Specialists & Specialization Quotes
He was the intellectual antithesis of Francis Galton and the Eugenicists in the Nature vs Nurture debates.
Bush had advised FDR to go ahead with the research and development program to try and develop an atomic bomb. He was the only Government Official who Roosevelt discussed the idea with. At the time, Bush as a government official supervised and directed many thousands of scientists, and was one of just a few scientists who monitored and advised on the Manhattan Project to develop the Bomb. Here he is one of the first people to notice, understand and articulate the dilemma of specialization in science. To the degree it was a problem in 1945, it became a geometrically greater problem 65 years later satellites were capturing more high resolution of the universe every week than all the astronomers in the world could examine in a year. Ironically, Bush called for a type of precursor to the Internet to cope with this problem which the Internet helped with. Using computers to observe and analyze the many images helped much but all of science became weighed down with this problem of specialization and the explosion of knowledge.
Even Fuller would have been surprised at how fast this began to come to pass.
This futuristic work attempted to project American life in the year 2000—then 112 years in the future. It is remarkable how many elements he successfully predicted.
This was in 1945 where the number of research studies published each month was large compared to the past but a tiny fraction of what it would be just 50 years later.
The English Language has been in use for over 1000 years. English and English Speaking scientists have been active througout that time. Yet at the time that Wulf pointed this out, the actual word "Scientist" had been in use for less than a century.
