Science , Technology And Society In The Nineteenth Century

During the twentieth century, changes brought about by the industrial revolution have radically transformed human society as a whole, and the Western world in particular, to the point that many observers regard the twentieth century as the century of the most dynamic in the history of mankind. The scientific and technological research has been the driving force of these changes, in that it produced an economic development that, in turn, has created new resources for research, this virtuous circle has supported an increase characterized by increasing growth rates so that In the industrialized world, it has acquired characteristics even explosives(Cookson , pp. 205-209).

As a first approximation we can say that in the last two centuries, research has grown exponentially. A closer look shows that in the period 1914 to 1945 the rate of growth of research has changed with strong spikes in times of war, in the period 1946 to 1975 the development of research in the Western world stood stable at very high levels; and at the end of the century the rate of growth of research funding is substantially reduced, while remaining positive(Silva, p.630).

Recent decades have also been characterized by the rapid industrialization of some Asian countries, which have achieved very high rates of economic growth, even in this case can be recognized is the role of research as a factor of development, is the virtuous circle that feeds the expansion Simultaneous research and production units.

During the twentieth century the growth of the science and technology has taken speed unmatched in human history, the expansion was likely to induce profound changes - even qualitative - in the forms and ways in which the activity takes place in research.

The most far-reaching changes are as follows: science broke into fields that seemed denied to scientific investigation, we have seen the multiplication and diversification of places where the research is carried out and the fragmentation of the scientific community(Coiro, pp. 30-35)

Europe has lost its centrality in favor of the United States; imbalances have emerged who see the research concentrated in certain geographical areas and targeting mainly the dominant interests in these areas, the military and economic competition between nations has brought with it the need for privacy research, undermining the nineteenth-century ideal of a supranational scientific community and the growth of the means needed to research led scientists to depend increasingly on sources of funding, fueling the conflict between independence and finalization, the multiplication of research workers has undermined the spirit of its elite scientists nineteenth century, scientific knowledge, finally, has been extended far beyond the assimilation capacity of a single individual or even a single research group (Taleb, pp. 102-106).

In the twentieth century scientific research and technological growth has been very strong. Depending on the criteria used, the investigation of this growth has revealed an exponential growth characterized by a doubling time of between ten and twenty years. The research system has thus dilated than in the past, many orders ...