VANNEVAR BUSH
Bush had advised FDR to go ahead with the research and development program to try and develop an atomic bomb. He was the only Government Official who Roosevelt discussed the idea with. At the time, Bush as a government official supervised and directed many thousands of scientists, and was one of just a few scientists who monitored and advised on the Manhattan Project to develop the Bomb. Here he is one of the first people to notice, understand and articulate the dilemma of specialization in science. To the degree it was a problem in 1945, it became a geometrically greater problem 65 years later satellites were capturing more high resolution of the universe every week than all the astronomers in the world could examine in a year. Ironically, Bush called for a type of precursor to the Internet to cope with this problem which the Internet helped with. Using computers to observe and analyze the many images helped much but all of science became weighed down with this problem of specialization and the explosion of knowledge.
Fifty years later there would literally be hundreds of millions of computers in the world each one of which computed more things about the affairs of people than all the computers in the entire world were capable of when Bush wrote this.
See {624449} for the essence of the letter.
The collection of quotations, its cross references, concepts, and search engine is just the kind of thing that Bush was predicting.
Vannevar Bush was an American engineer, inventor and science administrator, who during World War II headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), through which almost all wartime military R&D was carried out, including important developments in radar and the initiation and early administration of the Manhattan Project. He emphasized the importance of scientific research to national security and economic well-being, and was chiefly responsible for the movement that led to the creation of the National Science Foundation.
