Dear Organlearners,
Richard Webster <webster.1@osu.edu> quotes from Peter Drucker's "The Next
Information Revolution." the following:
>"The next information revolution is well under way....It is a
>revolution in CONCEPTS." It asks "What is the MEANING
>of information and what is its PURPOSE?" (page 47)...
>"The new information revolution began in the business sector....
>But it is about to engulf education and health care....Again
>the changes in concepts will in the end be at least as
>important as the changes in tools and technology...."
Greetings Dick,
Thank you very much for bringing this to our attention.
What I particularly liked, is the use of the word "Next". In other words,
Drucker acknowledges more than one information revolution.
You have provided us with a pointer to the future. I want to provide you
with a pointer to the past on the same thread.
I am buzy preparing a contribution for the LOlist with the title "A Primer
in Entropy". The idea is to enable all thinkers who did not had the
slightest training in "energy conservation" and "entropy production" to
use these concepts with more confidence in their thinking.
While doing research in our university's library on one of the most
revolutionary periods (1840-1870) in all history of scientic thinking, I
came deeply under the impression how Robert Mayer, one of the five most
influential thinkers during that period, was saying virtually the same
thing! He actually pointed out, while the concepts of science were
changing, how they were changing!
He frequently stressed in his writings the two sides of the same coin:
* If we want to know what goes on during a
phenomenon, we must measure.
* If we do not try to understand our measurements
(information), they have been made in vain.
You people will probably not believe it, but up to 1842 virtually all
physicists and chemists used the same name for what we today conceptualise
as "force" and "energy". They used the word "force" for both. Newton did
not use the word "force" because he wrote his Principia in Latin. He used
the Latin word "vis". When people began to write in English, they
translated "vis" with "force". Newton never used any particular Latin word
to indicate that he had formed the concept of "energy". But Leibniz,
caught up in the conflict between him and Newton as to whom had discovered
infinitesimal calculus, probably first formed the the concept of "energy".
He refered to it as "vis viva" to contrast it to Newton's concept of
"vis".
But another hundred and fifty years had to pass before Mayer (1842) made
the bold statement that scientists will have to distinguish between
Newton's "vis" and Leibniz's "vis viva". He based his arguments on many
things, but especially that these two concepts had different units of
measurement. Thus he was probably the first scientist ever to introduce
"dimensional analysis". In this discipline the distinction between
different quantities in terms of different units of measurement is
fundamentally important.
To make the distinction clear, he renamed Newton's concept of "force" as
"vis morte". You can probabaly imagine what happened next -- all hell
broke loose. Who the hell is this German physician (medical doctor) to
speak of the great English scientist's (Newton) concept as "dead force"
and the crafty German Leibniz's concept as "live force"?
It is tragic that there was so much animosity between the Germans and the
English for so many centuries. The conflict between Newton and Leibniz as
to whom discovered infinitesmal calculus originally, is a typical example
of this animosity. Eventually, to keep the peace, it was decided that they
invented the calculus independently. Great was my surpise a few months ago
when I found out that all the major tools of calculus, except the words
"calculus", "fluxion" (Newton) and "infintesimal" (Leibniz) were already
invented and used by the French mathematician Pierre de Fermat decades
before them. This invention brought him into conflict with another French
thinker Rene Descartes. Sad, is not, how fame and ignorance create
conflict?
I cannot help but to think of the ancient Greeks who probably
initiated the first information revolution.
They had a saying: (I cannot type the actual Greek letters so I will
type their closest "western" equivalents.)
Tarssei tous antropous ou ta prachmata,
alla ta peri ton prachmaton dochmata.
In English and our context it means roughly the following:
It is not the pratices (information and technology)
which matters, but the explanation of them.
In other words, the essence of the revolution is not in the practices
(infomation and technology) themselves, but in the transformation of
our thinking about them.
Best wishes
--At de Lange <amdelange@gold.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa
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