Change itself.

Next: The culture of Up: The General Context Previous: Promises.

Change itself.

Change is endemic and isn't going to go away. (note: For example the December 13, 1993 issue of Fortune contained six articles on the cover theme of ``Managing in the Era of Change,'' including one entitled ``How Will We Live With the Tumult'' which referred to ``Continuous business revolution [that] will upend millions of American lives.'') All alert institutions sense this and are nervous. Change that will unsettle science has already drastically affected other sectors. For example, under the Cold War paradigm the Defense Department had been able to plan against a fairly well-characterized threat, but now it can plan on nothing but ever-changing threats. Ironically, while seeking institutional and funding stability for itself, science accelerates change for everyone, and for science the end of the Cold War marks the resumption of history not its end. That is, it marks the end of a time of abnormally stable, rigid polarization. Some of our current dilemmas are due to old tensions whose expression during the Cold War was suppressed, ignored, or occasionally exploited and incorporated into that war. A final ironic change: having contributed mightily to the victory over the USSR, science has worked itself out of a job.

Compared to the spectrum of Cold War science, different science may be supported in the new era; probably less reductionist, with growth likely in fields of higher-order complexity such as ecology, earth science, and the social sciences [Waldrop, 1992; Schweber, 1993; Ruelle, 1994].

Many in the science community know change is needed to respond to a changing context [NRC 1994, Schmidt 1994, Hoffman 1992]. However, others deny the relevance of external change, perhaps because they feel science is sacrosanct and should be accommodated through adjustments by the rest of society.