james burke

• let me start with one of the reasons why that happens, why it has been dificult for us to second-guess change, to recognize for example, what unlimited bandwidth and technology convergence will do to almost every aspect of our lives before it actually does it.
  
  the challenge of being able to do that kind of thing, the challenge of prediction was once very amusingly was highlighted with the great modern philosopher wittgenstein, you may know wittgenstein, he's the man who ruined university administration. because he once said: "if anything can be said at all, it can be said clearly."
  
  anyway somebody once went up to wittgenstein and said what a bunch of morons we europeans were back 700 years ago before copernicus told us how the solar system worked. to have looked up in the sky and to have thougt that what we were seeing up there was the sun going around the earth. whereas every idiot knows that the earth goes around the sun, and you don't have to be einstein to get that!
  
  to which the great philosopher is said to have replied as philosophers will, "yeah yeah", "but" he said, i wonder what it would've looked like up there, if the sun *had* been going around the earth.
  
  the point being of course, it would look exactly the same.
  
  what he was saying was, in any decision, you're constrained by your knowledge context. by what you know at the time. you're in a box. and science and technology, is no exception."