Chapter 11.3 Science and Technology for Today’s World
Chapter 11.3 Science and Technology for Today’s World
Learning Objectives
By the end of this section, you will be able to:
- Discuss the development of complex digital computers and their effects on human society
- Analyze the effects of the internet and social media on society
- Describe important medical developments of the last fifty years and current medical challenges
World War II brought about a massive technological transformation as countries like Germany and the United States rapidly innovated to avoid destruction and defeat their enemies. In the decades after the war, there was major progress in medical technology, the creation of new vaccines, and the elimination of deadly diseases. All these achievements had profound effects on the way people lived, traveled, and worked. Underlying them were major advancements in the field of information technologies, such as computers. Once the war was over, the development of increasingly powerful computers ushered in a computer revolution as powerful as the nineteenth century’s Industrial Revolution, and with it a digital age.
The Digital Computer Revolution
Many of the technological advancements of the 1940s and 1950s came in the form of increasingly powerful analog computers, which analyze a continuous stream of information, much like that recorded on vinyl records. Analog computers worked well for solving big mathematical problems, such as the calculations related to electrical power delivery systems or the study of nuclear physics. However, one of their weaknesses was that they were inefficient at managing large amounts of data. Digital computers, or those that translate information into a complex series of ones and zeros, were far more capable of managing bulk data. Just a few years after the war, digital computing received a huge boost with the invention of the transistor, a device with far more computing potential than its predecessor the vacuum tube. Scientists could amplify this enlarged computing capacity even further by wiring multiple transistors together in increasingly complex ways.
The use of multiple transistors for computing purposes was an important step, but it had obvious drawbacks. Making machines capable of processing a great deal of information required connecting many transistors, which took up a great deal of space. Then, in the late 1950s, inventors in the United States developed an innovative solution. Using silicon, they could integrate transistors and capacitors in a way that clumsy wiring could not accomplish. The silicon-based integrated circuit freed computer technology from size constraints and opened the door to additional advancements in computing power.
Even so, digital computers remained large, expensive, and complicated to operate, and their use was largely confined to universities and the military. Only gradually over the 1970s did computing technology become more widely available, largely thanks to mass-produced general-purpose computers, sometimes called min