🚀 go-pugleaf

	I think that people responding to the querry about James Burke's
view of Science in "Connections" have not made one of his central points,
made in the first and last episodes, chapters of the book:

	We depend on a technical world whose structure we could not
individually rebuild from scratch if we were suddenly stripped of it. 
	If we wanted to wrest control of our lives from the technological
infrastructure that has been created over the past 1500 years what
should we do? Destroy it and start over, do nothing, try to understand
how its parts create our world?

	The middle sections of the series offer a whimsical account of how
seemingly unrelated incidents suggested innovations that lead to modern
inventions and science. I think that the value of Burke's presentation is
not only that it is fun, but that ideas arn't often formed in some formal
and dry way, but often in a climate of necessity, sometimes frivolous
need, but someone is there to see the connection between two or more effects
whose sum is greater than the "bits". This process does not always involve
great men, often practical men of no great intellect.

	In the subsequent series, and book, "The day the Universe Changed",
Burke is looking at this same process, but more soborly, for a few critical
events where a number of things came together to make a great change in
the subsequent culture. Again, this is not the Great Men approach. I have seen
some of the PBS episodes, and read only some of the chapters of the book, I
could go review this material and comment on it later.

	I should add that I think that Burke mentions pieces of history that
are well mentioned in traditional history of Science and Technology books I
have seen, but adds some novel ones and his own unique interpetation. Some
people may disagree with the slapstick way he does this, but he is trying
to present a complicated topic in an entertaining way, at least in the first
series. I don't find anything In either series or book that I strongly object
to, or do I know of any case where he has got his facts wrong.

	I think that the support of our way of life by a technical infra-
structure that could be easily destroyed, say by global nuclear war, and
not easily replaced, is a powerful concept. I have often wondered if there
is a repository of our current knowledge that could survive the total
destruction of the global or regional communications system we use for
disemination of technical culture? Are there places, vaults, underground,
where backup copies of University libraries are stored? Do people put
records, blueprints, textbooks, scientific monographics in some form that
could be stored for thousands of years? Are Compact Disks used for this
purpose? Do we know that CDs last for any length of time? Is there a better
way to store information? I know that corporate records are stored in vaults.
Near Menlo Park, at Ben Lomond Mountian there is such a place. 
	I suppose a deeper question is, if we were to experience some
catastrophy that destroys the infrastructure of technology, something caused
by the technology itself, nuclear war, some worldwide climatic change, a
pandemic that decimates world population, etc., would we lose so much faith
in the accmulation of knowledge so it gets destroyed by us, like the burning
of the library at Alexandra by Christians in the Fourth Century? What perserves
the value of knowledge?

Bruce Salem