Blockages To Technological Solutions

 Imagination is more important than knowledge 

Albert Einstein (1879-55)

 Why has science become so blocked? Why do we allow our dynamic nation to become mired in the innocuous standards of a banal scientific community?

 The indicators have been present since the late 1940's, when the GI Bill educated many of our men who served during the Second World War. It was the most brilliant action this nation ever took, providing the massive brain trust, which was needed for the expansion and conversion of our industry from wartime to peace. In the fifties and sixties, we expanded this internationally as many businesses moved into export, import, and overseas branches.

 By the end of the sixties we had reached the limit of export expansion and had industrialized a large part of the world. It was then we should have advanced to turnkey installations, export of technology, and the inventions that remain here on our shores and feed a world hungry for these technologies. Education is the key to adjusting to the accelerated outsourcing that is wiping out the middle class.

 A return of the GI Bill for services rendered to the country (In the Peace Corp and domestic service as well as military) should replace student loans that serve so few and saddle most to never-ending debt.

 We have gone impetuously into a government business partnership with relentless military buildup. While we were building bombs Germany and Japan were committing themselves to the same type of government/business partnership to build a better life for their citizens. As a result the United States is a debtor nation experiencing an unfavorable export/import balance of payments, chiefly to China, Japan and Germany. Instead of becoming involved in exporting technology, scientific development, and a burgeoning service industry we became mired down with acquisition of commodities, stock market investments, land, welfare programs, the largest military machine in the world, repetitively voting for politicians who did not threaten our personal pocketbooks by supporting anything outside the status quo.

 We are the number one debtor nation in the world. Most of our patents are being issued to the same foreign companies from whom we buy our commodities that have purchased $1.33 trillion in U. S. real estate. The small, innovative improvements made in the products by the Japanese and European companies do not begin to light a candle to that which could be produced with an unleashed American “Yes we can” ingenuity.

 Scholarly people, having spent years utilizing safe conventional ways of approaching problems, have become primarily interested in keeping their jobs or making money off of money on Wall Street or real estate. In one medium-sized computer laboratory in the early days of advanced small computers a very advanced computer was developed. However, computers are worthless, as many original computer companies discovered, until they have developed software equal to the capabilities of the computer for which they are designed.

One company struggled with its software experts for months trying to develop a general ledger package for their computer. Meanwhile their advanced computers remained either unsold or in the offices of unhappy customers. The programmers who were developing the individual ledger packages that fed into the general ledger were withholding critical information to protect their jobs.

A year later their computer still did not have workable software for businesses for which it was designed. Other enterprising companies soon surpassed it, not necessarily with superior products. This is why very few inventions emerge from large research laboratories.

 Science conventions should cultivate vast innovations. However, those submitting papers know they will be selected on the basis of their scholastic background, how much their scientific views agree with the norm, and if their paper is supported with endless details.

 Heads of graduate school departments spend most of their time seeking government grants from large corporations to help them get approval for medicines, pesticides, and food supplements. Most times the research requested for these funds is proprietary or a small piece of a major product development, so the participating graduate students are not even aware of how their piece of research fits into the bigger picture, following their years of research.

 For this reason, many presentations in the scientific conventions are full of details, which have little meaning, probably took years to complete and usually leave the audience wondering what it was all about. Threatened egos can be a curse to nations as well as individuals. Humility is the most important quality of a noble person. Unity of heart in a think tank with a common goal produces knowledge none of the participants could ever generate individually.

It is the Law of Attraction that Napoleon Hill, author of Think and Grow Rich said, "Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve".