検索キーワード： 制作 "Stripe Press" 科学・工学

Maintenance is what keeps everything going. It’s what keeps life going. Yet it’s also easy to shirk or defer—until the thing breaks, the system falters, and everything stops. The apparent paradox is profound: Maintenance is absolutely necessary and maintenance is optional. The first in a multi-volume work, Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One offers a comprehensive overview of the civilizational importance of maintenance. The book begins with a dramatic contest of maintenance styles under life-critical conditions:

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering is the expression of what “You and Your Research” outlined. It's a book about thinking; more specifically, a style of thinking by which great ideas are conceived. The book is filled with stories of people performing mighty deeds—but they are not meant simply to be admired. Instead, they are to be aspired to, learned from, and surpassed. Hamming consistently returns to Shannon’s information theory, Einstein’s theory of relativity, Grace Hopper’s work on high-level programming, Kaiser’s work on digital filters, and his own work on error-correcting codes.

So rich was the scientific harvest of the early 20th century that it transformed entire industries and economies. Max Planck laid the foundation for quantum physics, Barbara McClintock for modern genetics, Linus Pauling for chemistry - the list goes on. In the 1970s, the nature of scientific work started to change.

A timely investigation of the causes of technological and scientific stagnation, and a radical blueprint for accelerating innovation. From the Moon landing to the dawning of the atomic age, the decades prior to the 1970s were characterized by the routine invention of transformative technologies at breakneck speed. By comparison, ours is an age of stagnation. Median wage growth has slowed, inequality and income concentration are on the rise, and scientific research has become increasingly expensive and incremental.

In The Origins of Efficiency, Brian Potter argues that improving production efficiency—finding ways to produce goods and services in less time, with less labor, using fewer resources—is the force behind some of the biggest and most consequential changes in human history.