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Science and technology is a topic that encompasses science, technology, and the interactions between the two. Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of explanations and predictions about nature and the universe. Technology is the collection of techniques, methods or processes used in the production of goods or services or in the accomplishment of objectives, such as scientific investigation, or any other consumer demands.
Science may drive technological development, by generating demand for new instruments to address a scientific question, or by illustrating technical possibilities previously unconsidered. In turn, technology may drive scientific investigation, by creating demand for technological improvements that can only be produced through research, and by raising questions about the underlying principles that a new technology relies on.
For the majority of human history, technological improvements were achieved by chance, trial and error, or spontaneous inspiration. When the modern scientific enterprise matured in the Enlightenment, it primarily concerned itself with basic questions of nature. Research and development directed towards immediate technical application is a relatively recent occurrence, arising with the Industrial Revolution and becoming commonplace in the 20th century.
Like most interdisciplinary programs, STS emerged from the confluence of a variety of disciplines and disciplinary subfields, all of which had developed an interest—typically, during the 1960s or 1970s—in viewing science and technology as socially embedded enterprises.[1] The key disciplinary components of STS took shape independently, beginning in the 1960s, and developed in isolation from each other well into the 1980s, although Ludwik Fleck's monograph (1935) Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact anticipated many of STS's key themes. In the 1970s Elting E. Morisonfounded the STS program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which served as a model. By 2011, 111 STS research centres and academic programs were counted worldwide.
- History of technology, that examines technology in its social and historical context. Starting in the 1960s, some historians questioned technological determinism, a doctrine that can induce public passivity to technologic and scientific "natural" development. At the same time, some historians began to develop similarly contextual approaches to the history of medicine.
- History and philosophy of science (1960s). After the publication of Thomas Kuhn's well-known The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), which attributed changes in scientific theories to changes in underlying intellectual paradigms, programs were founded at the University of California, Berkeley and elsewhere that brought historians of science and philosophers together in unified programs.
- Science, technology, and society. In the mid- to late-1960s, student and faculty social movements in the U.S., UK, and European universities helped to launch a range of new interdisciplinary fields (such as women's studies) that were seen to address relevant topics that the traditional curriculum ignored. One such development was the rise of "science, technology, and society" programs, which are also—confusingly—known by the STS acronym. Drawn from a variety of disciplines, including anthropology, history, political science, and sociology, scholars in these programs created undergraduate curricula devoted to exploring the issues raised by science and technology. Unlike scholars in science studies, history of technology, or the history and philosophy of science, they were and are more likely to see themselves as activists working for change rather than dispassionate, "ivory tower" researchers.
