Translate Page

Tuesday, 7 August 2018

Contributions Of Science And Technology In Todays World


INTRODUCTION
Science and technology has generated new knowledge, such as discoveries of new principles, and has dramatically contributed to the development and progress of people’s lives, the economy, and the society. Particularly in Japan, which lacks natural resources, technological innovations served as the key in achieving a remarkable recovery and high economic growth from the postwar devastation bringing material affluence to people’s lives. In this process, Japan, which was making efforts to catchup with Europe and the United States, became one of the front runners as the world’s second-largest economic power, and the time has come for Japan to demonstrate creativity and open the way to the future. Thus, the Japanese government enacted the Science and Technology Basic Law in 1995, and has implemented various measures for promoting science and technology according to the Science and Technology Basic Plan Phase 1 and Phase 2, in order to become an advanced science and technology-oriented nation. On the other hand, social and public expectations for science and technology became more sophisticated and diverse, and new problems that need to be addressed such as global environmental issues have emerged. Under such circumstances, international knowledge competition has intensified not only among western developed countries, but also among countries including China and the Republic of Korea. Therefore, Japan needs to further develop its “scientific and technological capabilities.” Dr. Shinichiro Tomonaga, the physicist who was the second Japanese Nobel Prize winner following Dr. Hideki Yukawa, said the following in an article contributed to Kagaku (Science) magazine, after referring to the difference in the research environment between Japan and the United States at the time: “It is wonderful that there are many brilliant scholars and ardent, competent young researchers also in Japan. These people have actually made remarkable accomplishments despite various adverse conditions.

CONTRIBUTIONS OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Creation and Use of Knowledge
A single mobile phone alone is packed with numerous cutting-edge scientific and technological accomplishments. In this manner, in the modern society, the scientific and technological knowledge and achievements are being used in our daily lives in various forms. Science and technology has two functions: creating new knowledge such as elucidating unknown phenomena that surround us and discovering new laws and principles; and using the knowledge gained in the real world. Because these two functions interact and are hard to separate, and because scientific and technological achievements have already been permeated throughout our daily lives like the atmosphere itself, we have come to rarely realize them as scientific and technological achievements. However, science and technology has had various impacts and spillover effects in our daily lives in the process of their development. These impacts and spillover effects are reviewed below.
(Intellectual/cultural values of science and technology)
Science is an intellectual activity that started from intellectual curiosity for understanding natural phenomena, originating from the feelings of admiration and inspiration for nature and other things surrounding human beings.
Scientific and technological achievements bring us new knowledge. Their accumulation expands the limits of people’s activities both in space and time, beyond the conventional concept of values. They can enlarge the possibilities of people’s activities and serve as the driving force for society from the view points of culture and civilization. In medieval times, when people believed the geocentric theory of Claudius Ptolemaeus, Nicolaus Copernicus advocated the heliocentric system (Copernican theory), and the theory came to be established by the efforts of Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, and Galileo Galilei. Later, the idea was inherited by Isaac Newton’s law of gravitation and modern astrophysics represented by the Big Bang theory, and has influenced people’s views of the universe and the Earth in the various times. John Dalton demonstrated the existence of atoms, which had been a philosophical concept until then, and this developed to Amedeo Avogadro’s molecular hypothesis. In addition, the discovery of atoms was accelerated by Dimitri Mendeleev’s periodic law, which had a large impact on the understanding of the composition of matter, i.e. that all matter is made up of a certain number of atoms. Furthermore, the possible existence of even smaller elementary particles has been indicated. In this manner, our understanding of matter is likely to deepen even further in the future. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution proposed an idea on the evolution of organisms, while the elucidation of genes, which started with Gregor Johann Mendel’s law of heredity, hints at the answer to the mystery of organisms. Yet new views on organisms and senses of ethics are expected to develop in the 21st century, which is being called the “century of life science.” Today, as development of science and technology accelerates, their achievements are expected to influence people’s values at an even faster pace and may dramatically change the paradigms of society.
In the preceding section we have offered a brief description of some developments in Western Europe that gave rise to the Enlightenment, in which scientific positivism played such a pivotal role. The Enlightenment made a profound impact on both the industrial development of Western Europe - also causing the sharp opposition between tradition and modernity - and on the development of the idea of human rights. As Herrera put it succinctly,
For Enlightenment, all things in nature are disposed in harmonious order, regulated by a few simple laws, in such a way that everything contributes to the equilibrium of the Universe. The same rational order is the basis of the human world and manifests itself through the instincts and tendencies of men. The main obstacle to this linear unending human progress is, for the Enlightenment, ignorance and the education of all strata of society in the light of reason and science will finally lead to a perfect and happy society.
Indeed, the rational analysis of the physical and social world will gradually show many ideas of the established traditional order to be errors, which will be replaced by scientific truth. Moreover, in connection with these ideas, a new type of society evolved and conscious attempts were made to change political and social orders in the direction of a "rational society." It was, as Eisenstadt phrased it, the birth of "the civilization of modernity," which is, among other things, characterized by growing structural differentiation and specialization, the establishment of universalistic organizational frameworks, and the articulation of relatively open, non-traditional systems of stratification and mobility in which criteria of achievement are dominant.
The rise of this industrial, open society, based on a specific set of values of the Enlightenment, is closely connected to the birth of human rights. Although the idea of human rights has deep historical roots - and not exclusively in the Western world -human rights, as formulated in documents such as the Bill of Rights and the Declaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen, are very much the product of both the Enlightenment and the rise of industrial society. As such the concept of human rights is strongly associated with individualism, rationalism, and universalism. Dumont states that the adoption of the Declaration marks in a certain sense the triumph of the individual.
This seems to be a rather restricted view of the origin of human rights. Are these rights - as liberties - primarily a functional alternative in a modern world, for the security that is provided in an organic way within traditional structures? In European history we can observe several periods which bear witness to the disintegration of established social structures and the concomitant rise of individualism - for example, the period after the downfall of the Greek city-states and the Renaissance period in which the individual emerged from the communal order of the Middle Ages - without the development of a concept of human rights that is comparable to the concept as it emerged in the eighteenth century.
In the historical documents to which we referred earlier, the idea of human rights is associated with a very positive image of individualism. In the period when these documents were being produced, individualism was considered by many advocates of social change to be a pivotal characteristic of the emerging social order. It referred not only to respect for the intrinsic value or dignity of the individual human being in relation to privacy, but also to individual autonomy, the capacity of the individual to think independently, to decide for himself or herself, to control the conditions under which he - or she - lived and worked. As such, autonomy was - and is - the reverse of alienation and powerlessness. The coming social order was contrasted with the traditional order of feudal society in which an individual's opportunities in life were strongly determined by his or her position in the social order, based on birth, and the rights to which his or her estate entitled the individual.
This connection between the birth of human rights and the rise of a new liberal, democratic order produced consequences for the contents of human rights as individual, universal rights. The origin of human rights, and the subsequent development of socioeconomic rights, shed some light on the model of man that is traditionally associated with those who favor civil rights. This model is, as Campbell says, of a person somewhat beyond the "norm" in the sense of the normal: an active, rational, and entrepreneurial person for whom the life which is claimed is one in which there is a degree of self-expression, self-help, and self-defense. It is of a person who has the opportunity to have and manage property, to communicate views and pursue happiness along individually chosen lines, to share in government and freely go about day-to-day activities without the interference of officials and prohibitions of the state beyond those strictly necessary for the defense of the rights of others.
Human rights are, as we explained, tied to an individualistic view of society and man. In this view individualism is combined with rationalism, universalism, and cosmopolitanism, and as such they stand in opposition to particularism, collectivism, and traditionalism. Human rights refer to the individual and are beyond his or her particular social relationships or roots. This primacy of reason, universalism, and the individual over the group appears to be essential in solving problems related to human rights as it develops in international law today.
In order to pursue our analysis of the relationship of technological development and human rights we have to elaborate on the model of development that is connected with the Enlightenment and the rise of industrial society. This is particularly important because this model of development still plays a dominant role in the thinking of many leaders in the domain of (post) industrial development. Our description of the Enlightenment model of industrial development will be, perforce, of an ideal, typical or constructed in the Weberian sense. 


REFERENCE





Adas, Michael (1989). Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ISBN 0-8014-2303-1.

Bereano, P. (1977). Technology as a Social and Political Phenomenon.Wiley & Sons, ISBN 0471068756.

Show others what you've found!