ABSTRACT
Around 1680 a French physicist, Denis Papin, then working in Germany – as a Protestant he had been forced to leave his native country – invented the steam engine. Whether he actually built one we do not know. But he designed one. And he actually put together the first safety valve. A generation later, in 1715, Thomas Newcomen then put the first working steam engine into an English coal mine. This made it possible for coal to be mined – until then ground water had always flooded English mines. With Newcomen's engine, the age of steam was on. From then on, for 250 years, the model of technology was mechanical. Fossil fuels rapidly became the main source of energy. And the ultimate source of motive power was what happens inside a star, that is the sun. In 1945, atomic fission replicated what occurs in the sun. There is no going beyond this. In 1945 the era in which the mechanical universe was the model came to an end. But only a year later in 1946 the first computer, the ENIAC, came on stream. And with it began an age in which information will be the organizing principle for work. Information, however, is the basic principle of biological, rather than of mechanical processes.
