SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY: IMPACT ON SOCIETY 19 development can be planned and 'rapidly achieved as part of a total process of social progress. I A cursory glance at the history of science and technology shows that radical changes in the natural sciences and their individual branches and those in technology and its various branches have occurred separately though in interaction with each other. Thus Darwin's Theory of Evolution in Biology and the discovery of the Quantum in Physics are revolutions in individual sciences, while the transformation from one medium to the other, from gas bulb to electric, are similar developments in technology. The supersession of the geo-centric view of the universe by the helio-centric view revolutionized natural science as a whole; the industrial revolution and the large-scale introduction of machinery totally transformed technology. One specificity of the present era consists in the fact that revolutions in the natural sciences and technology have merged into a single united process of scientific and technological development wherein the fundamental changes taking place in the natural sciences and technology can be viewed as different aspects of the same united process. In the past the identification of technical tasks led to the discovery of new laws of nature and the creation of new theories in the sciences. Engels wrote to Starkendurg in 1894: If, as you say, technique largely depends on the state of science, science depends far more still on the state and requirements of technique. If society has a technical need, that helps science forward more than ten universities. The whole of hydrostatics (Torricelli, etc.,) was called for by the necessity for regulating the mountain streams of Italy in the 16th centuries . . . 1 In our day the discovery of new law& and theories is a prerequisite for the emergence of new branches of technology. No trial and error methods would have enabled people to construct atomic reactors, space vehicles or cybernetic devices. A necessary precondition for the solution of such technical tasks is the discovery of natural phenomena and processes^ along with the laws that govern them, and the various forms in which these laws act. This is why practice itself, nowadays requires that the development of science - should be ahead of that of technology and production.2 Production is thus becoming an ever increasing application of science. The validity of Marx's insight that "if the productive process comes to be a field of applied science, then conversely science comes to be a factor, a function, so to speak, of the productive process'58 is evident from the urge of scientific research to find new resources for techtiological progress. It is this fact that brings the social function of science more' to the fore than ever before. - The quantitative leap that has come about in the world of science and technology can be gauged from the following indicators. In most of