Science & Tech Quote by William Irwin Thompson

Thompson is compressing human history into a brutal little graph: long flat lines, then sudden vertical climbs. The point isn’t just that “things sped up.” It’s that our dominant systems of meaning-civilization, then science-don’t merely describe reality; they reorganize time itself, turning what once felt like geological patience into a cultural expectation of rapid turnover.

His phrasing makes “emergence” do heavy lifting. Civilization arrives not as a smooth upgrade but as a threshold event, a phase change. Once you have cities, writing, bureaucracies, and stored surplus, you also get memory that can compound. Innovations stop dying with their inventors. They accumulate, spread, standardize. Time becomes legible: calendars, dynasties, records. Change can be measured, and what’s measurable becomes manageable.

Then science appears as a second accelerator, and Thompson’s subtext gets sharper: science isn’t only a body of facts, it’s a machine for producing reliable novelty. A method. A way of “knowing the universe” that converts curiosity into technology, prediction, and control. That collapses feedback loops: hypothesis to experiment to application to new hypothesis, all on increasingly short cycles. “Centuries” is doing rhetorical work here too, because it frames modernity as structurally impatient. Once science is installed as epistemology, waiting starts to look like failure.

The context is late-20th-century systems thinking and cultural critique: a philosopher watching modern societies treat acceleration as destiny. Thompson is nudging readers to see speed as a historical artifact, not a natural law-and to ask what gets lost when every era expects the next one to arrive on schedule.