Beware the military-industrial complex, —1961 President Dwight D Eisenhower
Don't throw pearls to swine, lest they trample them and turning, rend you. — Matthew 7:6
We live in a technological dark age, — 1972, Gian-Carlo Rota, MIT Professor Applied Mathematics & Philosophy[1]
Professor Rota died quietly from atherosclerotic heart disease in his sleep.[2] His congestive heart failure was probably an inevitable consequence of his habit of carrying a large glass bottle of Coke around from which he frequently imbibed. A wonderful raconteur, he did try to warn me before I embarked on a lifetime as a submarine officer, — a Jonah imbedded in Leviathan's belly.
He embodied the American émigré scientist, — the brains that flee repressive regimes and come to foster our science and engineering. We capably nurtured them before #Faucism, and still need to because of our failure to grow our own brainpower in #FactorySchools. In a similar fashion to him, I am an émigré engineer.
Koyaanisqatsi — life out of balance.
Science embodies design architecture, e.g., Einstein's thought-experiments or quantum theory; whereas technology is process engineering, e.g., Edison's experimentation or the Manhattan Project. Technology does not inherently require theoretical principles of action, merely trial and error determination of process specifications, e.g., Spanish and Japanese tempered steel swords prior to metallurgical theory. Technology can be dogmatically taught and applied, which is an appropriate methodology required for strict procedural compliance. Science, on the other hand, is a process of creating theoretical, falsifiable constructs, e.g., the theory of evolution, which may or may not have direct functional extension into technological processes.
Clearly a theory need not be evidence-based, however, a scientific theory or paradigm should have predictability, which in turn implies it has falsifiability. And, when a scientific theory fails in explanatory power or has an unverifiable underpinning, that crisis often leads to theoretical amendments. However, when theory is dogma, and verifiability is abandoned then Ptolemaic explanations become deified.
A common misconception is that the truth will inevitably be revealed by working out the details. But this misses the biggest blunder in the history of science: that the accumulation of details could be accommodated within any prevailing paradigm by tweaking and complicating the paradigm. A classic example is Ptolemaic cosmology, a theory of epicycles for the motion of the Sun and planets around the Earth that survived empirical scrutiny for longer than it deserved.[3]
In the data-information-knowledge-wisdom pyramid, science tends to focus on the explanatory knowledge-wisdom tip, whereas technology resides in the data-information-knowledge base. "An engineering project which aims to study the strength of rods and bricks might never lead to a particularly elegant blueprint for the building in which these ingredients are finally embedded. In the scientific quest for the truth, we also need architects (theory makers), not just engineers (theory implementers/testers)." And besides coherency and beauty, following a blueprint, "without pausing to question whether the architecture of the project makes sense when discrepancies between expectations and data are revealed," can be a recipe for disaster.[4]
Empires rise, flourish and decay with a centralized dogma and a technological base adequate for their ideological, economic, political & military power to function. By their very nature, empires thrive on indoctrination and propaganda, hierarchy and control, and welfare and war. Mighty engineering empires, like the Roman or American, can endure for centuries as they siphon natural resources to embody their territorial control. Those that fail early, like the USSR, often do so due to ecocide, i.e., dogmatic application of destructive engineering practices.
Technological application irrationally disconnected from supporting life is the mold that withers the vines of empires, e.g., desertification, — the draining of the Aral Sea to irrigate cotton turning the lake basin into a dust-bowl cauldron.
Is there an antidote for the Chernobyl disaster engineering madness, where a nuclear reactor was constructed that required power to reliably shut it down in an emergency, a contingency where electricity should have been considered to have been compromised? Can "truth in advertisement" save us from mass delusion?
In Europe, the paint manufacturer, Sherwin-Williams has trademarked the Ronseal phrase that stands for the integrity of its varnish: —
Does Exactly What It Says on the Tin. ™
Alas, the cart has been in front of the donkey for over a century, and varnished truth is what we've come to accept. "How do we practice deceit? We rip the truth apart and we weave it into a lie. Nothing is more convincing."[5]
[1] E F Beschler, D A Buchsbaum, J T Schwartz, R P Stanley. B D Taylor and M Waterman, Gian-Carlo Rota (1932-1999), Notices Amer. Math. Soc. 47 (2) (2000), 203-6. http://www.ams.org/notices/200002/mem-rota.pdf
[2] Gian-Carlo Rota, MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Rota/
[3] Abraham Loeb, (24.5.2013) On the Importance of Conceptual Thinking Outside the Simulation Box, Nature Physics, Vol 9, Issue 7, https://arxiv.org/abs/1305.5495
[4] Ibid.
[5] Quellcrist Falconer to Takeshi Kovacs, Altered Carbon