cardwell, D. (1971). From Watt to Clausius: The rise of thermodynamics in the early industrial age. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Cardwell, D. (1972). Science and the steam engine, 1790–1825. In P. Mathias (Ed.), Science and society, 1600–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cardwell, D. (1976). Science and technology: The work of James Prescott Joule. Technology and Culture, 17, 674–686.
Cardwell, D. (1995). The Norton history of technology. New York: W.W. Norton.
Channell, D. (1989). The history of engineering science: An annotated bibliography. New York: Garland.
Channell, D. (1991). The vital machine: A study of technology and organic life. New York: Oxford University Press.
Channell, D. (2004). The computer at nature’s core. Wired Magazine, 2, 79–80.
Channell, D. (2009). The emergence of the engineering sciences: A historical analysis. In A. Meijers (Ed.), Handbook of the philosophy of technology and engineering sciences (pp. 117–154). Amsterdam: Elsevier Science.
Cipolla, C. (1978). Clocks and culture: 1300–1700. New York: W.W. Norton.
Drachmann, A. G. (1948). Ktesibios, Philon and Heron: A study in ancient pneumatics. Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard.
Drachmann, A. G. (1962). The mechanical technology of Greek and Roman antiquity. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Edwards, P. (1996). The closed world: Computers and the politics of discourse in cold war America. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Forman, P. (2007). The primacy of science in modernity, or technology in postmodernity, and of ideology in the history of technology. History and Technology, 23, 1–152.
Fox, R., & Guagnini, A. (1998–1999). Laboratories, workshops, and sites: Concepts and practices of research in industrial Europe, 1800–1914. Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, 29, 55–140, 191–294.
Galilei, G. (1954). Dialogues concerning two new sciences. New York: Dover Publications.
Galison, P. (1989). Bubbles, sparks, and the postwar laboratory. In L. Brown, M. Dresden, & L. Hoddeson (Eds.), Pions to quarks: Particle physics in the 1950s (pp. 213–251). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Galison, P. (1997). Image and logic: A material culture of microphysics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Galison, P., Hevly, B., & Lowen, R. (1992). Controlling the monster: Stanford and the growth of physics research, 1935–1962. In P. Galison & B. Hevly (Eds.), Big science: The growth of large-scale research. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Gardner, H. (1985). The mind’s new science: A history of the cognitive revolution. New York: Basic Books.
Gibbs, W. W. (2004). Synthetic life. Scientific American, 290(5), 74–81.
Hall, A. R. (1959). The scholar and the craftsman in the scientific revolution. In M. Clagett (Ed.), Critical problems in the history of science. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Hall, M. B. (Ed.). (1973). The Pneumatics of Hero of Alexandria: A facsimile of the 1851 Woodcroft edition. New York: American Elsevier Publishing Co.
Hankins, T., & Silverman, R. (1995). Instruments and the imagination. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Harman, P. (1982). Energy, force and matter: The conceptual development of nineteenth-century physics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Healey, E. C. (1856). To our readers. The Engineer, 1, 3.
Heidegger, M. (1977). The question concerning technology and other essays. New York: Harper and Row.
Hills, R. (1989). Power from steam: A history of the stationary steam engine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hobbes, T. (1839). The English works of Thomas Hobbes (Vol. 7). London: John Bohn.
Hodges, H. (1970). Technology in the ancient world. New York: Barnes and Noble Books.
Holton, G. (1973). Thematic origins of scientific thought: Kepler to Einstein. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Ihde, D. (1990). Technology and the lifeworld: From garden to earth. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Ihde, D. (2010). Heidegger’s technologies: Postphenomenological perspectives. New York: Fordham University Press.
Kay, L. (2000). Who wrote the book of life: A history of the genetic code. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
König, W. (1996). Science-based industry or industry-based science? Electrical engineering in Germany before World War II. Technology and Culture, 37, 70–101.
Koyré, A., & Cohen, I. B. (1962). Newton and the Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence. Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Sciences, 15, 63–126.
Kuhn, T. (1969). Energy conservation as an example of simultaneous discovery. In M. Clagett (Ed.), Critical problems in the history of science. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Kuhn, T. (1978). Black-body theory: The historical development of quantum theory and quantum discontinuity, 1894–1912. New York: Oxford University Press.
Landels, J. G. (1978). Engineering in the ancient world. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Landes, D. (1983). Revolution in time: Clocks and the making of the modern world. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Latour, B. (1987). Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Leslie, S. W. (1993). The cold war and American science: The military-industrial-academic complex at MIT and Stanford. New York: Columbia University Press.
Lloyd, S. (2002). Computational capacity of the universe. Physical Review Letters, 88(23), art. no. 237901.
Martin, J. (1992). Francis Bacon, the state and the reform of natural philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mayr, O. (1986). Authority, liberty & automatic machinery in early modern Europe. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
McMullin, E. (1990). Conceptions of science in the scientific revolution. In D. Lindberg & R. Westman (Eds.), Reappraisals of the scientific revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Meyer-Thurow, G. (1982). The industrialization of invention: A case study from the German dye industry. Isis, 73, 363–381.
Mumford, L. (1963). Technics and civilization. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World.
Noble, D. (1997). Religion of technology: The divinity of man and the spirit of invention. New York: Knopf.
Pagel, W. (1967). William Harvey’s biological ideas. New York: Hafner.
Price, D. d. S. (1963). Little science, big science. New York: Columbia University Press.
Reich, L. (1985). The making of American industrial research: Science and business at GE and Bell, 1876–1926. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Roland, A. (1985). Technology and war: A bibliographic essay. In M. R. Smith (Ed.), Military enterprise and technological change. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Roland, A. (2001). The military-industrial complex. New York: Society for the history of technology and the American Historical Association.
Rosenfield, L. (1968). From beast-machine to man-machine: Animal soul in French letters from Descartes to La Mettrie. New York: Octagon.
Salomon, J.-J. (1973). Science and politics. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Sassower, R. (1995). Cultural collisions postmodern technoscience. New York: Routledge.
Schweber, S. (1992). Big science in context: Cornell and MIT. In P. Galison & B. Hevly (Eds.), Big science: The growth of large-scale research (pp. 149–183). Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Shapin, S. (1981). Of gods and kings: Natural philosophy and politics in the Leibniz-Clarke disputes. Isis, 72, 187–215.
Shapin, S. (1996). The scientific revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Shapin, S., & Schaffer, S. (1985). Leviathan and the air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the experimental life. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Smith, C. (1998). The science of energy: A cultural history of energy physics in Victorian Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Staudenmaier, J. (1985). Technology’s storytellers: Reweaving the human fabric. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Toulmin, S. (1964). The complexity of scientific choice: A stocktaking. Minerva, 2, 343–359.
Webster, C. (1965). William Harvey’s conception of the heart as a pump. Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 39, 510–515.
Weinberg, A. (1961). Impact of large-scale science. Science, 134, 161–164.
Wheeler, J. A. (1998). Geons, black holes and quantum foam: A life in physics. New York: W.W. Norton.
Wise, M. N. (1990). Electromagnetic theory in the nineteenth century. In R. C. Olby et al. (Eds.), Companion to the history of modern science (pp. 342–356). London: Routledge.
Zagorin, P. (1998). Francis Bacon. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Ziman, J. (1996). Post-academic science: Constructing knowledge with networks and norms. Science Studies, 9, 67–80.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Channell, D.F. (2015). Technological Thinking in Science. In: Hansson, S. (eds) The Role of Technology in Science: Philosophical Perspectives. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 18. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9762-7_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9762-7_3
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-017-9761-0
Online ISBN: 978-94-017-9762-7
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawPhilosophy and Religion (R0)