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This every-which-way process has been at work ever since the first prehistoric flint pebble was knapped into a butchering tool. Until about 500 years ago, however, innovation in a world moving at the speed of agriculture came infrequently, giving time for accommodation and a complacent sense of establishment. Then Columbus rediscovered America, and suddenly the rug was pulled out from under every form of Western authority. America had figured neither in the Bible nor in Aristotle, so what was it doing there? Then, within a few decades, returning with explorers from east and west came a flood of new plant and animal species, all of them also absent from the canonical lists. Help! If Holy Writ and the Big A were wrong, which way was up? For more than a century, things taxonomic went to hell in a handbasket while the European intelligentsia behaved like Chicken Little.
Life settled down to better than chaos only in the early 17th century, when French noodler Rene Descartes saved the day with a trick for thinking things through without screwing up: doubt what isn't self-evident, and reduce every problem to its simplest components. It is these twin tools of methodical doubt and reductionism that allow the editors of TIME to produce this special section on invention. Because what Descartes began may now be coming to its final flowering.
Reductionism encouraged the fragmentation of knowledge under the rubric "Learn more and more about less and less." And as the drive to subdivide the natural world into smaller and smaller bits brought the development of the kind of tools needed for this enterprise (microscopes, telescopes, thermometers, dividing engines and all the other instrumentation required for measuring the new data), disciplines split into subdisciplines and sub-subdisciplines. As a result, isolated in their intellectual silos, scientists and their technological sidekicks literally "reduced" human knowledge to myriad, mutually incomprehensible pinpoints of niche expertise. No matter how esoteric a matter might be today, somebody, somewhere has spent years getting a Ph.D. in it.
Let's not knock this. Specialist invention has given millions of us the highest standard of living in history. And not just at the gizmo level. Now and again, deep in the epistemological woodwork, mind-numbingly arcane fields mix and mingle to produce cosmic upheaval with startling new realms of crossbred knowledge: astrophysics, biogeography, psychopharmacology, neurochemistry, paleobotany. This is to be expected. There are more scientists and technologists alive today than in the whole of previous history, and they have as much right to a happy and productive life as the rest of us.
If only we knew what they were going to do next. Because it doesn't always come up roses. James Watt's steam engine generated an Industrial Revolution that gave us a democracy of possessions--and over-population, acid rain, the Love Canal, disappearing forests, tattered ozone layers and Scud missiles. Medical miracles lengthen our lives and take national welfare provision to the edge of crisis. Electronic globalization moves jobs elsewhere.