Eureka

Of the three, the rise of freedom is the most difficult to explain and yet the easiest to understand. The desire for freedom is fundamental to human nature. Each of us "understands,'' at least viscerally, our great preference to be free, and, regardless of our differences, understands that freedom is morally right - a truth needing no explanation. Each of us carries within his own intuition an appreciation of the reason that many millions of people have given their lives for freedom.

Technology is the result of engineering - the manipulation of the environment in efforts to change the human condition. For thousands of years - all of recorded history - man has struggled to change his environment in order to increase the quality and length of human life and to improve the nature of human life. Unfortunately, throughout that period, some men have also worked to build technology for negative reasons, particularly technology that can be used to enslave others and take away their freedom. In all cases, however, technology can be described as human-controlled environmental change.

We know that our environment changes over time whether or not we cause that change. The earth is a dynamic system - biologically, geologically, and astronomically. We now have the ability - in small ways - to affect that change, but most environmental change is still far beyond the control of man.

Those who have adopted the worship of a static, unchanged environment in the new animal and plant-centered religion that they call "environmentalism'' (and we call pseudoenvironmentalism) have adopted a lost cause. They advocate a world with less technology, but their stated goals could only be fulfilled by technology so advanced that it will probably still remain the province of science fiction for many centuries to come.

To the limits of his ability, however, man has always struggled to improve the environment to his own benefit. The invention of the wheel, the control of fire, crude metallurgy, primitive agriculture, and the many other helpful technologies that engineers developed in the first few recorded millennia greatly improved the microenvironment immediately surrounding human beings. These engineers produced many valuable things. Their accomplishments are especially remarkable in that their work was almost entirely empirical. They had little fundamental understanding of the materials with which they worked. They knew only a little mathematics and essentially no science.

Gradually they built an environment for man sufficiently advanced that he was able to take the next step - the development of science. Science then provided the understanding necessary for a sustained advance in engineering which created our modern civilization.

What, however, is the nature of true science or scientists - of whom there are far fewer than is generally realized? Although there are now many hundreds of thousands of people with educational degrees in science, very few of these people are actually scientists -those whose work and insights truly advance modern science. Most "scientists,'' are, in reality, technicians whose activities have become a profitable business in this era of $33 billion annual tax-financed, non-defense "research'' and government regulations that require huge industrial expenditures for unnecessary procedures.

Fourth, they are scrupulously honest about their work. In the words of Richard Feynman, "A scientist's highest obligation is to prove himself wrong.'' This requires active honesty - a refusal to ignore any experimental result and a continual active search for information bearing on his hypotheses, whether positive or negative.