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How is entropy relevant to human affairs? Life and happiness depend on an infinitesimal sliver of orderly arrangements of matter amid the astronomical number of possibilities. Our bodies are improbable assemblies of molecules, and they maintain that order with the help of other improbabilities: the few substances that…
Only in the 18th century Enlightenment did the concept of progress become widespread. Earlier, most people thought of history in terms of a fall from a past Golden Age, or perhaps repeating cycles. (If they thought of such things at all. Mostly they just worried about their next meals.) With the Industrial Revolution…
What was so exciting about Manchester? Disraeli with his acute political and historical instinct understood that Manchester had done something unique and revolutionary. Only he was wrong to call it science. What Manchester had done was to invent the Industrial Revolution, a new style of life and work which began in…
The possibilities of modem technology were first in practice realised in England by the energy of a prosperous middle class. Accordingly, the industrial revolution started there. But the Germans explicitly realised the methods by which the deeper veins in the mine of science could be reached. In their technological…
While we now know that Turing was too optimistic on the timeline, AI's inexorable progress over the past 50 years suggests that Herbert Simon was right when he wrote in 1956 "machines will be capable ... of doing any work a man can do." I do not expect this to happen in the very near future, but I do believe that by…
There was a type of employee at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution whose job and livelihood largely vanished in the early twentieth century. This was the horse. The population of working horses actually peaked in England long after the Industrial Revolution, in 1901, when 3.25 million were at work. Though they…
I take a different view of science as a method; to me, it enters the human spirit more directly. Therefore I have studied quite another achievement: that of making a human society work. As a set of discoveries and devices, science has mastered nature; but it has been able to do so only because its values, which derive…