A view of future APL science and technology: Guest editor's introduction

Johns Hopkins APL Technical Digest (Applied Physics Laboratory)

Volumn 26, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 298-305

  Sommerer, John C ^a,b,c  

^a APL ^*  (United States)

^b APL Science and Technology Council   (United States)

^c US Naval Research Advisory Committee   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ANTHOLOGIES; INSTITUTIONAL VISION;

RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT MANAGEMENT; SOCIAL ASPECTS; SOCIETIES AND INSTITUTIONS;

PROFESSIONAL ASPECTS;

EID: 33750410205     PISSN: 02705214     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (6)

1. This epigraph (together with many variations) has been attributed to a number of authors, most often Nobel prize-winning Danish physicist Niels Bohr. Unfortunately, I have been unable to connect this useful saying to Bohr through any authoritative written source. The phrase has also been ascribed to Yogi Berra (easy to dismiss, since Berra himself noted that "I didn't really say everything I said"), to Danish 17th century naval hero Piet Hein, and occasionally to 20th century Danish cartoonist and social commentator Robert Storm Peterson. The strength of the Denmark connection is marked, and provides a good clue to perhaps the most definitive attribution. The Danish quotation dictionary Bevingede Ord (Winged Words, T. Vogel-Jørgensen, Gads Forlag, Copenhagen, 1979) notes that in the 1948 memoirs of Danish statesman
2. K. K. Steincke, Goodbye and Thanks, the phrase was attributed to an otherwise unidentified member of the Folketing (Danish Parliament) during the period 1935-1939. It is, of course, completely plausible that Bohr read this phrase in a newspaper and subsequently adopted it conversationally.
3. Science and Technology in Service to the Nation, special issue, Johns Hopkins APL Tech. Dig. 24(1) (2003)
4. The influence of Y2K in extending the information technology revolution to developing economies, particularly India's, is one of "ten forces that flattened the world," as described in Thomas L. Friedman's fascinating and sobering book, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, NY, 2005). Any American technologist who hasn't read this book needs to, quickly.
5. Kossiakoff, A., and Sweet, W. N., Systems Engineering Principles and Practice, John Wiley and Sons, Hoboken, NJ (2003).
6. So-called scenario-based planning, where corporate strategies and portfolios are tested in highly stressing postulated alternative futures, has developed as an alternative to more traditional planning methodologies which tend to consider parametric variations around a "momentum" projection of the future. Such an approach is now felt to provide more robust strategies against highly disruptive, but difficult-to-predict eventualities (9/11 would be a singular example). This approach is described by one of the earliest practitioners of such planning, Peter Schwarz, in his book The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World (Currency Doubleday, 1991).