7.   February 20
The Persistence of Craft Labor

Question: does innovation depend on some version of “free labor,” and if so, why?

Quotes for Class Thirteen

I happened to walk into a basement workshop in the physics building at Cornell University.  There I saw two students, dressed in the customary style, with bare feet and long unkempt hair.  They were working with intense concentration, building a cryostat, a superrefrigerator for low-temperature experiments using liquid helium. This was not an ordinary helium cryostat that would take you down to one degree above absolute zero.  This was a new type of cryostat, working with the rare isotope of helium, that would take you down to a few millidegrees above absolute zero.  The students were exploring a new world and a new technology. . . . Their brains and hands were stretched to the limit. . . . At the time when I saw them as students putting the apparatus together, they were not dreaming of Nobel prizes.  They were driven by the sam passion that drove my grandfather [the boilermaker], the joy of a skilled craftsman in a job well done.  Science gave them their chance to build things that opened new horizons, just as their ancestors built ships to explore new continent.  They had found a creative middle way, between the hierarchical world of big business and the utopian dreams of student rebellion.
-- Freeman Dyson, The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet

Assignments:
Po Bronson, The First Twenty Million is Always the Hardest,
pp 1-150.

February 22
The Sources of Revolution

Question: what are the personal or “human” qualities that sustain creativity and innovation?

Quotes for Class Fourteen

People surmount tragedy when they use themselves up fully, when they use what they have and what they are, whatever they are and wherever they find themselves, even if this requires them to ignore cultural prescription or to behave in innovating ways undefined by their roles.  The tragic sense does not derive from feeling that people must always be less than history and culture demand; it derives, rather, from the sense that they have been less than they could have been, that they have needlessly betrayed themselves, needlessly forgone fulfillments that would have injured no one.  The scientific enterprise, like others, becomes edged with a tragic sense when scientists suspect that they have wasted their lives.  In confining work to the requirements of a demanding and unfulfillable paradigm, scientists are not using themselves up in their work and are, indeed, sacrificing, leaving unexpressed, certain parts of themselves -- their playful impulses, their unverified hunches, their speculative imagination.  When scientists commit themselves compulsively to a life-wasting high science model, they are making a metaphysical wager.  They are wagering that the sacrifice is ‘best for science.’ Whether this is really so, they cannot confirm; but they often need no further confirmation than the pain this self-confinement inflicts upon them.
-- Alvin Gouldner, The Coming Crisis in Sociology

Assignments:
Po Bronson, The First Twenty Million is Always the Hardest,
pp 151-291.