Twin Tracks The Unexpected Origins of the Modern World

Introduction Heading confidently for Japan, Columbus unexpectedly bumped into America, and Western knowledge went down the tubes. What was the New World doing there, when it didn't figure in the Bible or Aristotle? Not to mention its thousands of never-before-seen plants and animals. Intellectual panic followed. If the classical authorities were wrong about something as big as this, whose word could you trust any more? A hundred years of global exploration later, the problem had grown too big to ignore, so in 1619 Rene Descartes came up with a way to verify data through methodical doubt and reductionism: Question everything, and get down to detail; reduce all problems to their basic components; learn more and more about less and less.Descartes's approach generated the first specialist scientific research, which, in turn, triggered the Industrial Revolution and, with it, Adam Smith's idea that output was increased if the different stages of production were divided among different workers.Reductionism and the division of labor have given us the highest standard of living in history. They have also brought socially unsustainable rates of innovation and population growth, and the kind of specialist thinking that makes it difficult to see beyond the end of your Ph.D. As a result, commercial-secrecy-shrouded research labs, working on everything from new pesticides to smart bombs, launch their latest successes onto an unsuspecting market, and when these new products bump into other equally unexpected novelties -- because of the way the world is networked -- the result often causes unforeseen ripple reflects. For instance, Edison's electric light threatened the gaslight business, which was then given a temporary reprieve through the invention of the incandescent gas mantle by Auer von Welsbach, whose mantle research also revealed the existence of the rare earth neodymium, later available to dope the crystal for the first laser (itself fundamentally based on the electronic behavior of one of Edison's lightbulbs).Everything is connected. As you read these words, somewhere someone you've never heard of is doing something that will sooner or later bring change to your life. And sometime in the course of the next twenty-four hours you'll do the same to others. None of us is untouched by the swirl and eddy of serendipity that drives human endeavors at all levels from quantum chromodynamics to painting your house.In the past, the ripples took longer to spread because we were few and communication was slow. But the process was essentially the same as it is today. No decision, or course of action, escapes the effect of chance. For example, at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, if the English instead of the French had used the new stirrup to field mounted shock troops, and thus were victorious, this book would have been written in a form of English unaffected by the post-Hastings French invasion of England, and the text would look more like: p a Frencyscan ahton waelstowe geweald ("the French won").Until recently, reductionism discouraged the cross-disciplinary, connective view of events because we lacked the means to gather and cross-refer the very large amount of data that would have made such an approach feasible. So we tended to organize history as we organized knowledge: in specialist terms, boxed into separate, straight-line, thematic structures. And yet the most cursory examination reveals this is not the way things happen. For instance, as this book shows, the emergence of stealth aircraft came not so much from earlier work in the field of aeronautics as from crystal-diffraction studies and audio recording tape technology. Above all, like everything, stealth technology was the end product of a series of human encounters, each one as accidental as the last.The point of looking at history like this rather than in the traditional way (in terms of themes, or Great MomBurke, James is the author of 'Twin Tracks The Unexpected Origins of the Modern World', published 2003 under ISBN 9780743226196 and ISBN 0743226194.