Over the past twenty years, the technologies of simulation and                 visualization have changed our ways of looking at the world. In Simulation                 and Its Discontents, Sherry Turkle examines the now dominant medium of our                 working lives and finds that simulation has become its own sensibility. We hear it                 in Turkle's description of architecture students who no longer design with a pencil,                 of science and engineering students who admit that computer models seem more                 "real" than experiments in physical                 laboratories.Echoing architect Louis Kahn's famous question,                 "What does a brick want?", Turkle asks, "What does simulation                 want?" Simulations want, even demand, immersion, and the benefits are clear.                 Architects create buildings unimaginable before virtual design; scientists determine                 the structure of molecules by manipulating them in virtual space; physicians                 practice anatomy on digitized humans. But immersed in simulation, we are vulnerable.                 There are losses as well as gains. Older scientists describe a younger generation as                 "drunk with code." Young scientists, engineers, and designers, full                 citizens of the virtual, scramble to capture their mentors' tacit knowledge of                 buildings and bodies. From both sides of a generational divide, there is anxiety                 that in simulation, something important is slipping away. Turkle's examination of                 simulation over the past twenty years is followed by four in-depth investigations of                 contemporary simulation culture: space exploration, oceanography, architecture, and                 biology.

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