ABSTRACT
Living is full of arrangements and occasions by which we come to terms with our physical and social environments. We prefer peaceable, orderly arrangements. Things we can change, we change when necessary. We decide, we legislate. Things we cannot change we strive to understand. We research, which is just another way of saying we strive to refine and extend our understandings of the way things are and how they work. From elementary bits of knowledge, elaborate bodies of knowledge and powerful devices have been constructed — all from the conjunction, on the one hand, of what we have observed to be the nature of and the relations between things observed and experienced, and, on the other hand, of decisions to exploit those natures and relations.
