Wm. A. Wulf
National Academy of Engineering |
| It is, perhaps, worth reminding ourselves that the laboratorynot the physical structure, but the social constructis an invention, and that it is an invention that has profoundly changed the way that we do research in science and engineering. The laboratory evolved in early 19th-century Germany to support the principle of the unity of teaching, learning, and researcha principle to which we usually attach the name Wilhelm von Humboldt. By comingling a master with journeymen and apprentices in an inquiry-based teaching and learning environment, the researcher's methods, ethics, and passion for truth were conveyed along with the "mere facts." As it happens, the laboratory also enabled a scale of inquiry unattainable by the isolated, single researcher, and thus it changed the nature of the questions we dared to ask about nature, and the scope of artifacts we could attempt to build with that knowledge. |
| Some modern laboratories are huge by Humboldtian standards, as indeed is the whole research enterprise and its direct relevance to society. However, the laboratory has remained constrained and, in a sense, isolated by the demands of physical location. For quality communication, the participants need to be colocated. The instruments, the phenomena they measure, and the researchers who read the instruments needed to be similarly colocated. Access to the library of prior literature, the facilities for computation, and other analysis resources had to be close to the researchers. |
| The ubiquitous availability of high performance computers and telecommunications, collectively called |
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