Technology and Engineering

Too often technology is seen as inferior to science, as a simple practical application of a self-sufficient "pure" knowledge. Such a dichotomy is for sure an illusion. The contributions met in this volume, reflecting the richness and the density of the session Science, Technology and Industry during the XXth International Congress of History of Science in Liège in 1997, show all technology as nothing less than the bridge between science on one side, society and economy on the other side. And this bridge is not a one-way road but a place of interactions between the theoretical and the applied, between the knowledge and the know-how. A special section of this book demonstrates that this equal footing dialogue has been particularly intense as far as the military technical development is concerned, and that for many centuries.

This collection does not bring a synthesis or a state of the art, but some rich material able to stimulate the debates, still active since the 1970s, in the social studies of science and technology. Most of the papers integrate and try to touch the complexity of the processes at work when a discovery, an invention, has to be adapted, or when the social and economic structures solicit from science a solution to very peculiar problems. The diversity of topics, approaches, even the variety of the vocabulary used by the authors to describe apparently similar patterns, reflect the dynamic of a research flow but also, probably, the necessity to elaborate new analytical frames, new synthetic schemes.