ABSTRACT
Within two hundred years technological leadership shifted from China to the Occident. Seven hundred years later Papin’s steam engine created a new technology and with it a new worldview—the mechanical universe. The question of the right size for a given task or a given organization will become a central challenge. In the worldview of the mathematicians and philosophers, which Denis Papin and his contemporaries formulated, perception was “intuition” and either spurious or mystical, elusive, mysterious. In the biological universe, however, perception is at the center. And it can—indeed it must—be trained and developed. In governmental and business planning, we increasingly talk of “scenarios” in which a perception is the starting point. And, of course, any “ecology” is perception rather than analysis. In an ecology, the “whole” has to be seen and understood, and the “parts” exist only in contemplation of the whole.
