Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure
580.000₫
- Publisher : MIT Press (4 April 2023)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 232 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0262048051
- ISBN-13 : 978-0262048057
- Dimensions : 16.03 x 2.26 x 23.65 cm
- Vaclav Smil is currently a Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. He completed his graduate studies at the Faculty of Natural Sciences of Carolinum University in Prague and at the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences of the Pennsylvania State University. His interdisciplinary research interests encompass a broad area of energy, environmental, food, population, economic, historical and public policy studies, and he had also applied these approaches to energy, food and environmental affairs of China.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (Science Academy) and the first non-American to receive the American Association for the Advancement of Science Award for Public Understanding of Science and Technology. He has been an invited speaker in more than 250 conferences and workshops in the USA, Canada, Europe, Asia and Africa, has lectured at many universities in North America, Europe and East Asia and has worked as a consultant for many US, EU and international institutions. His wife Eva is a physician and his son David is an organic synthetic chemist.
Cho phép đặt hàng trước
Included in BILL GATES’s 2023 Holiday Reading List
Included in Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2023
Included in The Next Big Idea Club’s February 2023 Must-Read Books
“Every Smil book that I own is marked up with lots of notes that I take while reading. Invention and Innovation is no exception. Even when I disagree with him, I learn a lot from him…he always strengthens my thinking.”
-Bill Gates, Gates Notes
The world is never finished catching up with Vaclav Smil. In his latest and perhaps most readable book, Invention and Innovation, the prolific author-a favorite of Bill Gates-pens an insightful and fact-filled jaunt through the history of human invention. Impatient with the hype that so often accompanies innovation, Smil offers in this book a clear-eyed corrective to the overpromises that accompany everything from new cures for diseases to AI. He reminds us that even after we go quite far along the invention-development-application trajectory, we may never get anything real to deploy. Or worse, even after we have succeeded by introducing an invention, its future may be marked by underperformance, disappointment, demise, or outright harm.
Drawing on his vast breadth of scientific and historical knowledge, Smil explains the difference between invention and innovation. He then looks at three different types of inventions.
Inventions that failed to dominate as promised-
- Airships
- Nuclear fission
- Supersonic flight
Inventions that turned disastrous-
- Leaded gasoline
- DDT
- Chlorofluorocarbons
Inventions we have long been promised (and that would be highly beneficial)-
- Travel in vacuum (hyperloop)
- Nitrogen-fixing cereals
- Nuclear fusion
Finally, he offers a “wish list” of inventions that we most urgently need to confront the staggering challenges of the twenty-first century.
Filled with engaging examples and pragmatic approaches, this book is a sobering account of the folly that so often attends human ingenuity-and how we can, and must, better align our expectations with reality.
From the New York Times-bestselling author, a new volume on the history of human ingenuity-and its attendant breakthroughs and busts.
Included in BILL GATES’s 2023 Holiday Reading List
Included in Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2023
Sản phẩm tương tự
Book
Advertising & Marketing
** TODAY'S DEAL
Architecture