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Edward Tenner
(1 Aug 1944 - )
science historian and writer whose books include Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences (1996) on the history of technology and Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity (2004).
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Science Quotes by Edward Tenner (1 quote)
It is both a sad and a happy fact of engineering history that disasters have been powerful instruments of change. Designers learn from failure. Industrial society did not invent grand works of engineering, and it was not the first to know design failure. What it did do was develop powerful techniques for learning from the experience of past disasters. It is extremely rare today for an apartment house in North America, Europe, or Japan to fall down. Ancient Rome had large apartment buildings too, but while its public baths, bridges and aqueducts have lasted for two thousand years, its big residential blocks collapsed with appalling regularity. Not one is left in modern Rome, even as ruin.
— Edward Tenner
In Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences (1997), 23.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
