Bulletin Autumn 1977

reasons have more students of certain disciplines, it has on the whole a "mixed" composition. It is by virtue of this mixture, and the practice of having meals and chitchats together, that the members may influence one another and benefit from one another. This is how students may be educated in an informal way. Q. Turning to your own field, what is the recent development in electronics? A. In the field of electronics, the most rapid advances have come about in semi-conductors. From semi-conductors, integrated circuits have developed and from I.C., micro-computers. Microcomputers are very small in size, cheap to produce and easy to apply. In the near future (say, within a decade), revolutionary changes will be brought to our household chores, office work and daily life because of the wide application of microcomputers. The impact of these changes will exceed that of the invention of fire, farming tools, steam engine, electricity and atomic energy, with effects as yet inconceivable. Q. Would this be a change for the better, or for worse? A. This would be a question of values, but Science is not concerned with values. It is concerned only with "what is"; and there is another branch of knowledge which deals with "what ought to do". A sharp distinction is drawn between the two, and this is at the root of what C. P. Snow described as the confrontation of the “two cultures". Such confrontation in itself may not be a serious problem, but it would be catastrophic for mankind to be on an express train which has lost its bearings. At present, mankind is indeed on an express train which has lost its bearings. Q. Hasn't the academic world noticed this problem and how is it tackling it? A. In the past three or four decades, a new branch of knowledge has come into being. It falls neither within the province of “what is" nor within that of "what ought to do": it is concerned with "decision-making", and includes Automata Theory, Information Theory, System Theory, Control Theory, Optimization, Operational Research, etc. To illustrate my point: to make decisions with a finite machine or with the limited data available is the principle of Automata Theory; snowing in Hong Kong would be news, but not in Tokyo —t h is is the principle of Information Theory; to view a thing or a system as a whole from a wider perspective and not to reduce it to its component parts is the principle of System Theory. The direction and methods of these disciplines are different from those of the other branches of knowledge already in existence. Q. Would you like to tell us something more about the System Theory. It sounds so unscientific to forsake the reductionist approach. A. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, all disciplines were under the influence of the "scientific" approach, which reduces everything to its most elementary components. Russell named one of his books Logical Atomism and the philosophy of Wittgenstein turned out to be language philosophy. Historians at Cambridge such as Acton published Cambridge Modern History, which treated history as the collection of facts and piecing together of data. And it is even more so with natural science, which tends to concentrate on the trees rather than the forest. This method also had great influence in China during the May Fourth period. Hu Shih's History of Chinese Philosophy was not completed because he got stuck in his textual research on Zen. Ting Wen-chiang planned to write a biography of Liang Chi-ch'ao, but only managed to produce a pile of material by exhausting all the data on Liang. So we can see where the "scientific" approach of that time lands us. Q. How about Ch'ien Mu? A. In a sense, what Ch'ien Mu uses is the system approach we are talking about: study of the whole and not the fragmented parts. This is also the approach used by Toynbee in his A Study of History and Wells in his The Outline of History. It is interesting to note that these great historians defended their system approach vigorously and courageously in their first volume or introductory chapters and arrived at the System Theory independently in their conclusions. You may be surprised to find that we also use the system approach in the teaching of control