Scott, a professor of political science at Yale, presents a plausible contender for the most important piece of technology in the history of man. In “ Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States,” James C. Soap prevented more deaths than penicillin. I love my laptop and my iPhone and my Echo and my G.P.S., but the piece of technology I would be most reluctant to give up, the one that changed my life from the first day I used it, and that I’m still reliant on every waking hour-am reliant on right now, as I sit typing-dates from the thirteenth century: my glasses. Some of the most important things we use every day were invented long before the adoption of the scientific method. Wheels and wells, cranks and mills and gears and ships’ masts, clocks and rudders and crop rotation: all have been crucial to human and economic development, and none historically had any connection with what we think of today as science. Many of our most significant inventions are pure tools, with no scientific method behind them. For much of human history, though, technology had nothing to do with science.
When it comes to the shiniest wonders of the modern world-as the supercomputers in our pockets communicate with satellites-science and technology are indeed hand in glove.
Science and technology: we tend to think of them as siblings, perhaps even as twins, as parts of STEM (for “science, technology, engineering, and mathematics”).
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