This led him, in 1918, to call for the creation of what he called a “usable past.” Speaking to his contemporaries in an intelligent and vivid essay, he outlined the need for history that creative minds could draw upon. “The present is a void,” he wrote, “and the American writer floats in that void because the past that survives in the common

There is a vast difference between understanding how answers are arrived at and simply being informed of their outcomes. As soon as digital computation was capable of the kind of complexities needed to model natural processes – to take on the tasks which were previously only possible in physical simulators, like the water computers – knowledge of t