Some while ago, I was listening to some music by Palestrina (Missa Assumpta est Maria). The Catholic Church had been using the skills of Palestrina to fight reformation from Northern Europe on a spiritual level. When I was listening to the polyphonic voices of the chorus, there was indeed an idea of leaving the ground for reaching closer to the heavens. A strange experience I must say. Also, it is indeed a strange experience to realize that this music was used once to "brainwash" people, to transmit the dogma's of an institution. Luckily, we are not so sensitive anymore to greek or latin phrases. Palestrina lived until around 1595, so, he died around the same time when Galileo was a young man. (By the way, it seems that the father of Galileo was a musician as well.) It is interesting to see that science could not be used as a spiritual weapon for doing politics. Rather, politics needed to fight science to suppress changing forces within the organization. And indeed, we are using the same approaches within the organizations as we know them today, to have some form of predictability, some sense of security, be our dogma's based on correct assumptions or not. I guess this is why human contracts work in corporate worlds or marriage. But if we look back at the music of Palestrina, or the fruits of the scientific method, what survived were not the boundaries that we need to feel safe at a certain moment in time, but the ideas that arise from the confrontation with the unknown, the new, and questions around change.
(Some small note at the end, I also think, computers are a great tool to have a dialogue with the new and unknown, because they allow us to quickly express, validate and communicate ideas. We can think about designs (and avoid mistakes from the past) that would not be possible otherwise. Try it out, thinking about "thinking about thinking", the sound simplification of processes is exactly what a study of computers allows us to do, but why computer models can be misleading on the other hand, when they hide too much of the wonderful complexity of the real world.)
